This paper is a study of the decisions that researchers take during the execution of a research plan: their researcher discretion. Flexible research methods are generally seen as undesirable, and many methodologists urge to eliminate these so-called ‘researcher degrees of freedom’ from the research practice. However, what this looks like in practice is unclear. Based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in two end-of-life research groups in which we observed research practice, conducted interviews, and collected documents, we explore when researchers (...) are required to make decisions, and what these decisions entail.An abductive analysis of this data showed that researchers are constantly required to further interpret research plans, indicating that there is no clear division between planning and plan execution. This discretion emerges either when a research protocol is underdetermined or overdetermined, in which case they need to operationalise or adapt the plans respectively. In addition, we found that many of these instances of researcher discretion are exercised implicitly. Within the research groups it was occasionally not clear which topic merited an active decision, or which action could retroactively be categorised as one.Our ethnographic study of research practice suggests that researcher discretion is an integral and inevitable aspect of research practice, as many elements of a research protocol will either need to be further operationalised or adapted during its execution. Moreover, it may be difficult for researchers to identify their own discretion, limiting their effectivity in transparency. (shrink)

Cohen Kadosh, Tzelgov, and Henik [Cohen Kadosh, R., Tzelgov, J., and Henik, A. (2008). A synesthetic walk on the number line: The size effect. Cognition, 106, 548-557] present a new paradigm to probe properties of the mental number line. They describe two experiments which they argue to be inconsistent with the exact small number model proposed by Verguts, Fias, and Stevens [Verguts, T., Fias, W., Stevens, M. (2005). A model of exact small-number representation. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 12, 66-80]. We (...) discuss the data, assumptions, and conclusions of Cohen Kadosh et al.'s paper in relation to existing models of numerical cognition. (shrink)

The study of alternative genetic systems and mixed modes of reproduction, whereby sexual and asexual reproduction is combined within the same lifecycle, is of fundamental importance as they may shed light on classical evolutionary issues, such as the paradox of sex. Recently, several such cases were discovered in social insects. A closer examination of these systems has revealed many amazing facts, including the mixed use of asexual and sexual reproduction for the production of new queens and workers, males that can (...) clone themselves and the routine use of incest without deleterious genetic consequences. In addition, in several species, remarkable cases of asexually reproducing socially parasitic worker lineages have been discovered. The study of these unusual systems promises to provide insight into many basic evolutionary questions, including the maintenance of sex, the expression of sexual conflict and kin conflict and the evolution of cheating in asexual lineages. (shrink)

This paper concerns model-checking of fragments and extensions of CTL* on infinite-state Presburger counter systems, where the states are vectors of integers and the transitions are determined by means of relations definable within Presburger arithmetic. In general, reachability properties of counter systems are undecidable, but we have identified a natural class of admissible counter systems (ACS) for which we show that the quantification over paths in CTL* can be simulated by quantification over tuples of natural numbers, eventually allowing translation of (...) the whole Presburger-CTL* into Presburger arithmetic, thereby enabling effective model checking. We provide evidence that our results are close to optimal with respect to the class of counter systems described above. (shrink)

The present study explored the multidimensionality of moral identity. In four studies (N = 1,159), we compiled a comprehensive list of moral traits, analyzed their factorial structure, and established relationships between the factorial dimensions and outcome variables. The resulting dimensions are Connectedness, Truthfulness, Care, and Righteousness. To examine relations to personality traits and pro- and antisocial inclinations we developed a new instrument, the Moral Identity Profile (MIP). Our results show distinctive relationships for the four dimensions, which challenge previous unidimensional conceptualizations (...) of moral identity. We discuss implications, limitations, and how our conceptualization reaffirms the social aspect of morality. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to clarify both the role of nurses in ethics meetings and the way in which ethics meetings can function as a catalyst for good nursing care. The thoughts presented are practice based; they arose from our practical experiences as nurses and ethicists with ethics meetings in health care organizations in Belgium. Our reflections are written from the perspective of the nurse in the field who is participating in (inter)professional ethical dialogue. First, the difficulties that (...) nurses experience while participating in ethics meetings are described. Then the possibilities for support of nurses in their ethical responsibility are explored. (shrink)

