Sexual selection theory provides interesting tools to address the evolution of human art behavior as it contains models that explain the evolution of elaborate male display traits and these traits exhibit conspicuous similarities with human art behavior. In sexual selection theory, it is recently suggested sensory exploitation hypothesis offers a valuable alternative to good genes and Fisherian runaway. Because, one, it can explain the origins of male display traits while good genes and Fisherian runaway cannot, and two, (...) it can even explain how these traits are maintained, namely without the need of any selection on female preferences in the sexual context, thus solely by female sensory biases maintained by selection in another context. Good genes and Fisherian runaway were previously applied to model the evolution of human art and aesthetics. The above implies application of sensory exploitation to model human art could offer a valuable addition to these models. I use some of the concepts (like dual inheritance) developed by the authors of the cultural runaway hypothesis, Boyd and Richerson, to develop a model for the evolution of art based on sensory exploitation hypothesis applied to the cultural level, which I call cultural sensory exploitation hypothesis. Boyd and Richerson's model suggest human aesthetic and artistic expression evolve as a consequence of a cultural runaway process, but in my proposed model they can originate even without this process. Finally, I use this hypothesis to address the conundrum of the creative explosion, a burst of elaborate art some 50,000 years ago and the sudden emergence of cave paintings. I conclude that some evidence indicates that the creative explosion was a consequence of a change in effective population size (i.e. interacting pool of social learners), which made maintenance of innovations necessary for the production of elaborate art possible. These innovations were maintained and selected because they offered the ability to (self)exploit preexisting sensory biases through art. In this view it does not matter whether art initially served any function in human evolution as it readily evolves as a mere consequence of sensory biases. In other words I suggest that the incidental exploitability of sensory biases through art may be the most fundamental driving force behind the origin of art and that it may play an important role in its subsequent maintenance and evolution as well. (shrink)

We investigate a system of two species exploiting a common resource. We consider both abiotic and biotic resources. We are interested in the asymmetric competition where a given consumer is the locally superior resource exploiter and the other is the locally inferior resource exploiter. They also interact directly via interference competition in the sense that LIE individuals can use two opposite strategies to compete with LSE individuals: we assume, in the first case, that LIE uses an avoiding strategy, i.e. LIE (...) individuals go to a non-competition patch to avoids competition with LSE individuals, and in the second one, LIE uses an aggressive strategy, i.e. being very aggressive so that LSE individuals have to go to a non-competition patch. We further assume that there is no resource in the non-competition patch so that individuals have to come back to the competition patch for their maintenance, and the migration process acts on a fast time scale in comparison with demography and competition processes. The models show that being aggressive is efficient for LIE’s survival and even provoke global extinction of the LSE and this result does not depend on the nature of resource. (shrink)

We investigate a system of two species exploiting a common resource. We consider both abiotic (i.e. with a constant resource supply rate) and biotic (i.e. with resource reproduction and self-limitation) resources. We are interested in the asymmetric competition where a given consumer is the locally superior resource exploiter (LSE) and the other is the locally inferior resource exploiter (LIE). They also interact directly via interference competition in the sense that LIE individuals can use two opposite strategies to compete with LSE (...) individuals: we assume, in the first case, that LIE uses an avoiding strategy, i.e. LIE individuals go to a non-competition patch to avoids competition with LSE individuals, and in the second one, LIE uses an aggressive strategy, i.e. being very aggressive so that LSE individuals have to go to a non-competition patch. We further assume that there is no resource in the non-competition patch so that individuals have to come back to the competition patch for their maintenance, and the migration process acts on a fast time scale in comparison with demography and competition processes. The models show that being aggressive is efficient for LIE’s survival and even provoke global extinction of the LSE and this result does not depend on the nature of resource. (shrink)

Conflicts over rangeland exploitation have been a serious challenge in Iran, rooted in human behavior. Accordingly, this study aimed to provide a comprehensive theoretical framework in the field of analyzing conflict behavior among rangeland exploiters. This research is a descriptive-correlational and causal-relational study conducted using a cross-sectional survey. The statistical population of the study was rangeland exploiters in one of the northwest provinces of Iran (N= 66,867) of whom 384 people were selected as a sample and stratified (...) random sampling method with proportional assignment. The research instrument was a questionnaire, the validity of which was confirmed by a panel of academic experts and the reliability of its items was verified using Cronbach’s alpha coefficient. The results showed that the variables of personal norms (PN) and the perceived behavioral control were able to predict 25.9% of the variance in terms of the conflicting behavior of rangeland exploiters; besides, ascription of responsibility, PN, perceived behavioral control, and awareness of consequences, which have been proposed as activators of PN, were able to explain a significant percentage (63.5%) of the variance in terms of PN. Furthermore, analysis of the effects of environmental and cultural values showed that conflict behaviors of exploiters were mostly affected by their underlying values. Generally, the results of this study would help in the development of more integrated and comprehensive models in the field of exploiters’ conflict behavior. Eventually, to change and improve the environmental behavior of exploiters to better management of conflict in rangelands, providing a list of considerations and competencies for agricultural extension and education, this article comes to the end. (shrink)

The objective of this study is to explore factors that affect the decisions single-child parents make when considering whether to have a second child applying the psychological theory of planned behaviour. Quantitative survey data from a sample of parents with a single child selected from a Slovak representative sample was used to perform regression analysis assessing effects of attitudes, subjective norms and perceived control on intention to have a second child within the next three years. Results largely confirm the model (...) captured in TPB. All three components of the TPB have a significant effect on intentions to have a second child. A particular set of liberal and conservative attitudes facilitate plans to have a second child. The strongest predictors, however, are the perceived pressure from the social environment and subjective desire to have a child. The study concludes that, along with demographic and sociological variables, psychological factors play a significant role in decision-making processes concerning reproductive planning. (shrink)

