真实和虚拟金钱奖赏影响风险决策行为*

在风险情境下人类如何决策是长久以来心理学和经济学研究中一个极具挑战性的核心问题。众多研究采用真实或虚拟金钱作为奖赏强化物来探索风险决策行为的过程和机制,但对金钱奖赏真实性如何影响决策了解很少。仿真气球冒险任务(BART：Balloon Analogue Risk Task)可以在实验室条件下有效评估个体在真实社会中的风险行为。本研究采用 BART任务,通过两个实验探讨和比较了真实与虚拟金钱奖赏对风险决策行为的影响。实验一的结果发现,与虚拟金钱奖赏相比,真实金钱奖赏情境下的风险决策更容易受上一次决策结果的影响,上一次决策失败会导致被试的风险偏好水平显著降低(平均吹气球的次数显著减少),同时决策失败(气球吹爆)次数也显著减少,提示真实金钱奖赏下有更强的反馈学习效应。实验二重复了实验一的结果,并进一步发现,虚拟金钱奖赏的幅度对被试的风险决策行为没有影响,而真实金钱奖赏的幅度能显著改变被试的风险决策行为,较大幅度的真实金钱奖赏可以显著降低被试的风险偏好水平,但这种奖赏幅度对风险偏好的调控效应只对感觉寻求水平低的被试有效,感觉寻求水平高的被试不受影响。这些发现表明真实与虚拟金钱奖赏对风险决策行为有不同的影响。我们的结果可以用风险决策的后悔理论或齐当别模型来解释。     

Within-subject comparison of real and hypothetical money rewards in delay discounting

A within-subject design, using human participants, compared delay discounting functions for real and hypothetical money rewards. Both real and hypothetical rewards were studied across a range that included $10 to $250. For 5 of the 6 participants, no systematic difference in discount rate was observed in response to real and hypothetical choices, suggesting that hypothetical rewards may often serve as a valid proxy for real rewards in delay discounting research. By measuring discounting at an unprecedented range of real rewards, this study has also systematically replicated the robust finding in human delay discounting research that discount rates decrease with increasing magnitude of reward. A hyperbolic decay model described the data better than an exponential model.     

Rawls and Research on Cognitively Impaired Patients: A Reply to Maio

In his paper, “The Relevance of Rawls’ Principle of Justice for Research on Cognitively Impaired Patients” (Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 23 (2002):45–53), Giovanni Maio has developed athought-provoking argument for the permissibility of non-therapeutic research on cognitively impaired patients. Maio argues that his conclusion follows from the acceptance of John Rawls’s principles of justice, specifically, Rawls’s “liberty principle” Maio has misinterpreted Rawls’s “libertyprinciple” – correctly interpreted it does notsupport non-therapeutic research on cognitivelyimpaired patients. Three other ‘Rawlsian’ arguments are suggested by Maio’s discussion –two “self-respect” arguments and a “presumed consent” argument – but none of them are convincing. However, an alternative argument developed from Rawls’s discussion of “justice in health care” in his most recent book, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, may justify certain kinds of non-therapeutic research on some cognitively impaired patients in special circumstances. We should not expect anything more permissive from a liberal theory of justice. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Effects of minimal social cues on trust in the investment game

In anonymous game tasks, individuals’ prosocial behaviour was shown to increase when those individuals were provided with social cues from a third party or bystander. It has been suggested that those social cues can be presented using a configuration suggestive of a face with ‘watching eyes’. This led us to question whether it was possible to provide the watching‐eyes configuration with even weaker facial information, such as a simple dot pattern. By using a minimal social cue paradigm, such as the one described above, the present research found that individuals’ trust toward the trustee increased when they detected the watching‐eyes dot pattern as a source of social cues in two settings: a hypothetical investment game for both college students (Study 1) and customs officers (Study 2); and an actual investment game for college students (Study 3).     

