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。     

A university-based incentive program to increase safety belt use: Toward cost-effective institutionalization

A cost-effective incentive program to increase safety belt use was implemented by the campus police of a large university. For each of the 3-week intervention periods during three consecutive academic quarters, the 22 campus police officers recorded the license plate numbers of vehicles with drivers wearing a shoulder belt. From these numbers, 10 raffle winners were drawn who received gift certificates donated by community merchants. Faculty and staff increased their belt usage markedly as a result of the "Seatbelt Sweepstakes," whereas students increased their belt use only slightly. A cost-effectiveness analysis indicated that the sweepstakes cost an average of $0.98 per each newly buckled driver. During each sweepstakes intervention, officers' belt usage increased significantly, but diminished to initial baseline levels after the final withdrawal of the program. Surveys of officers' opinions indicated that the police would accept the program demands as a regular task requirement. This result and the fact that program promotion and coordination were eventually taken over by two student organizations suggest that institutionalization of the "Seatbelt Sweepstakes" is feasible.     

Rhetorics of truth,justice and secrecy in Pascal's text

Beginning from a definition of philosophical discourse which states the necessity of rhetoric meant as the whole of the linguistic devices aiming to persuade the interlocutor of truth and justice, the author points out that Pascal's text would be an outstanding example of such a discourse, while showing, nevertheless, the specificity of the rhetoric he employs. Such a specificity would aim to carry out a complex logic of the secret, concerning chiefly the ackowledgement and identification procedures of the subject of the discourse-enunciation, and its pronominal and nominal markers.The author studies this logic on one hand by starting from the pragmatic patterns developed by the linguistics of enunciation, and on the other taking into account the philosophical, ethical and religious themes of the Jansenist thought in the XVIIth century. The distinction between concealment and secret leads the author to set up the forms of political rhetoric against the actual Pascalian aspects of philosophical rhetoric. Such a logic of the secret, which is the projection of the hidden God teologema into the field of philosophical discourse, would enable us to position as absent the subject producing this discourse and thus to transform what he states into a discourse of truth and justice. The very careful examination of the anonymity strategies and mostly of the writing tactics concerning the author's real name (anagram) would seem to confirm this conception of the rhetoric of Pascal's philosophical discourse.     

Variation in arm-choice strategies of rats in radial-maze tasks

Rats were trained with three delay-interpolated tasks in a radial-arm maze. The tasks differed in the post-delay bait conditions. When every arm was baited in the post-delay free choices (Task E8B), rats made adjacent-arm choices frequently. When only the four arms unvisited in the pre-delay forced choices were baited after delay (Task U4B), rats chose unvisited arms preferentially, with frequent arm investigations. When four quasi-randomly selected arms were baited after delay (Task R4B), rats did not choose adjacent arms as frequently as the rats in Task E8B did, and made fewer arm investigations. These results indicate that the rats developed different arm-choice strategies in accordance with tasks. As for the effects of rewarding, post-delay choice behavior was not affected by the pre-delay bait conditions.