While the effects of pattern learning on language processing are well known, the way in which pattern learning shapes exploratory behavior has long gone unnoticed. We report on the way in which individual differences in statistical pattern learning affect performance in the domain of language along multiple dimensions. Analyzing data from healthy monolingual adults' performance on a serial reaction time task and a self‐paced reading task, we show how individual differences in statistical pattern learning are reflected in readers' knowledge (...) of linguistic co‐occurrence patterns and in their exploration and exploitation of content‐specific and task‐general information. First, we investigated the extent to which an individual's pattern learning correlates with his or her sensitivity to systematic morphological and syntactic co‐occurrences, as evidenced while reading authentic sentences. We found that the stream of morphological and syntactic information has a more pronounced effect on the reading speed of, as we will label them, content‐sensitive learners in that the more probable the co‐occurrence pattern, the faster their reading of that pattern will be. Next, we investigated how differences in pattern learning are reflected in the ways in which individuals approach the reading task itself and adapt to it. Casting this relation in terms of exploration/exploitation strategies, known from Reinforcement Learning, we conclude that content‐sensitive learners are also more likely to initially probe (explore) a wider range of directly relevant patterns, which they can later use (exploit) to optimize their reading performance further. By affecting exploratory behavior, pattern learning influences the information that is gathered and becomes available for exploitation, thereby increasing the effect pattern learning has on language cognition. (shrink)

This book explores how traditional theories of economic justice, both from the libertarian right and the egalitarian left, have failed to appreciate the objection against exploitative behavior that would be possible through the exercise of property rights. This failure also underlies the recent plea for a so-called unconditional basic income.

An increasing number of users have been attracted by location-based social networks in recent years. Meanwhile, user-generated content in online LBSNs like spatial, temporal, and social information provides an ever-increasing chance to study the human behavior movement from their spatiotemporal mobility patterns and spawns a large number of location-based applications. For instance, one of such applications is to produce personalized point of interest recommendations that users are interested in. Different from traditional recommendation methods, the recommendations in LBSNs come with (...) two vital dimensions, namely, geographical and temporal. However, previously proposed methods do not adequately explore geographical influence and temporal influence. Therefore, fusing geographical and temporal influences for better recommendation accuracy in LBSNs remains potential. In this work, our aim is to generate a top recommendation list of POIs for a target user. Specially, we explore how to produce the POI recommendation by leveraging spatiotemporal information. In order to exploit both geographical and temporal influences, we first design a probabilistic method to initially detect users’ spatial orientation by analyzing visibility weights of POIs which are visited by them. Second, we perform collaborative filtering by detecting users’ temporal preferences. At last, for making the POI recommendation, we combine the aforementioned two approaches, that is, integrating the spatial and temporal influences, to construct a unified framework. Our experimental results on two real-world datasets indicate that our proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art POI recommendation approaches. (shrink)

We cooperate with other people despite the risk of being exploited or hurt. If future artificial intelligence (AI) systems are benevolent and cooperative toward us, what will we do in return? Here we show that our cooperative dispositions are weaker when we interact with AI. In nine experiments, humans interacted with either another human or an AI agent in four classic social dilemma economic games and a newly designed game of Reciprocity that we introduce here. Contrary to the hypothesis that (...) people mistrust algorithms, participants trusted their AI partners to be as cooperative as humans. However, they did not return AI's benevolence as much and exploited the AI more than humans. These findings warn that future self-driving cars or co-working robots, whose success depends on humans' returning their cooperativeness, run the risk of being exploited. This vulnerability calls not just for smarter machines but also better human-centered policies. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that sensory exploitation, a model from sexual selection theory, deserves more attention in evolutionary thinking about art than it has up until now. We base our argument on the observation that in the past sensory exploitation may have been underestimated in sexual selection theory but that it is now winning field. Likewise, we expect sensory exploitation can play a more substantial role in modeling the evolution of art behavior. Darwin's theory of (...) sexual selection provides a mechanistic basis to explain the evolution of male display traits. This mechanistic approach has proven useful to developing hypotheses about the evolution of human art. Both Boyd and Richerson (1985) and Miller (1998, 1999, 2000, 2001) have applied an indirect-benefit model from sexual selection to the evolution of art behavior. We argue that the mechanistic possibilities sensory exploitation has to offer as a model have remained underexplored so far, so we propose a concept based upon it. From the sensory exploitation perspective it follows that exaptive exploitation of psychosensory biases is a primary force in the evolution of art production (notice that the use of a model from sexual selection does not imply art evolved as a sexual display - we only use it for its mechanism) and that the indirect-benefit model only provides secondary forces. Thus, sensory exploitation may operate alone under some conditions but usually secondary processes as a result of indirect benefits are expected to kick in. The concept of sensory exploitation will need to play a central role in articulating all of the existing hypotheses about art. (shrink)