An important approach to understand how the brain gives rise to consciousness is to probe the depth of unconscious processing, thus to define the key features that cause conscious awareness. Here, we investigate the possibility for subliminal stimuli to shape the context for unconscious processing. Context effects have generally been assumed to require consciousness. In the present experiment, unconscious context processing was investigated by looking at the impact of the context on the response activation elicited by a subliminal prime. We (...) compared the effects of the same subliminal prime on target processing when the prime was embedded in different unconscious contexts. Results showed that the same prime can evoke opposite responses depending on the unconscious context in which it is presented. Taken together, the results of this study show that context effects can be unconscious. (shrink)

The present article puts forward a behavioral disinhibition hypothesis stating that, often, at least some levels of behavioral disinhibition are needed to overcome people’s inhibition to intervene in dilemmatic situations in which they have to choose between different actions with good reasons for each of the actions involved. Results reported indeed show that people to whom disinhibited behaviors were salient or people with stronger predispositions toward behavioral disinhibition were more likely to intervene in trolley and footbridge dilemmas.

Trainers often use information from previous learning sessions to design or redesign a course. Although universities conducted numerous research integrity training in the past decades, information on what works and what does not work in research integrity training are still scattered. The latest meta-reviews offer trainers some information about effective teaching and learning activities. Yet they lack information to determine which activities are plausible for specific target groups and learning outcomes and thus do not support course design decisions in the (...) best possible manner. This article wants to change this status quo and outlines an easy-to-use taxonomy for research integrity training based on Kirkpatrick’s four levels of evaluation to foster mutual exchange and improve research integrity course design. By describing the taxonomy for research integrity training (TRIT) in detail and outlining three European projects, their intended training effects before the project started, their learning outcomes, teaching and learning activities, and their assessment instruments, this article introduces a unified approach. This article gives practitioners references to identify didactical interrelations and impacts and (knowledge) gaps in how to (re-)design an RI course. The suggested taxonomy is easy to use and enables an increase in tailored and evidence-based (re-)designs of research integrity training. (shrink)

Our research is a value sensitive based approach to designing autonomous systems in a military context. Value sensitive design is an iterative process of conceptual, empirical and technical considerations. We enhance value sensitive design with Participatory Value Evaluation. This allows us to mine values of a large unorganized stakeholder group relevant to our context of research, namely Australian citizens. We found that value prioritizations differ depending on the context of use and that no one value fits all autonomous systems. General (...) ethical frameworks can serve as high level guiding principles, but when it comes to actual technologies, a more nuanced and granulated approach to selecting and incorporating values is needed. Our research contributes to a greater awareness of the importance of inclusion of values in autonomous systems design in the context of defence. We suggest relevant frameworks and methods for values-based autonomous military systems design in the context of Australia, which may serve as a blueprint for other countries. Finally, we provide suggestions on how to operationalise values in systems design, as this is underrepresented in the current literature. (shrink)

General relativity has a geometric and a field interpretation. If angular momentum conservation is invoked in the geometric interpretation to explain experiments, the causality principle is violated. The field interpretation avoids this problem by allowing faster-than-light propagation of gravity in forward time. All existing experiments are in agreement with that interpretation. This implies the existence of real superluminal propagation and communication of particles and fields, free of causality problems. The introduction of real physical faster-than-light propagation into gravitation, electrodynamics and quantum (...) theory has important consequences for physics. (shrink)

