Ethical Considerations & the Practice of Tanking in Sport Management

Abstract

The paper defines the practice of tanking in regard to sport organizations and differentiates this approach from activities such as match fixing and team building. Thereafter, the ethical implications tanking presents are developed using Alasdair MacIntyre’s neo-Aristotilean ethical framework. In particular, MacIntyre’s concept of a practice that supports both internal and external goods is discussed to examine the moral questions tanking presents. The insights developed within this analysis are applied throughout to the specific practice of basketball within the discrete institution of the National Basketball Association. Finally, the paper discusses some broader implications the tanking strategy presents for the management and leadership of a sophisticated sport franchise.     

Further attempts to clarify the importance of category variability for categorisation

The issue of how category variability affects classification of novel instances is an important one for assessing theories of categorisation, yet previous research cannot provide a compelling conclusion. In five experiments we reexamine some of the factors thought to affect participant performance. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants almost always classified the test item as belonging to the high variability category. By contrast, in Experiment 3 we employed an alternative experimental paradigm, where the difference in variability of the two categories was less salient. In that case, participants tended to classify a test item as belonging to the low variability category. Two additional experiments (4 and 5) explored in detail the differences between Experiments 1, 2 on the one hand, and 3 on the other. Some insight into the underlying psychological processes can be provided by computational models of categorisation, and we focus on the continuous version of Anderson's (1991) Rational Model, which has not been explored before in this context. The model predicts that test instances exactly halfway between the prototypes of two categories should be classified into the more variable category, consistent with the bulk of empirical findings. We also provided a comparison with a slightly reduced version of the Generalised Context Model (GCM) to show that its predictions are consistent with those from the Rational Model, for our stimulus sets.     

Context effects and selective response lengthening in a temporal serial reproduction task

Repeatedly performing a temporal reproduction task has been reported to increase reproduced durations. We report the novel finding that the second reproduction in a series is selectively enhanced relative to the first. This was true regardless of whether the responses were discrete (separate start and stop responses) or contiguous (stop response is the start of the next response). In a final experiment we test the hypothesis that the second reproduction is more influenced by the central tendency of previously experienced durations than is the first. These results are discussed in terms of two sources of performance uncertainty: temporal remoteness of the second and subsequent reproductions from the standard and trial-by-trial unpredictability of the standard in random but not blocked designs.     

Generalization of deferred imitation during the first year of life

Infants first generalize across contexts and cues at 3 months of age in operant tasks but not until 12 months of age in imitation tasks. Three experiments using an imitation task examined whether infants younger than 12 months of age might generalize imitation if conditions were more like those in operant studies. Infants sat on a distinctive mat in a room in their home (the context) while an adult modeled actions on a hand puppet (the cue). When they were tested 24 h later, 6-month-olds generalized imitation when either the mat or the room (but not both) differed, whereas 9-month-olds generalized when both the mat and the room differed. In addition, 9-month-olds who imitated immediately also generalized to a novel test cue, whereas 6-month-olds did not. These results parallel results from operant studies and reveal that the similarity between the conditions of encoding and retrieval-not the type of task-determines whether infants generalize. The findings offer further evidence that memory development during infancy is a continuous function.     

Unilateral brain damage effects on processing homonymous and polysemous words

Using an auditory semantic priming paradigm, the present study investigated the abilities of left-hemisphere-damaged (LHD) non-fluent aphasic, right-hemisphere-damaged (RHD) and normal control individuals to access, out of context, the multiple meanings of three types of ambiguous words, namely homonyms (e.g., "punch"), metonymies (e.g., "rabbit"), and metaphors (e.g., "star"). In addition, the study tested certain predictions of the "suppression deficit" and "coarse semantic coding" hypotheses that have been proposed to account for the linguistic deficits typically observed after RH damage. Homonymous, metonymous, and metaphorical words were used as primes followed after a short (100 ms) or a long (1000 ms) inter-stimulus interval (ISI) by dominant-meaning-related, subordinate-meaning-related or unrelated target words. No significant group effects were found, and for both ISIs, dominant- and subordinate-related targets were facilitated relative to unrelated control targets for the homonymy and metonymy conditions. In contrast, for the metaphor condition, only targets related to the dominant meaning were facilitated. These findings provide only partial support for the "suppression deficit" hypothesis and no support for the "coarse semantic coding" hypothesis (as interpreted herein) indicating that patients with focal LH or RH damage can access the multiple meanings of ambiguous words and exhibit processing abilities comparable to those of older normal control subjects, at least at the single-word level.     