The general idea of guilt aversion is that agents may be motivated to avoid letting others down, even at the expense of their own material payoff. Several experimental studies have documented behavior that is consistent with agents exhibiting guilt averse motivations in social interactions. However, there are strategic implications of guilt aversion, which can impact economic outcomes in important ways, that have yet to be explored. I introduce a game that admits the possibility for agents to induce guilt upon (...) others in a manner consistent with the method posited by Baumeister et al.. This game enables me to experimentally test whether agents attempt to exploit the guilt aversion of others by inducing guilt upon them, and whether agents are actually susceptible to this exploitation. Additionally, the design enables me to test whether agents exhibit higher degrees of trust when they are given such an opportunity to exploit the guilt aversion of others. The data suggest that agents do not attempt to fully exploit the guilt aversion of other agents by inducing guilt upon them; however, the data suggest that agents would have been susceptible to guilt induction. (shrink)

Based on the views of Hindus in Bali, the application of ornaments in the form of Balinese traditional symbols should follow the rules of the prevailing tradition.The symbols are created to show the cosmology and philosophy based on the teachings of Hinduism as indigenous in Bali and function as a means of a sacred ritual. But in reality the designers in Bali often exploit the symbols by “mutilating” and applying them to undue places, motivated by a desire to create a (...) product or environment characterized by Balinese ethnicity. For example, Acintya relief, Karang Bhoma, Garuda Wisnu and others are applied as façade decorations for shops and banks, or they are created in the form of a statue to decorate crossroads, or used for decoration of the human body in the form of a tattoo and so forth. Seen from a semiotic approach, these actions can damage the structure of the meaning of symbols, because they bring about the interruption of the established relations of the signifier and signified and they form symbol fragments with unclear relations to meaning. Similarly, in today’s designs stamped with such decoration, they appear awkward and meaningless. From such behaviour, that practice creates styles such as pastiche, parody, kitsch, camp and so forth. (shrink)

– We present a new paradigm extending the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma to multiple players. Our model is unique in granting players information about past interactions between all pairs of players – allowing for much more sophisticated social behaviour. We provide an overview of preliminary results and discuss the implications in terms of the evolutionary dynamics of strategies.

When we learn how to throw darts we adjust how we throw based on where the darts stick. Much of skill learning is computationally similar in that we learn using feedback obtained after the completion of individual actions. We can formalize such tasks as a search problem; among the set of all possible actions, find the action that leads to the highest reward. In such cases our actions have two objectives: we want to best utilize what we already know ( (...) class='Hi'>exploitation), but we also want to learn to be more successful in the future (exploration). Here we tested how participants learn movement trajectories where feedback is provided as a monetary reward that depends on the chosen trajectory. We mathematically derived the optimal search policy for our experiment using decision theory. The search behavior of participants is well predicted by an ideal searcher model that optimally combines exploration and exploitation. (shrink)

How, and how well, do people switch between exploration and exploitation to search for and accumulate resources? We study the decision processes underlying such exploration/exploitation trade‐offs using a novel card selection task that captures the common situation of searching among multiple resources (e.g., jobs) that can be exploited without depleting. With experience, participants learn to switch appropriately between exploration and exploitation and approach optimal performance. We model participants' behavior on this task with random, threshold, and sampling (...) strategies, and find that a linear decreasing threshold rule best fits participants' results. Further evidence that participants use decreasing threshold‐based strategies comes from reaction time differences between exploration and exploitation; however, participants themselves report non‐decreasing thresholds. Decreasing threshold strategies that “front‐load” exploration and switch quickly to exploitation are particularly effective in resource accumulation tasks, in contrast to optimal stopping problems like the Secretary Problem requiring longer exploration. (shrink)

The sociobiology of bacteria, largely unappreciated and ignored by the microbiology research community two decades ago is now a major research area, catalyzed to a significant degree by studies of communication and cooperative behavior among the myxobacteria and in quorum sensing (QS) and biofilm formation by pseudomonads and other microbes. Recently, the topic of multicellular cooperative behaviors among bacteria has been increasingly considered in the context of evolutionary biology. Here we discuss the significance of two recent studies1,2 of the (...) phenomenon of “cheating” mutants and their exploitation of cooperating microbial populations of Pseudomonas aeruginosa. BioEssays 30:296–298, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Search in an environment with an uncertain distribution of resources involves a trade-off between exploitation of past discoveries and further exploration. This extends to information foraging, where a knowledge-seeker shifts between reading in depth and studying new domains. To study this decision-making process, we examine the reading choices made by one of the most celebrated scientists of the modern era: Charles Darwin. From the full-text of books listed in his chronologically-organized reading journals, we generate topic models to quantify his (...) local (text-to-text) and global (text-to-past) reading decisions using Kullback-Liebler Divergence, a cognitively-validated, information-theoretic measure of relative surprise. Rather than a pattern of surprise-minimization, corresponding to a pure exploitation strategy, Darwin’s behavior shifts from early exploitation to later exploration, seeking unusually high levels of cognitive surprise relative to previous eras. These shifts, detected by an unsupervised Bayesian model, correlate with major intellectual epochs of his career as identified both by qualitative scholarship and Darwin’s own self-commentary. Our methods allow us to compare his consumption of texts with their publication order. We find Darwin’s consumption more exploratory than the culture’s production, suggesting that underneath gradual societal changes are the explorations of individual synthesis and discovery. Our quantitative methods advance the study of cognitive search through a framework for testing interactions between individual and collective behavior and between short- and long-term consumption choices. This novel application of topic modeling to characterize individual reading complements widespread studies of collective scientific behavior. (shrink)

