Moral psychology of nursing robots: Exploring the role of robots in dilemmas of patient autonomy

Artificial intelligences (AIs) are widely used in tasks ranging from transportation to healthcare and military, but it is not yet known how people prefer them to act in ethically difficult situations. In five studies (an anthropological field study, n = 30, and four experiments, total n = 2150), we presented people with vignettes where a human or an advanced robot nurse is ordered by a doctor to forcefully medicate an unwilling patient. Participants were more accepting of a human nurse's than a robot nurse's forceful medication of the patient, and more accepting of (human or robot) nurses who respected patient autonomy rather than those that followed the orders to forcefully medicate (Study 2). The findings were robust against the perceived competence of the robot (Study 3), moral luck (whether the patient lived or died afterwards; Study 4), and command chain effects (Study 5; fully automated supervision or not). Thus, people prefer robots capable of disobeying orders in favour of abstract moral principles like valuing personal autonomy. Our studies fit in a new era in research, where moral psychological phenomena no longer reflect only interactions between people, but between people and autonomous AIs.     

Female Politicians as Climate Fools: Intertextual and Multimodal Constructions of Misogyny Disguised as Humor in Political Communication

The present study explores how the polarized political discussion on climate change is used to construct as a humorous misogynist message in a Finnish far-right political campaign video from 2021. Applying a multimodal analytical approach, the study explores the ways in which humor and irony are mobilized in the video through intertextual cues and verbal, visual, and sonic means to produce a dichotomy between “us”—the rational males who oppose strong measures against climate change—and “them,” the irrational females, who propose them. The study contributes to political psychology, first by responding to the call for social and political psychologists to expand our knowledge of the production and spread of misogyny in online political communication; second, by showing the importance of studying intertextual and multimodal constructions of misogyny disguised as humor in political communication, and, finally, through demonstrating the utility of interdisciplinarity and multimodal analytic approaches in research on online political mobilization and persuasion.     

Effects of color on perceptual and conceptual tests of implicit memory

Two experiments are reported that explore why recent investigations of implicit memory failed to find any effects of color information on test performance. In the first experiment, participants studied colored pictures as well as words printed in colored ink without any memory instructions. During the test phase, a verbal and a pictorial version of a color-choice task (a conceptual priming test) were compared to two perceptual tests (word-stem completion and picture-fragment identification). Similar and significant amounts of priming to color occurred in both color-choice tasks. The perceptual tests were found to be sensitive to changes in the stimulus-presentation mode from study to test, but stimuli remaining the same color and those changed to black-and-white did not differ in the priming scores. In the second experiment, a mild division of attention was introduced in the study phase. Once again, priming to color was observed only in the verbal version of a color-choice test and not in the word-stem completion test. Dividing attention did not decrease performance on both implicit tests, whereas an explicit test of color recall for studied pictures suffered from dividing attention at encoding. It is concluded that a perceptual attribute such as color may be represented and coded by conceptual processing. Furthermore, automatic (or not attention-demanding) encoding processes may suffice for later conceptual tests of implicit memory. Previous failures to find any effects of color information on implicit performance are attributed to the use of perceptual priming tests. Received: 30 June 1997 / Accepted: 20 April 1998     

On the aim of the theory of verisimilitude

J. P. Z. Bonilla's methodological approach to truthlikeness is evaluated critically. On a more general level, various senses in which the theory of truthlikeness could be seen as a theory concerned with methodology are distinguished, and it is argued that providing speical sciences with methodological tools is unrealistic as an aim of the theory of verisimilitude. Rather, when developing this theory, one should rest contnet with the more modest aim of conceptual analysis, or of providing explications for the relational concept of being closer to the truth. In addition, some remarks will be made on the difficulties which the similarity approach to truthlikeness has in realizing this aim and which are caused by the important role that Hintikka's constituents have in it.     

Truthlikeness for hypotheses expressed in terms of n quantitative variables

A qualitative theory of truthlikeness, based on a family of quantitative measures, is developed for hypotheses that are concerned with the values of a finite number of real-valued quantities. Representing hypotheses by subsets of ⁿ, I first show that a straightforward application of the basic ideas of the similarity approach to truthlikeness does not work out for hypotheses with zero n-dimensional Lebesgue measure. However, it is easy to give a counterpart for the average measure preferred by Pavel Tichý and Graham Oddie in terms of Hausdorff measures. The task of finding analogies of the min-sum-measure preferred by Ilkka Niiniluoto is more interesting. I present and discuss analogies of two different types for this measure.     

Somatisierung

Zusammenfassung Somatisierung meint die Erfahrung und den Bericht von k?rperlichen Beschwerden, für die kein hinreichender medizinischer Befund vorliegt, verbunden mit einem hohen Ausma? von organ-medizinischer Hilfesuche. Gegenüber früheren Definitionen, die st?rker auf psychosoziale Faktoren bei der Somatisierung abheben, wird gegenw?rtig eine ausschlie?lich beschreibende Begriffsfestlegung bevorzugt. Somatisierung liegt als Normenvariante bis zur schweren pathologischen Auspr?gung vor. Die ICD-10 fa?t sehr heterogene Krankheitsbilder von Somatisierung in der Klasse der somatoformen St?rungen zusammen. Fraglich ist, ob Somatisierung eher als Proze? denn als diskrete Krankheitseinheit zu konzeptualisieren ist. Somatisierung enth?lt drei Komponenten: Auf der Wahrnehmungsebene erh?hte Sensibilit?t gegenüber K?rpersensationen (“somatosensorische Amplifikation”), auf der Erlebensebene negative Affekte in Form von psychischem und somatischen Distre?erleben, auf der Verhaltensebene inad?quate Inanspruchnahme der Gesundheitsressourcen (“abnormes Krankheitsverhalten”). Trotz z. T. vielversprechender Behandlungsvorschl?te unter verhaltenstherapeutischer, psychodynamischer und psychoedukativer Orientierung erscheint die Prognose von Somatisierung bisher wenig günstig. Es gibt Hinweise, da? der Sicherung der therapeutischen Beziehung besondere Bedeutung für den Behandlungserfolg zukommt.      

Jñānagarbha and the “God's‐eye view”

In trying to define the difference between conventional and ultimate truth, the Mādhyamika Buddhist author Jñānagarbha ends up in paradoxical formulations. Putnam's discussion of Nietzsche's remark that “as the circle of science grows larger it touches paradox at more places” is presented as an illustration for Jñānagarbha's case. No comparison of Putnam and Jñānagarbha is intended as regards the contents of their presentations, the focus being only on the logical form of their argumentation. The paradoxical nature of Jñānagarbha's doctrinal system is explained to derive from the logical incompleteness of formal systems. The paradox is also explained to work as a direction arrow pointing to what can only be realised in a mystical experience.