EVOLUTION OF RELIGIOUS CAPACITY IN THE GENUS HOMO: TRAIT COMPLEXITY IN ACTION THROUGH COMPASSION

In this third and last article on the evolution of religious capacity, the authors focus on compassion, one of religious expression's common companions. They explore the various meanings of compassion, using Biblical and early related documents, and derive general cognitive components before an evolutionary analysis of compassion using their model. Then, in taking on neural reuse theory, they adapt a model from linguistics theory to understand how neural reuse could have operated to fix religious capacity in the human genome. They present a teaching tool on “Religious Capacity in Action,” and develop an example of compassionate decision making in very early Homo sapiens in North Africa. They round out their analysis of compassion by exploring theory in neuroscience on a standard decision‐making model, and investigate what goes on in the human brain when a values‐based decision is made.     

Are individual differences in masked repetition and semantic priming reliable?

Despite the robustness of semantic priming (e.g., cat–DOG), the test-retest and internal reliabilities of semantic priming effects within individuals are surprisingly low. In contrast, repetition priming (e.g., dog–DOG) appears to be far more reliable across a range of conditions. While Stolz and colleagues attribute the low reliability in semantic priming to uncoordinated automatic processes in semantic memory, their use of unmasked priming paradigms makes it difficult to fully rule out the influence of strategic processes. In the present study, we explored the reliability of semantic and repetition priming when primes were heavily masked and cannot be consciously processed. We found that masked repetition, but not semantic, priming effects showed some degree of reliability. Interestingly, skilled lexical processors (as reflected by vocabulary knowledge and spelling ability) also produced larger masked repetition priming effects.     

Biases and Heuristics in Decision Making and Their Impact on Autonomy

Cognitive scientists have identified a wide range of biases and heuristics in human decision making over the past few decades. Only recently have bioethicists begun to think seriously about the implications of these findings for topics such as agency, autonomy, and consent. This article aims to provide an overview of biases and heuristics that have been identified and a framework in which to think comprehensively about the impact of them on the exercise of autonomous decision making. I analyze the impact that these biases and heuristics have on the following dimensions of autonomy: understanding, intentionality, absence of alienating or controlling influence, and match between formally autonomous preferences or decisions and actual choices or actions.     

The View from Inside the System: How Police Explain Their Response to Sexual Assault

Prior research has documented the problematic community response to sexual assault: the majority of sexual assaults reported to police are never prosecuted. Social dominance theory suggests that this response is a form of institutional discrimination, intended to maintain existing social structures, and that police personnel likely draw upon shared ideologies to justify their decision‐making in sexual assault case investigations. This study drew upon social dominance theory to examine how police justified their investigatory decisions to identify potential leverage points for change. The study revealed that the likelihood of a case referral to the prosecutor increased with each additional investigative step completed; of the different types of justifications provided by police for a less‐than‐thorough investigative response and stalled case, blaming the victim for the poor police investigation proved to be the most damaging to case progression; and the type of explanation provided by police was impacted by specific case variables. As suggested by social dominance theory, the study demonstrates that police rely on several different mechanisms to justify their response to sexual assault; implementing criminal justice system policies that target and interrupt these mechanisms has the potential to improve this response, regardless of specific case factors.     

Faster Teaching via POMDP Planning

Human and automated tutors attempt to choose pedagogical activities that will maximize student learning, informed by their estimates of the student's current knowledge. There has been substantial research on tracking and modeling student learning, but significantly less attention on how to plan teaching actions and how the assumed student model impacts the resulting plans. We frame the problem of optimally selecting teaching actions using a decision‐theoretic approach and show how to formulate teaching as a partially observable Markov decision process planning problem. This framework makes it possible to explore how different assumptions about student learning and behavior should affect the selection of teaching actions. We consider how to apply this framework to concept learning problems, and we present approximate methods for finding optimal teaching actions, given the large state and action spaces that arise in teaching. Through simulations and behavioral experiments, we explore the consequences of choosing teacher actions under different assumed student models. In two concept‐learning tasks, we show that this technique can accelerate learning relative to baseline performance.     

Eye Movements in Risky Choice

We asked participants to make simple risky choices while we recorded their eye movements. We built a complete statistical model of the eye movements and found very little systematic variation in eye movements over the time course of a choice or across the different choices. The only exceptions were finding more (of the same) eye movements when choice options were similar, and an emerging gaze bias in which people looked more at the gamble they ultimately chose. These findings are inconsistent with prospect theory, the priority heuristic, or decision field theory. However, the eye movements made during a choice have a large relationship with the final choice, and this is mostly independent from the contribution of the actual attribute values in the choice options. That is, eye movements tell us not just about the processing of attribute values but also are independently associated with choice. The pattern is simple—people choose the gamble they look at more often, independently of the actual numbers they see—and this pattern is simpler than predicted by decision field theory, decision by sampling, and the parallel constraint satisfaction model. © 2015 The Authors. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.     

Cognitive Reflection Predicts Real‐Life Decision Outcomes,but Not Over and Above Personality and Decision‐Making Styles

The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), designed to assess the ability to inhibit intuition to process a problem analytically, predicts people's performance in many normative judgement and decision‐making tasks (e.g., Bayesian reasoning, conjunction fallacy and ratio bias). However, how the CRT predicts normative decision‐making performance is unclear, and little is known about the extent to which the CRT predicts real‐life decision outcomes. We investigate the role of the CRT in predicting real‐life decision outcomes and examine whether the CRT predicts real‐life decision outcomes after controlling for two related individual differences: the Big Five personality traits and decision‐making styles. Our results show that greater CRT scores predict positive real‐life decision outcomes measured by the Decision Outcome Inventory. However, the effect size was small, and the relationship became non‐significant after statistically controlling for personality and decision‐making styles. We discuss the limited predictive role of cognitive reflection in real‐life decision‐making outcomes, along with the roles of personality and decision‐making styles. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Dressing “in code”: Clothing rules,propriety, and perceptions

Does dressing in line with societal clothing rules make a woman appear more professional and competent? We used a within-subjects design and tested if participants rated women dressed in compliance with school and workplace clothing rules more positively than women not dressed in compliance with rules. Participants (N = 89) at a mid-sized mid-western university rated 10 pictures of women captured from the internet on 11 attributes. Participants rated the five women dressed following clothing rules higher on a composite measure of positive attributes (intelligent, competent, powerful, organized, efficient, and professional), F(1, 86) = 68.92, p < .001 η_p² = .45. Participant’s ratings did not correlate with their own self-reported levels of sexism. Participants’ gender was not a significant correlate. Our findings indicate that how students perceive women significantly relates to dressing in code. Participants rated women in less revealing and less tight clothing more positively.