Despite decades of study, mimicry continues to inspire and challenge evolutionary biologists. This essay aims to assess recent conceptual frameworks for the study of mimicry and to examine the links between mimicry and related phenomena. Mimicry is defined here as similarity in appearance and/or behavior between a mimic and a model that provides a selective advantage to the mimic because it affects the behavior of a receiver causing it to misidentify the mimic, and that evolved (or is maintained (...) by selection) because of those effects. Mimics copy cues or signals that are already in use as part of a stable communication system, but offer misleading information to receivers. Mimicry overlaps, both conceptually and evolutionarily, with camouflage and perceptual exploitation but the overlap is only partial, which may create some confusion. Certain types of camouflage (e.g. masquerade) conform to the definition of mimicry, while others (e.g. background matching) are not considered mimicry because they prevent detection rather than recognition of the camouflaged animal. Mimicry, on the other hand, works by exploiting peculiarities of the receiver at higher stages of sensory processing involving recognition and classification of stimuli. Perceptual exploitation models of trait evolution are also closely related to mimicry, and sensory traps in particular may act as a precursor for true mimicry to evolve. The common thread through these diverse phenomena is deception of a receiver by a mimic. Thus receiver deception (i.e. perceptual error) emerges as a key characteristic of mimicry shared with some types of camouflage and perceptual exploitation. (shrink)

Disgust originated as an evolutionary adaptation for avoiding disease, but it has since infiltrated morality. Many philosophers are skeptical of moral disgust. Skeptics argue that disgust is unreliable and harmful, and that we should eliminate or minimize feelings of disgust in moral thought. However, these arguments are unsuccessful. They do not show that disgust is more problematic than other emotions implicated in morality. Moreover, empirical research suggests that disgust supports important norms and values. Disgust is frequently elicited by “reciprocity violations,” (...) i.e., acts of cheating, dishonesty, and exploitation. The emotion is a fitting response because it accurately reflects the ability of these moral wrongs to pollute and to circulate. Repurposing its original functions, moral disgust motivates social exclusion, tracks the spread of immorality, and acts as a signaling system to coordinate sanctioning. Instead of expunging ourselves of moral disgust, then, we should seek to understand its virtues and its vices. (shrink)

This volume provides the fundamentals needed to understand the various explanatory systems and methodologies used in the behavior sciences and to evaluate their findings, in particular the literature and findings on buyer behavior. In clear prose, the author discusses the key issues in modern philosophy, psychology, and sociology and their relevance for the student of marketing and buyer behavior. O'Shaughnessy exploits insights from many disciplines as to the many ways to derive understanding of behavioral phenomena, making it (...) accessible not only to academics and students of marketing, but to professionals as well. (shrink)

The enormous scale of the available information and products on the Internet has necessitated the development of algorithms that intermediate between options and human users. These algorithms attempt to provide the user with relevant information. In doing so, the algorithms may incur potential negative consequences stemming from the need to select items about which it is uncertain to obtain information about users versus the need to select items about which it is certain to secure high ratings. This tension is an (...) instance of the exploration–exploitation trade‐off in the context of recommender systems. Because humans are in this interaction loop, the long‐term trade‐off behavior depends on human variability. Our goal is to characterize the trade‐off behavior as a function of human variability fundamental to such human–algorithm interaction. To tackle the characterization, we first introduce a unifying model that smoothly transitions between active learning and recommending relevant information. The unifying model gives us access to a continuum of algorithms along the exploration–exploitation trade‐off. We then present two experiments to measure the trade‐off behavior under two very different levels of human variability. The experimental results inform a thorough simulation study in which we modeled and varied human variability systematically over a wide rage. The main result is that exploration–exploitation trade‐off grows in severity as human variability increases, but there exists a regime of low variability where algorithms balanced in exploration and exploitation can largely overcome the trade‐off. (shrink)

There is an alleged tension between undue inducement and exploitation in research trials. This paper considers claims that increasing the benefits to research subjects enrolled in international, externally-sponsored clinical trials should be avoided on the grounds that it may result in the undue inducement of research subjects. This article contributes to the debate about exploitation versus undue inducement by introducing an analysis of the available empirical research into research participants' motivations and the influence of payments on research subjects' (...) behaviour and risk assessment. Admittedly, the available research in this field is limited, but the research that has been conducted suggests that financial rewards do not distort research subjects' behaviour or blind them to the risks involved with research. Therefore, I conclude that research sponsors should prioritise the prevention of exploitation in international research by providing greater benefits to research participants. (edited). (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ethical implications of video game companies employing psychologists and using psychological research in game design.,The author first argues that exploiting psychology in video games may be more ethically problematic than familiar application domains like advertising, gambling and political rhetoric. Then an overview of the effects particular types of game design may have on user behavior is provided, taking into account various findings and phenomena from behavioral psychology and behavioral economics.,Finally, the (...) author concludes that the corresponding ethical problems cannot – and should not – be addressed by means of regulation or rating systems. The author argues instead that a more promising countermeasure lies in using the same psychological research to educate gamers (children in particular) and thereby increase their capacity for meta-cognition.,The importance of this lies in the tremendous effect these behavior-modifying technologies may have upon our self-determination, well-being and social relations, as well as corresponding implications for the society. (shrink)

In this article we present the bases for a computational theory of the cognitive processes underlying human communication. The core of the article is devoted to the analysis of the phases in which the process of comprehension of a communicative act can be logically divided: (1) literal meaning, where the reconstruction of the mental states literally expressed by the actor takes place: (2) speaker's meaning, where the partner reconstructs the communicative intentions of the actor; (3) communicative effect, where the partner (...) possibly modifies his own beliefs and intentions; (4) reaction, where the intentions for the generation of the response are produced; and (5) response, where an overt response is constructed. The model appears to be compatible with relevant facts about human behavior. Our hypothesis is that, through communication, an actor tries to exploit the motivational structures of a partner so that the desired goal is generated. A second point is that social behavior requires that cooperation be maintained at some level. In the case of communication, cooperation is, in general, pursued even when the partner does not adhere to the actor's goals, and therefore no cooperation occurs at the behavioral level. This important distinction is reflected in the two kinds of game we introduce to account for communication. The main concept implied in communication is that two agents overtly reach a situation of shared mental states. Our model deals with sharedness through two primitives: shared beliefs and communicative intentions. (shrink)