Barking up the wrong tree? Lexical ambiguity resolution in children with language impairments and autistic spectrum disorders

Lexical ambiguity resolution was investigated in 9- to 17-year-olds with language impairment (LI, n=20), autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) plus language impairment (ALI, n=28), ASD and verbal abilities within the normal range (ASO, n=20), and typically developing children (TD, n=28). Experiment 1 investigated knowledge of dominant and subordinate meanings of ambiguous words. The LI and ALI groups knew fewer subordinate meanings than did the ASO and TD groups. Experiment 2 used a modified version of the paradigm to investigate contextual facilitation and suppression of irrelevant meanings. All groups demonstrated contextual facilitation, responding quickly and more accurately to words following a biased context. However, children with ALI and LI did not use context as efficiently as did their peers without language deficit. Furthermore, for the LI and ALI groups, errors in the suppression condition reflected poor contextual processing. These findings challenge the assumptions of weak central coherence theory and demonstrate the need for stringent language controls in the study of autistic cognition.     

The role of embodied intention in early lexical acquisition

We examine the influence of inferring interlocutors' referential intentions from their body movements at the early stage of lexical acquisition. By testing human participants and comparing their performances in different learning conditions, we find that those embodied intentions facilitate both word discovery and word-meaning association. In light of empirical findings, the main part of this article presents a computational model that can identify the sound patterns of individual words from continuous speech, using nonlinguistic contextual information, and employ body movements as deictic references to discover word-meaning associations. To our knowledge, this work is the first model of word learning that not only learns lexical items from raw multisensory signals to closely resemble infant language development from natural environments, but also explores the computational role of social cognitive skills in lexical acquisition.     

Coding infant engagement in the Face-to-Face Still-Face paradigm using deep neural networks

BackgroundThe Face-to-Face Still-Face (FFSF) task is a validated and commonly used observational measure of mother-infant socio-emotional interactions. With the ascendence of deep learning-based facial emotion recognition, it is possible that common complex tasks, such as the coding of FFSF videos, could be coded with a high degree of accuracy by deep neural networks (DNNs). The primary objective of this study was to test the accuracy of four DNN image classification models against the coding of infant engagement conducted by two trained independent manual raters.Methods68 mother-infant dyads completed the FFSF task at three timepoints. Two trained independent raters undertook second-by-second manual coding of infant engagement into one of four classes: 1) positive affect, 2) neutral affect, 3) object/environment engagement, and 4) negative affect.ResultsTraining four different DNN models on 40,000 images, we achieved a maximum accuracy of 99.5% on image classification of infant frames taken from recordings of the FFSF task with a maximum inter-rater reliability (Cohen's κ-value) of 0.993.LimitationsThis study inherits all sampling and experimental limitations of the original study from which the data was taken, namely a relatively small and primarily White sample.ConclusionsBased on the extremely high classification accuracy, these findings suggest that DNNs could be used to code infant engagement in FFSF recordings. DNN image classification models may also have the potential to improve the efficiency of coding all observational tasks with applications across multiple fields of human behavior research.     

What Eye Movements Reveal About Later Comprehension of Long Connected Texts

We know that reading involves coordination between textual characteristics and visual attention, but research linking eye movements during reading and comprehension assessed after reading is surprisingly limited, especially for reading long connected texts. We tested two competing possibilities: (a) the weak association hypothesis: Links between eye movements and comprehension are weak and short-lived, versus (b) the strong association hypothesis: The two are robustly linked, even after a delay. Using a predictive modeling approach, we trained regression models to predict comprehension scores from global eye movement features, using participant-level cross-validation to ensure that the models generalize across participants. We used data from three studies in which readers (Ns = 104, 130, 147) answered multiple-choice comprehension questions ~30 min after reading a 6,500-word text, or after reading up to eight 1,000-word texts. The models generated accurate predictions of participants' text comprehension scores (correlations between observed and predicted comprehension: 0.384, 0.362, 0.372, ps < .001), in line with the strong association hypothesis. We found that making more, but shorter fixations, consistently predicted comprehension across all studies. Furthermore, models trained on one study's data could successfully predict comprehension on the others, suggesting generalizability across studies. Collectively, these findings suggest that there is a robust link between eye movements and subsequent comprehension of a long connected text, thereby connecting theories of low-level eye movements with those of higher order text processing during reading.     

Doing justice to creative justifications: Creativity,Honesty-Humility,and (un)ethical justifications

Research on the relation between creativity and unethical behavior has provided inconclusive findings, thus far. Herein, we focus on a mechanism that has been suggested as underlying a positive relation between these constructs: an increased ability to generate unethical justifications (i.e., reasons for behaving unethically) of those with high levels of creativity. Specifically, we test if creativity is more strongly related to the generation of unethical than ethical justifications. In a vignette experiment (N = 907, N = 20,719 rated answers), we find that creativity is equally related to the quality and quantity of both ethical and unethical justifications. Additionally, Honesty-Humility from the HEXACO Model of Personality is positively related to the quality of ethical, and negatively related to the quality and quantity of unethical justifications.