Background: Ethical leadership is important for developing ethical healthcare practice. However, there is little research-based knowledge on how to stimulate and educate for ethical leadership. Objectives: The aim was to develop and investigate the feasibility of a 6-week web-based, ethical leadership educational programme and learn from participants’ experience. Training programme and research design: A training programme was developed consisting of (1) a practice part, where the participating middle managers developed and ran an ethics project in their own departments aiming at (...) enhancing the ethical mindfulness of the organizational culture, and (2) a web-based reflection part, including online reflections and coaching while executing the ethics project. Focus group interviews were used to explore the participants’ experiences with and the feasibility of the training. Participants and research context: Nine middle managers were recruited from a part-time master’s programme in leadership in Oslo, Norway. The research context was the participating leaders’ work situation during the 6 weeks of training. Ethical considerations: Participation was voluntary, data anonymized and the confidentiality of the participating leaders/students and their institutions maintained. No patient or medical information was involved. Findings: Eight of the nine recruited leaders completed the programme. They evaluated the training programme as efficient and supportive, with the written, situational feedback/coaching as the most important element, enhancing reflection and motivation, counteracting a feeling of loneliness and promoting the execution of change. Discussion: The findings seem consistent with the basic assumptions behind the educational design, based partly on e-health research, feedback studies and organizational ethics methodology, partly on theories on workplace learning, reflection, recognition and motivation. Conclusion: The training programme seems feasible. It should be adjusted according to participants’ proposals and tested further in a large-scale study. (shrink)

In this paper we introduce a computational control framework that can keep AI-driven military autonomous devices operating within the boundaries set by applicable rules of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) related to targeting. We discuss the necessary legal tests and variables, and introduce the structure of a hypothetical IHL-compliant targeting system.

In this paper, we examine how organizations’ impression management evolves in response to rising stakeholder pressures regarding organizations’ corporate responsibility initiatives. We conducted a comparative case study analysis over a period of 13 years for two organizations—Exxon and BP—that took extreme initial stances on climate change. We found that as stakeholder pressures rose, their IM tactics unfolded in four phases: advocating the initial stance, sensegiving to clarify the initial stance, image repairing, and adjusting the stance. Taken together, our analysis of (...) IM over these four phases provides three key insights about the evolution of IM in the face of rising pressures. First, when faced with stakeholder pressures, it seems that organizations do not immediately resort to conforming but tend to give in gradually when pressures increase and start to come from relatively powerful stakeholders. Second, evolution of IM seems to be characterized by path dependence, i.e., even as organizations’ positions evolve, they continue to show their conviction in their initial positions and try to convey that their subsequent positions flow logically from the previous ones. Finally, IM involves navigation between symbolism and substance, and companies tend to strive toward harmonizing their symbolic and substantive actions as stakeholder pressure increases. (shrink)

Music, literature, history. These things are not quite alike. But in Europe, before the advent of recording machines that made it possible for sounds to be recorded and played back, the three activities relied on the same technology of preservation. They were kept in/as books. Bookishness, in European and colonial imaginaries, was an often-idealized, powerful means of keeping things from slipping away. An understanding of bookish things as a repository can be evinced in laws that required preserving a copy of (...) newly published literary works and music for the benefit of posterity; or in popular novels where a book featured as the chronicler (both recorder and narrator) of its own adventures, beyond the lifespans of individual users. Scholars have paid specialist attention to the ontological differences among music, literature, and history when they are kept as books. Discipline-specific trainings and conversations tend to emphasize how different these objects and practices are. Yet focusing on their shared mode of bookish preservation offers other rewards. Our multi-authored article is a creative experiment in bringing together musicologists, literary scholars, and historians to test the potential, for our own fields and with implications for other humanities disciplines, of foregrounding this technological convergence. We propose the more capacious categories of bookkeepers (people who keep things as books) and cultures of note-taking (whether glossing a textbook or notating music) as fruitful avenues to avoid writing the artificially separate histories of creation versus consumption, public versus personal, authoritative versus amateurish, or artistic versus documentary practices. Music, broadly conceived, and the nineteenth-century album (a book of blank pages to keep verses, music, memories, and many more things) serve as the starting point for our reflections. Both exhibit a tangential connection to the normative codes of what Roger Chartier called “the order of books.” In considering actors/artifacts/acts at the very margins of textuality, or existing in a perverse relationship with bookishness, our aim is to redraw the knowledge-making structures we use to investigate our objects of study, calling attention to the intermedial and social practices, and cultures of remembrance, in which they are historically imbricated. (shrink)