Colour information not only helps sustain the survival of animal species by guiding sexual selection and foraging behaviour but also is an important factor in the cultural and technological development of our own species. This is illustrated by examples from the visual arts and from state-of-the-art imaging technology, where the strategic use of colour has become a powerful tool for guiding the planning and execution of interventional procedures. The functional role of colour information in terms of its potential benefits to (...) behavioural success across the species is addressed in the introduction here to clarify why colour perception may have evolved to generate behavioural success. It is argued that evolutionary and environmental pressures influence not only colour trait production in the different species but also their ability to process and exploit colour information for goal-specific purposes. We then leap straight to the human primate with insight from current research on the facilitating role of colour cues on performance training with precision technology for image-guided surgical planning and intervention. It is shown that local colour cues in two-dimensional images generated by a surgical fisheye camera help individuals become more precise rapidly across a limited number of trial sets in simulator training for specific manual gestures with a tool. This facilitating effect of a local colour cue on performance evolution in a video-controlled simulator (pick-and-place) task can be explained in terms of colour-based figure-ground segregation facilitating attention to local image parts when more than two layers of subjective surface depth are present, as in all natural and surgical images. (shrink)

Some of the challenges in Sanders et al. (this issue) can be aptly illustrated by means of charity nudges, that is, nudges designed to increase charitable donations. These nudges raise many ethical questions. First, Oxfam’s triptychs with suggested donations are designed to increase giving. If successful, do our actions match ex ante or ex post preferences? Does this make a difference to the autonomy of the donor? Second, the Behavioural Insights Team conducted experiments using social networks to nudge people to (...) give more. Do these appeals steer clear of exploiting power relations? Do they respect boundaries of privacy? Third, in an online campaign by Kiva, donors are asked to contribute directly to personalized initiatives. In many cases, the initiative has already been funded and donor money is funnelled to a new cause. Is such a “pre-disbursal” arrangement truthful and true to purpose as a social business model? (shrink)

In everyday situations, and particularly in some sport and working contexts, humans face an inherently unpredictable and uncertain environment. All sorts of unpredictable and unexpected things happen but typically people are able to skillfully adapt. In this paper, we address two key questions in cognitive science. First, how is an agent able to bring its previously learned skill to bear on a novel situation? Second, how can an agent be both sensitive to the particularity of a given situation, while remaining (...) flexibly poised for many other possibilities for action? We will argue that both the sensitivity to novel situations and the sensitivity to a multiplicity of action possibilities are enabled by the property of skilled agency that we will call metastable attunement. We characterize a skilled agent’s flexible interactions with a dynamically changing environment in terms of metastable dynamics in agent-environment systems. What we find in metastability is the realization of two competing tendencies: the tendency of the agent to express their intrinsic dynamics and the tendency to search for new possibilities. Metastably attuned agents are ready to engage with a multiplicity of affordances, allowing for a balance between stability and flexibility. On the one hand, agents are able to exploit affordances they are attuned to, while at the same time being ready to flexibly explore for other affordances. Metastable attunement allows agents to smoothly transition between these possible configurations so as to adapt their behaviour to what the particular situation requires. We go on to describe the role metastability plays in learning of new skills, and in skilful behaviour more generally. Finally, drawing upon work in art, architecture and sports science, we develop a number of perspectives on how to investigate metastable attunement in real life situations. (shrink)

The continuous revaluation of rewards lies at the core of Ainslie's account of willpower. Yet, he does not explicate the underlying experiential mechanisms. We draw upon theoretical, neuroscientific, and computational evidence to demonstrate that boredom evokes revaluation. By biasing behavior toward exploration, boredom necessitates effortful willpower to balance it against exploitation, thereby rendering suppression a highly adaptive function of willpower.

Does motor behavior early in development have the same signatures of habituation, dishabituation, and Spencer-Thompson dishabituation known from infant perception and cognition? And do these signatures explain the choice preferences in A not B motor decision tasks? We provide new empirical evidence that gives an affirmative answer to the first question together with a unified neural dynamic model that gives an affirmative answer to the second question.In the perceptual and cognitive domains, habituation is the weakening of an orientation response (...) to a stimulus over perceptual experience. Switching to a novel stimulus leads to dishabituation, the re-establishment of the orientation response. In Spencer-Thompson dishabituation, the renewed orientation response transfers to the original stimulus. The change in orientation responses over perceptual experience explains infants' behavior in preferential looking tasks: Familiarity preference early during exposure and novelty preference late during exposure. In the motor domain, perseveration in the A not B task could be interpreted as a form of familiarity preference. There are hints that this preference reverses after enough experience with the familiar movement. We provide a unified account for habituation and patterns of preferential selection in which neural dynamic fields generate perceptual or motor representations. The build-up of activation in excitatory fields leads to familiarity preference, the build-up of activation in inhibitory fields leads to novelty preference. We show that the model accounts for the new experimental evidence for motor habituation, but is also compatible with earlier accounts for perceptual habituation and motor perseveration. We discuss how excitatory and inhibitory memory traces may regulate exploration and exploitation for both orientation to objects and motor behaviors. (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)

