Decision-makers use social information to update their preferences but choose for others as they do for themselves

People's risky decisions are susceptible to the social context in which they take place. Across three experiments using different paradigms, we investigated the influence of three social factors upon participants' decisions: the recipient of the decision-making outcome (self, other, or joint), the nature of the relationship with the other agent (friend, stranger, or teammate), and the type of information that participants received about others' preferences: none at all, general information about how previous participants had decided, or information about a specific partner's preference. We found that participants' decisions about risk did not differ according to whether the outcome at stake was their own, another agent's, or a joint outcome, nor according to the type of information available. Participants did, however, adjust their preferences for risky options in light of social information.     

“己之所欲”还是“成人之美”？解释水平视角下个体赠送-接受礼物的偏好不对称性

解释水平理论被广泛应用于消费研究领域。本研究以解释水平理论为理论基础,采用情境问卷调查方法,通过5个实验探讨个体赠送与接受礼物时是否存在性别和角色偏好的不对称性。结果发现,一般情境下,受性别因素影响,男生偏好赠送和接受工具性礼物,女生偏好赠送和接受表达性礼物。但随着心理距离（社会距离和空间距离）的拉近,个体的解释水平降低,更关心他人的喜好和需求,赠送者会更基于接收者的偏好进行礼物选择。     

社会距离和性别对公平关注的影响

本研究使用单次匿名最后通牒博弈任务,采用2（性别: 男性, 女性）×3（社会距离: 自我决策, 替朋友决策, 替他人决策）×5（提议类型: 1/9, 2/8, 3/7, 4/6, 5/5）的混合实验设计,通过操作反应者的不同社会距离,考察资产分配情境下自我-他人决策的性别差异。研究结果发现：（1）相比于自我决策和替朋友决策,女性被试替他人决策时更愿意接受提议1/9,2/8和3/7,而提议4/6和5/5的接受率不受社会距离的影响;男性被试中社会距离和提议类型的交互作用不显著;（2）不平等提议的反应时随社会距离增加而逐渐降低,而平等提议的反应时不受社会距离的调节;（3）替他人决策时女性的接受阈限显著低于男性,而自我决策及替朋友决策时接受阈限不存在性别差异。     

Teaching business ethics to professional engineers

Without question “business ethics” is one of the hot topics of the day. Over the past months we have seen business after business charged with improper practices that violate commonly-accepted ethical norms. This has led to a loss of confidence in corporate management, and has had severe economic consequences. From many quarters business educators have heard the call to put more emphasis on ethical practices in their business courses and curricula. Engineering educators are also heeding this call, since the practice of engineering usually involves working for (or leading) a business and/or engaging in business transactions. In the summer of 2002, Auburn University’s Engineering Professional Development program made the decision to produce—based on the author’s Executive MBA course in Business Ethics—a distance-delivered continuing education program for professional engineers and surveyors. Participants across the USA now may use the course to satisfy continuing education requirements with respect to professional licensing and certification. This paper outlines the purpose and content of the course and describes its production, distribution, application, and evaluation. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the “Ethics and Social Responsibility in Engineering and Technology” meeting, New Orleans, 2003.     

The Suspended Aesthetic: Slavoj Žižek on Eastern European Film

Slavoj iek's writings on Krzysztof Kies´lowski and Andrej Tarkovskij represent direct challenges to the Central and Eastern European tradition of spiritual art and to dominant aesthetic concepts as such. He refuses to separate the solemn films of Kies´lowski and Tarkovskij from popular culture and stresses their import as ethical statements by their directors. Despite this ethical emphasis, iek makes an important contribution to philosophical aesthetics. He implicitly defines art as a suspension of reality which reveals time in its fragility and potentiality. Defining iek's aesthetics in terms of suspension helps to explain his partiality for Kies´lowski and Tarkovskij and bears comparison to the Russian tradition of philosophical aesthetics, in particular Aleksej Losev and Alexander Bakshy.     

A formal model for structuring local perceptions of environmental space

The problem of constructing computational models of space that mimic those found in human spatial reasoning is addressed. This paper extends a formal model that addressed point objects in a 2D world to include the presence of line objects and barriers. The problem consists of determining an appropriate global model for the spatial configuration given a sequence of local views or observations. A formal model is proposed based on constraint network theory. The model leads to the identification of stable regions within which perceptual information about the environment changes slowly, and zones of transition within which the perceptual information changes more quickly. A special case of transition zones is a gateway, which may be viewed as a kind of discontinuity or singularity in the model. It is expected that the model obtained will be used to mimic human mental representations of navigable outdoor environments.     

The role of locomotion in the acquisition and transfer of spatial knowledge in children

The role of locomotion in the acquisition and transfer of spatial knowledge was investigated in 144 five-, seven- and eleven-year-old children. Two experiments were conducted in the Kiel locomotor maze. In the first experiment, one group of children explored the spatial layout by walking through the maze, while another learned the maze by surveying the layout. In the second experiment, children were exposed to one of two orientation tests in the maze, one of which could be solved using "landmark orientation", the other only using a "relational place orientation". Children sitting by the side of the experimental chamber surveying the maze needed fewer trials to learn the spatial layout than children exploring the environment in the locomotion condition, but in the orientation test demanding the "relational place orientation" children who had explored the maze in the locomotion condition outperformed the children in the non-locomotion condition. Results are discussed in the context of cognitive mapping models.     

On Selective Left Neglect during Walking in a Child

In this article we describe a child affected by right parieto-occipital lesion due to head injury. The patient showed left hemianopia, but not unilateral spatial neglect on traditional paper-and-pencil tests and on "ecological" tests. However, his parents reported frequent collisions with obstacles on the left side. A specific test was set up: The patient had to kick down skittles put on both sides of a route traced on the floor. He kicked down 89% of skittles on the right, but only 38% on the left side. These findings are discussed in light of recent theories on unilateral neglect.     

人体系统非优性的进化论诠释

从进化论的角度论述了人体系统非优性的成因,说明了生物竿化在人体系统中保留下大量的时空沉迹,其形式与特征表现为层次套叠,多元集合,转化退化。从而成为新与旧,高级与低级,复杂与简单,一句话就是优 与非优相互缠绕,相互作用,互补关联的协同统一性,而疾病的发生则是这种辩证统一的失调或破坏。     

Landmark-based spatial search in honeybees. I.

Honeybees were trained to find sugar water in the middle of an array of two landmarks of different colours. Unrewarded tests compared searching on the training array with searching on rotated arrays. On rotated tests, a system using the angles between landmarks would continue to search in the middle. A system using vectors to individual elements would search at locations outside the rotated array at which the distances and compass directions to a subset of landmarks matched. Results indicated that bees used both elements and interlandmark angles, but they relied most on one favourite landmark element. Results support the template model of landmark use in honeybees, with the minor parametric modification that weights given to different elements may be unequal. Received:6 July 1998 / Accepted after revision:7 December 1998