Within moral psychology, theories focusing on the conceptualization and empirical measurement of people’s morality in terms of general moral values –such as Moral Foundation Theory- (implicitly) assume general moral values to be relevant concepts for the explanation and prediction of behavior in everyday life. However, a solid theoretical and empirical foundation for this idea remains work in progress. In this study we explore this relationship between general moral values and daily life behavior through a conceptual analysis and an empirical study. (...) Our conceptual analysis of the moral value-moral behavior relationship suggests that the effect of a generally endorsed moral value on moral behavior is highly context dependent. It requires the manifestation of several phases of moral decision-making, each influenced by many contextual factors. We expect that this renders the empirical relationship between generic moral values and people’s concrete moral behavior indeterminate. Subsequently, we empirically investigate this relationship in three different studies. We relate two different measures of general moral values -the Moral Foundation Questionnaire and the Morality As Cooperation Questionnaire- to a broad set of self-reported morally relevant daily life behaviors (including adherence to COVID-19 measures and participation in voluntary work). Our empirical results are in line with the expectations derived from our conceptual analysis: the considered general moral values are poor predictors of the selected daily life behaviors. Furthermore, moral values that were tailored to the specific context of the behavior showed to be somewhat stronger predictors. Together with the insights derived from our conceptual analysis, this indicates the relevance of the contextual nature of moral decision-making as a possible explanation for the poor predictive value of general moral values. Our findings suggest that the investigation of morality’s influence on behavior by expressing and measuring it in terms of general moral values may need revision. (shrink)

We understand regulatory policy problems against the backdrop of existing implementations of a regulatory framework. There are argument schemes for proposing a policy and for criticising a proposal, rooted in a shared understanding that there is an existing regulatory framework which is implemented in social structures in society, yet has problems. The problems with the existing implementations may be attributed either to those implementations or to the constraints imposed by the regulatory framework. In this paper we propose that calls for (...) change of regulatory policy, and case-based and statistical evidence produced in support of policy proposals, are based in model-based problem solving activities. This perspective suggests schemes for a good argument pro or con a policy proposal, while avoiding the problem of backing up claims and evidence on the policy level with a conjectural deep model of the policy domain. (shrink)

This work presents elements for an alternative operationalization of monitoring and diagnosis of multi-agent systems, developed in the context of compliance checking. In contrast to traditional accounts of model-based diagnosis, and most proposals concerning non-compliance, our method does not consider any commitment towards the individual unit of agency. Identity is considered to be mostly an attribute to assign responsibility, and not as the only referent to a source of intentionality. The proposed method requires as input a set of prototypical agent-roles (...) known to be relevant for the domain, and an observation, i.e. evidence collected by a monitor agent. We elaborate on a concrete example concerning tax frauds in real-estate transactions. (shrink)

In this review, we provide an overview of the dynamic changes within the microbiota and its metabolites that are implicated in establishing and maintaining gastrointestinal homeostasis during various stages of microbial colonization. The gradual conversion of the gut microbiota toward a mutualistic microbial community involves replacement of pioneer gut colonizers with bacterial taxa that are characteristic for the adult gut. An important microbial signature of homeostasis in the adult gut is the prevalence and activity of a diverse spectrum of bacterial (...) species that produce beneficial metabolites through metabolic interactions between microbial groups. Deciphering these microbial signatures and their metabolites that govern short and long‐term equilibrium, as well as imbalances in host‐microbial relationships, may provide novel diagnostic tools and/or therapeutic targets for specific disorders associated with intestinal dysbiosis and loss of homeostasis. (shrink)

The nature of unconscious information processing is a heavily debated issue in cognitive science, and neuroscience. Traditionally, it has been thought that unconscious cognitive processing is restricted to knowledge that is strongly prepared by conscious processes. In three experiments, we show that the task that is performed consciously can also be applied unconsciously to items outside the current task set. We found that a same–different judgment of two target stimuli was also performed on two subliminally presented prime stimuli. This was (...) true for target and prime stimuli from entirely different categories, as well as for prime and target stimuli at different levels of abstraction. These results reveal that unconscious processing can generalize more widely than previously accepted. (shrink)