Standard accounts of derivational morphology assume that it is incremental: some words are formed on the basis of others, and each derivational family has a base from which all of the other words are derived. The importance of the base has been questioned by paradigmatic approaches to morphology, which posit that word systems are about multidirectional relationships between words and paradigm cells, in which no word has a privileged status. This paper seeks to test which of these two views makes (...) more accurate predictions about speakers’ cognitive representations of derivational families. We perform an acceptability judgement experiment in which speakers are asked to evaluate the acceptability of a pseudoword conditional on another pseudoword in the same derivational family. We find that speakers are aware of implicative relationships between words in the same family, and that they opportunistically exploit probabilistic relationships between surface words, regardless of whether the base form is the predictor, the target of prediction, or not at all involved in the task. (shrink)

The unprecedented economic growth in recent decades has cultivated the exploitation of natural resources and over-consumption, leading to ecological deterioration and sustainability. The ever-increasing consumption in developing countries is creating a significant environmental strain. Thus, the industry and consumers’ environmental issues and their harmful effects on human health have led to concerns among researchers, scientists, academic communities, and policymakers. The present work examines the impact of different consumption value factors on sustainable consumption behavior concerning consumer choice in Pakistan (...) and China. A cross-sectional study is conducted, and data are collected through a primary source questionnaire. A sample of 431 respondents is chosen from different cities in Pakistan, and a sample of 342 respondents is selected from China. Estimation techniques like descriptive statistics, frequency distribution, multicollinearity, R square, independent sample t-test, the coefficient of correlation, and regression analysis are used for the data analysis. The comparative results show that knowledge values and emotional values significantly influence the choice behavior of respondents toward environmentally friendly products both in Pakistan and China. In contrast, social values and conditional values show insignificant influence. Furthermore, functional values are significant in Pakistan while insignificant in the context of China, and environmental values are significant in China although insignificant in Pakistan with regard to sustainable consumption behavior. (shrink)

Infants’ minutes long babbling bouts or repetitive reaching for or mouthing of whatever they can get their hands on gives very much the impression of active exploration, a building block for early learning. But how can we tell apart active exploration from the activity of an immature motor system, attempting but failing to achieve goal directed behavior? I will focus here on evidence that infants increase motor activity and variability when faced with opportunities to gather new information (about their (...) own bodies or the world) and propose this as a guiding principle for separating variability generated for exploration from noise. I will discuss mechanisms generating movement variability, and suggests that, in the various forms it takes, from deliberate hypothesis testing to increasing environmental variability, it could be exploited for learning. However, understanding how variability in motor acts contributes to early learning will require more in-depth investigations of both the nature of and the contextual modulation of this variability. (shrink)

After a brief introduction and review of recent literature on microaggressions, a theoretical typology of three sources of social injustice (oppression, dehumanization, and exploitation) contributes to the theorization of the sources of microaggressions. A selected compendium of words and affective phrases generated in classroom exercises illustrates the nature of the experience of the moment of microaggression. Future research on microaggressions as well as evaluation of practice should examine the experience of microaggression, including being subjected to microaggression, initiating such acts, (...) and observing such acts. (shrink)

Eating is a fundamental part of human life and is, more than anything, a social activity. A new field, known as Computational Commensality has been created to computationally address various social aspects of food and eating. This paper illustrates a study on remote dining we conducted online in May 2021. To better understand this phenomenon, known as Digital Commensality, we recorded 11 pairs of friends sharing a meal online through a videoconferencing app. In the videos, participants consume a plate of (...) pasta while chatting with a friend or a family member. After the remote dinner, participants were asked to fill in the Digital Commensality questionnaire, a validated questionnaire assessing the effects of remote commensal experiences, and provide their opinions on the shortcomings of currently available technologies. Besides presenting the study, the paper introduces the first Digital Commensality Data-set, containing videos, facial landmarks, quantitative and qualitative responses. After surveying multimodal data-sets and corpora that we could exploit to understand commensal behavior, we comment on the feasibility of using remote meals as a source to build data-sets to investigate commensal behavior. Finally, we explore possible future research directions emerging from our results. (shrink)

This paper articulates a radical feminist analysis of psychotherapist-patient sexual exploitation, a problem that has affected an estimated one million North American women. I argue that such exploitation is rooted in misogynous attitudes that pervade the major institutions in contemporary culture, including the mental health professions. I examine ways that mental health professionals use sexist constructs and language to blame victims for their abuse. Through textual analysis of a series of letters and articles by prominent psychiatrists, I show (...) that the male writers attempted to silence victims and their female advocates by subjugating the women's voices to their rhetorical control and by indirectly drawing on the power of deeply-held cultural stereotypes of women. This analysis of therapist-patient sexual exploitation and the blaming of its victims points to the broader problem of oppressive androcentric bias in psychiatry's ideology, epistemology, and discourse. The article closes with a suggestion for correcting psychiatry's harmful biases and with recommended strategies for preventing psychotherapist-patient sexual exploitation. (shrink)

Individual bacterial cells can communicate via quorum sensing, cooperate to harvest nutrients from their environment, form multicellular biofilms, compete over resources and even kill one another. When the environment that bacteria inhabit is an animal host, these social behaviours mediate virulence. Over the last decade, much attention has focussed on the ecology, evolution and pathology of bacterial cooperation, and the possibility that it could be exploited or destabilised to treat infections. But how far can we really extrapolate from theoretical predictions (...) and laboratory experiments to make inferences about ‘cooperative’ behaviours in hosts and reservoirs? To determine the likely importance and evolution of cooperation ‘in the wild’, several questions must be addressed. A recent paper that reports the dynamics of bacterial cooperation and virulence in a field experiment provides an excellent nucleus for bringing together key empirical and theoretical results which help us to frame – if not completely to answer – these questions. (shrink)