Comparing rapid assessments of delay discounting with real and hypothetical rewards in children

Recent advances in assessment methodology have resulted in a highly efficient procedure for obtaining delay discounting rates for adults: a 5‐trial adjusting delay task (ADT‐5) examining intertemporal choice for hypothetical rewards. The low participant burden of this task makes it potentially useful for children, with whom delay discounting research is relatively limited. However, it is unknown whether results from this task match choice for real rewards. The present study assessed delay discounting for real and hypothetical monetary rewards using a modified ADT‐5 with 9 children admitted to a psychiatric day treatment program. Participants completed up to 3 tasks with each reward type in alternating order. No difference in discounting rate, via log(k), was observed between the first task of each reward type. This finding was replicated across subsequent tasks for the subset of participants (n = 6) who completed all 6 tasks. However, delay discounting of real and hypothetical rewards was not found to be statistically equivalent. These results suggest that a modified ADT‐5 using hypothetical rewards may be a viable option for assessing delay discounting in children with psychiatric diagnoses, but additional research is needed to explicitly examine whether hypothetical and real rewards are discounted equivalently in this population.     

From Necessity to Fate: a Fallacy

Though clearly fallacious, the inference from determinism to fatalism (the ``Lazy Argument') has appealed to such minds as Aristotle and his disciple, Alexander of Aphrodisias. It is argued here (1) that determinism does entail a rather similar position, dubbed ``futilism'; and (2) that distinctively Aristotelian determinism entails fatalism for any event to which it applies. The concept of ``fate' is examined along the way.     

Were Kant's Hypothetical Imperatives Wide-Scope Oughts?

I defend the claim that Kant held a wide-scope view of hypothetical imperatives, against objections raised by Mark Schroeder [2005 Schroeder, Mark 2005. The Hypothetical Imperative? Australasian Journal of Philosophy 83/3: 357–72.[Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]]. There is an important objection, now commonly known as the ‘bootstrapping’ problem, to the alternative, narrow-scope, view which Schroeder attributes to Kant. Schroeder argues that Kant has sufficient resources to reply to the bootstrapping problem, and claims that this leaves us with no good reason to attribute to Kant the wide-scope view. I show that Schroeder's Kantian reply to the bootstrapping problem cannot fully answer it. Schroeder also offers three main textual arguments for attributing to Kant the narrow-scope view: from Kant's claim that the moral imperative is unique in virtue of its categoricity, from Kant's distinction between ‘problematic’ and ‘assertoric’ hypothetical imperatives, and from Kant's conception of analyticity together with his claim that hypothetical imperatives are analytic. I argue that each of these views can be understood as cohering with the more plausible wide-scope view of hypothetical imperatives.     

Psychological closure as a memory phenomenon

A theory is proposed that life events are remembered with a satisfying sense of closure when there is decreased emotional detail in the constructed autobiographical memory representation. The first three studies show that, although properties of the experienced event (such as valence and recency) accounted for some variance in participants' sense of closure, the amount of emotional detail in the memory was also a significant predictor. The third study shows that emotion-focused biased retelling of the experience increased emotional detail and decreased the sense of closure participants reported. Related approaches and implications for psychological adjustment are discussed.     

The Causal Principle

There is a charge sometimes made in metaphysics that particular commitments are ‘hypothetical’, ‘dubious’ or ‘suspicious’. There have been two analyses given of what this consists in—due to Crisp (2007) and Cameron (2011). The aim of this paper is to reject both analyses and thereby show that there is no obvious way to press the objection against said commitments that they are ‘dubious’ and objectionable. Later in the paper I consider another account of what it might be to be ‘dubious’, and argue that this too fails. I use Bigelow's (1996) Lucretian properties as a vehicle for the discussions of dubiousness that follow. As a consequence, the paper ends up offering a partial defense of Lucretianism.     

Validity and Application of Computer-simulated Scenarios in Personnel Assessment

In Germany computer-simulated scenarios have been applied in personnel management for several years. Their goals are either to assess how potential managers cope with complex and connected problem states (job aptitude testing aspect) or to provide feedback on manager strengths and weaknesses in dealing with complexity, and how to modify these when necessary (training aspect). This paper presents and evaluates those scenarios that have been subjected to validity studies.