Most consumers are aware that climate change is a growing problem and admit that action is needed. However, research shows that consumers’ behavior often does not conform to their value and orientations. This value-behavior gap is due to contextual factors such as price, product design, and social norms as well as individual factors such as personal and hedonic values, environmental beliefs, and the workload capacity an individual can handle. Because of this conflict of interest, consumers have a hard time identifying (...) the true drivers of their behavior, as they are either unaware of or unwilling to acknowledge the processes at play. Therefore, consumer neuroscience methods might provide a valuable tool to uncover the implicit measurements of pro-environmental behavior (PEB). Several studies have already defined neurophysiological differences between green and non-green individuals; however, a behavior change intervention must be developed to motivate PEB among consumers. Motivating behavior with reward or punishment will most likely get users engaged in climate change action via brain structures related to the reward system, such as the amygdala, nucleus accumbens, and (pre)frontal cortex, where the reward information and subsequent affective responses are encoded. The intensity of the reward experience can be increased when the consumer is consciously considering the action to achieve it. This makes goal-directed behavior the potential aim of behavior change interventions. This article provides an extensive review of the neuroscientific evidence for consumer attitude, behavior, and decision-making processes in the light of sustainability incentives for behavior change interventions. Based on this review, we aim to unite the current theories and provide future research directions to exploit the power of affective conditioning and neuroscience methods for promoting PEB engagement. (shrink)

_An ambitious and radically original reading of philosopher Francis Bacon._.

Within the empirical study of moral decision making, people’s morality is often identified by measuring general moral values through a questionnaire, such as the Moral Foundations Questionnaire provided by Moral Foundations Theory (MFT). However, the success of these moral values in predicting people’s behaviour has been disappointing. The general and context-free manner in which such approaches measure moral values and people’s moral identity seems crucial in this respect. Yet, little research has been done into the underlying notion of self. This (...) article aims to fill this gap. Taking a phenomenological approach and focusing on MFT, we examine the concept of moral self that MFT assumes and present an improved concept of moral self for the empirical study of morality. First, we show that MFT adopts an essentialist concept of moral self, consisting of stable moral traits. Then, we argue that such a notion is unable to grasp the dynamical and context sensitive aspects of the moral self. We submit that Ricoeur’s narrative notion of identity, a self that reinterprets itself in every decision situation through self-narrative, is a viable alternative since it is able to incorporate context sensitivity and change, while maintaining a persisting moral identity. Finally, we argue that this narrative concept of moral self implies measuring people’s morality in a more exploratory fashion within a delineated context. (shrink)

A 121-nation study of societal collectivism and a 174-nation study of political autocracy show that parasitic stress does not account for any variation in these components of culture once the interactive impacts of climatic demands and income resources have been accounted for. Climato-economic livability is a viable rival explanation for the reported effects of parasitic stress on culture.

The Leibniz Center for Law is involved in the project Digitale Uitwisseling Ruimtelijke Plannen [DURP (http://www.vrom.nl/durp); digital exchange of spatial plans] which develops a XML-based digital exchange format for spatial regulations. Involvement in the DURP project offers new possibilities to study a legal area that hasn’t yet been studied to the extent it deserves in the field of Computer Science & Law. We studied and criticised the work of the DURP project and the Dutch Ministry of internal affairs on metadata (...) for regulatory documents, and made an inventory of issues related to legal knowledge representation that it felt were not sufficiently covered by current initiatives in the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) field. This inventory was an input to the DURP standardisation effort. In a second phase of the project we extended the METALex XML schema (cf. Boer et al. 2002; Boer et al. 2003) for ‚regular’ legal sources that we developed in the past for geospatial regulatory information, in order to support exchange of spatial regulations, including the associated geospatial information in the form of maps. We developed a prototype application and demonstrated how the spatial planning information in GML can be combined with XML with only minimal changes, using the Web Ontology Language (OWL). This paper describes our experiences. (shrink)