In this review, I analyse how ‘behaviour-based personalisation’ in insurance – that is, insurers’ increased interest in tracking and manipulating insureds’ behaviour with, for instance, wearable devices – has been approached in recent social scientific literature. In the review, I focus on two streams of literature, critical data studies and the sociology of insurance, discussing the new insurance schemes that utilise sensor-generated and digital data. The aim of this review is to compare these two approaches and to analyse what kinds (...) of understandings, methodologies and theoretical perspectives they apply to so-called ‘behaviour-based insurance’. The critical data studies literature emphasises the exploitative aspects of these new technologies and mobilises behaviour-based insurance to exemplify the negative outcomes of digital health. Scholars from the field of the sociology of insurance empirically analyse the practices of behavioural-based personalisation and study how regulating and ‘doing’ insurance affect attempts to personalise it. I highlight the importance of approaching insurance as a specific financial technology and argue that more research is needed to understand the practices of developing behaviour-based insurance schemes and the insureds’ experiences. (shrink)

This paper empirically examines how consumers react when a company marks a product with a gay label. The company under scrutiny is one of the largest video game developers in the world, and the labeled product is a popular video game character. We use a regression discontinuity design to exploit the quasi-experimental setting. The main finding was significant drop in demand for this character and a return to previous levels after approximately 3 months. Possible mechanisms and dynamics were explored by (...) analyzing demand for other characters and by surveying consumers. The results are consistent after performing robustness checks based on grid search, subsampling, and placebo tests. (shrink)

One of the most persistent legacies of Karl Marx and the Young Hegelians has been the centrality of the concept of “ideology” in contemporary social criticism. The concept was introduced in order to account for a very specific phenomenon, viz. the fact that individuals often participate in maintaining and reproducing institutions under which they are oppressed or exploited. In the extreme, these individuals may even actively resist the efforts of anyone who tries to change these institutions on their behalf. Clearly, (...) some explanation needs to be given of how individuals could systematically fail to see where their interests lie, or how they might fail to pursue these interests once these have been made clear to them. This need is often felt with some urgency, since failure to provide such an explanation usually counts as prima facie evidence against the claim that these individuals are genuinely oppressed or exploited in the first place. (shrink)

Natural environments have a restorative effect from mental/attentional fatigue, prevent stress, and help to revitalize psychological and physical resources. These benefits are crucial for promoting active aging, which is particularly relevant given the phenomenon of population aging in recent decades. To be considered restorative, green spaces have to meet specific requirements in ecological and psychological terms that can be assessed through Post-Occupancy Evaluation, a multimethod approach commonly used by environmental psychologists and landscape architects after construction to evaluate the design outcomes (...) from the users’ perspective. Generally, POEs consist of surveys and/or interviews accompanied by more or less structured observations of onsite users’ behavior. Despite this, various practical constraints can prevent physical access to the renovated area. Exploiting digital tools for such an assessment can be a crucial support in such circumstances. The current study presents the visual POE of a restorative garden for older adults in Milan, Italy. We developed a web application, that includes the exp-EIA© patented method, which allows participants to virtually explore a visual simulation of the environment and provide their feedback. We identified 3 representative viewpoints in the redeveloped garden differing from each other for the functions and the design principles that inspired the transformation. For each point of view, we created 360° Virtual Reality photographs, that can be navigated by looking around, i.e., panning, from the standing point of each view. In connection to each virtual scene, a survey was conducted. The focus was the psychological experience related to each viewpoint, assessed with two psychometric scales investigating the constructs of emotions and restoration ; such information is integrated with behavioral aspects, including the main activities prefigured by participants and their visual exploration of the VR photography. The results of the virtual exploration show that the garden is perceived as restorative, with a more intense effect in a spot purposely designed. The emotions experienced in the garden are positive and a mild level of arousal is observed. The behavioral dimension is characterized by predominantly contemplative activities and contact with nature. A cartographic representation of the psychological and behavioral data is developed, to support the maintenance of the garden. (shrink)

Uzquiano (Analysis 70:39–44, 2010 ) showed that the Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever ( HLPE ) [in its amended form due to Rabern and Rabern (Analysis 68:105–112, 2008 )] has a solution in only two questions. Uzquiano concludes his paper by noting that his solution strategy naturally suggests a harder variation of the puzzle which, as he remarks, he does not know how to solve in two questions. Wheeler and Barahona (J Philos Logic, to appear, 2011 ) formulated a three question (...) solution to Uzquiano’s puzzle and gave an information theoretic argument to establish that a two question solution for Uzquiano’s puzzle does not exist. However, their argument crucially relies on a certain conception of what it means to answer self-referential yes–no questions truly and falsely . We propose an alternative such conception which, as we show, allows one to solve Uzquiano’s puzzle in two questions. The solution strategy adopted suggests an even harder variation of Uzquiano’s puzzle which, as we will show, can also be solved in two questions. Just as all previous solutions to versions of HLPE , our solution is presented informally. The second part of the paper investigates the prospects of formally representing solutions to HLPE by exploiting theories of truth. (shrink)

In order for artificial intelligent systems to interact naturally with human users, they need to be able to learn from human instructions when actions should be imitated. Human tutoring will typically consist of action demonstrations accompanied by speech. In the following, the characteristics of human tutoring during action demonstration will be examined. A special focus will be put on the distinction between two kinds of motion events: path-oriented actions and manner-oriented actions. Such a distinction is inspired by the literature pertaining (...) to cognitive linguistics, which indicates that the human conceptual system can distinguish these two distinct types of motion. These two kinds of actions are described in language by more path-oriented or more manner-oriented utterances. In path-oriented utterances, the source, trajectory, or goal is emphasized, whereas in manner-oriented utterances the medium, velocity, or means of motion are highlighted. We examined a video corpus of adult–child interactions comprised of three age groups of children—pre-lexical, early lexical, and lexical—and two different tasks, one emphasizing manner more strongly and one emphasizing path more strongly. We analyzed the language and motion of the caregiver and the gazing behavior of the child to highlight the differences between the tutoring and the acquisition of the manner and path concepts. The results suggest that age is an important factor in the development of these action categories. The analysis of this corpus has also been exploited to develop an intelligent robotic behavior—the tutoring spotter system—able to emulate children's behaviors in a tutoring situation, with the aim of evoking in human subjects a natural and effective behavior in teaching to a robot. The findings related to the development of manner and path concepts have been used to implement new effective feedback strategies in the tutoring spotter system, which should provide improvements in human–robot interaction. (shrink)

Optimal foraging theory has been criticized for underestimating patch exploitation time. However, proper modeling of costs not only answers these criticisms, but it also explains apparently irrational behaviors like the sunk-cost effect. When a forager is sure to experience high initial costs repeatedly, the forager should devote more time to exploitation than searching in order to minimize the accumulation of said costs. Thus, increased recognition or reconnaissance costs lead to increased exploitation times in order to reduce the (...) frequency of future costs, and this result can be used to explain paradoxical human preference for higher costs. In fact, this result also provides an explanation for how continuing a very costly task indefinitely provides the optimal long-term rate of gain; the entry cost of each new task is so great that the forager avoids ever returning to search. In general, apparently irrational decisions may be optimal when considering the lifetime of a forager within a larger system. (shrink)

_This paper explores the theoretical review of job crafting behavior in service organizations by reviewing the literature on innovation capabilities. A workforce with proactive traits faces less environmental restriction and shows more groundbreaking behaviors of novel change. The current study has moved its emphasis from the influence of organizational job design on worker consequences to the inspection of the part that the workforce plays in defining task, social, and cognitive limits of work to verify innovation. Thus, innovation change is (...) sighted as the exploitation of novelty that entails alterations in work tasks for positive outcomes. This conceptual paper discusses the roles of innovation capabilities and job-crafting behavior in the IT industry. Refereeing to the theory of regulatory focus, the main objective of this paper is to create a new conceptual framework to understand the influence of employees’ perception of innovation capabilities by underpinning the regulatory focus model on job crafting behavior in the IT industry. _. (shrink)

Much of economics is built on the assumption that individuals are driven by self-interest and economic development is an outcome of the free play of such individuals. On the few occasions that the existence of altruism is recognized in economics, the tendency is to build this from the axiom of individual selfishness. The aim of this paper is to break from this tradition and to treat as a primitive that individuals are endowed with the ‘cooperative spirit’, which allows them to (...) work in their collective interest, even when that may not be in their self-interest. The paper tracks the interface between altruism and group identity. By using the basic structure of a Prisoner's Dilemma game among randomly picked individuals and building into it assumptions of general or in-group altruism, the paper demonstrates how our selfish rationality interacts with our innate sense of cooperation. The model is used to outline circumstances under which cooperation will occur and circumstances where it will break down. The paper also studies how sub-groups of a society can form cooperative blocks, whether to simply do better for themselves or exploit others. (shrink)

This study explores the individual-level activities of legislators in parliament, which have been largely ignored in the literature on parliamentary democracies. Individual legislators are extensively involved in parliamentary activities such as drafting private members’ bills and posing questions, even though these activities have only been considered to play marginal roles in parliamentary democracies. Moreover, their engagement varies significantly. By using unique data from Japan, this study demonstrates that the personal attributes of legislators affect their choice of parliamentary activities. Under electoral (...) systems with intra-party competition, legislators use parliamentary activities as an important means to inform their constituents about what they can do for them and how they differ from other legislators. In elections, candidates cultivate personal votes by exploiting the image drawn from their personal attributes and, once elected, they behave in accordance with their attributes in order to maintain their electoral ground. Thus, they devote themselves to different activities in parliament. The data analyzed here support this argument. The results of empirical analyses show that legislators with local-level political experience engage in particularistic pork-barrel activities that will benefit their local interests, while legislators with legal-work experience allocate their time and energy to general policy-making activities that will enhance their public image and visibility as legal experts. (shrink)

What I call "strategic injustice" involves a set of formal and informal regulatory rules and conventions that often lead to grossly unfair outcomes for a class of individuals despite their resistance. My goal in this paper is to provide the necessary conditions for such injustices and for eliminating their instances from our social practices. To do so, I follow Peter Vanderschraaf's analysis of circumstances of justice and expand his account by embedding "asymmetric conflictual coordination games" that summarize fair division problems (...) in a dynamic social network. I use the network effect on such coordination games to explain the emergence of stable exploitative behavior and conventions by a class of individuals even in the presence of restraining efforts by others. I conclude that such unfair conventions are resilient to uncoordinated individual actions and interventions. In fact, maintaining a rough equality itself turns into another coordination problem. Finally, I show that something similar to a social movement that restructures the network of social relations is necessary to solve such coordination problems. (shrink)