Deliberate Judgments Research Articles

Prudence in the Anthropocene

Abstract The deliberative judgment referred to in the history of rhetoric as phronesis, practical wisdom, or prudence might have prevented the existential crisis of the Anthropocene era, but it seems unable to reverse the damage or provide a basis for ecological sustainability. This essay offers several considerations for adapting this traditional model of judgment to take up the new challenge. The normative, calculative, and performative modalities of prudential thinking, along with insights provided by the Chinese philosopher Xu Changfu, provide a basis for examining political, technocratic, ethical, and artistic mentalities for addressing global warming, assessing their strengths and weaknesses in respect to effective advocacy, and learning from them to improve and expand practical wisdom. Special emphasis is given to paying attention to art, artists, and aesthetic values on behalf of developing an attitude of ecological mindfulness.

Computable bibliography: Using data analysis and data visualization to characterize a bibliography

The Scopus database, which includes many open-access items, conference papers, funding details, and patent linkages, has developed as a vital resource within the dynamic social and economic environment. Gaining popularity in several fields, systematic reviews synthesize the relevant research literature in order to guide deliberative judgments. However, researchers require assistance in keeping up with the ever-increasing multidisciplinary nature of work and the ever-changing nature of information. Researchers need efficient methods to navigate and leverage the wealth of available knowledge for their systematic review processes as the number of scholarly production grows tremendously. This study employs descriptive statistics to examine and graphically present the bibliography (the list of sources cited in the text). This study was conducted in Dr. Jodi Schneider's lab and aims to identify trends in scholarly publishing and evaluate the overall content of scholarly works. Publication dates, item types, author lists, titles, and keywords are examined in the analysis, which takes CSV(Comma Separated Values), BibTeX, or RIS formats as input. Emerging research fields and patterns of collaboration can be better understood with the help of the descriptive statistics generated. Word clouds also help readers evaluate the quality and topic focus of the papers by providing a visual assessment of the paper's composition.

Overextending: A Qualitative Study of Trainees Learning at the Edge of Evolving Expertise.

The challenge of graduate medical education is to prepare physicians for unsupervised practice while ensuring patient safety. Current approaches may inadequately prepare physicians due to limited opportunities for autonomy. Recent work on how trainees gain autonomy shows that they actively influence their supervisors' entrustment decisions. If program directors more clearly understand how trainees experience increasing independence, they may better sensitize trainees to the deliberations they will face during patient care. The authors sought to explore how trainees experience lessening supervision as their clinical training advances. Using constructivist grounded theory, the authors recruited trainees from various specialties and training levels via email and conducted 17 semi-structured interviews from 2019 to 2020 to solicit clinical experiences during which their perceived autonomy changed. Through constant comparison and iterative analysis, key themes and conceptual relationships were identified. Seventeen trainees from 4 specialties described novel clinical situations that required "overextending," or going beyond their perceived edge of evolving expertise. This move represented a spectrum based on perceived locus of control, from deliberate overextending driven by trainees, to forced overextending driven by external factors. Trainee judgments about whether or not to overextend were distilled into key questions: (1) Can I do it? (2) Must I do it? (3) Do I want to do it? and (4) Is it safe to do it? More advanced trainees posed a fifth question: (5) Am I missing something? Decisions to move into the realm of uncertainty about capabilities carried weight for trainees. In making deliberative judgments about overextending, they attempted to balance training needs, capability, urgency, and patient safety.

Revisiting the effect of incentivization on cognitive reflection: A meta‐analysis

AbstractThe effect of performance‐based incentives on judgment biases is a controversial issue. A recent extensive meta‐analysis of Brañas‐Garza et al. (2019, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socec.2019.101455) found no effect of incentives on performance in the cognitive reflection test (CRT), a test commonly used for assessing heuristic versus deliberative judgments. We conducted a meta‐analysis of studies that directly compared an incentive versus no‐incentive conditions (n = 2836) and found a small positive effect of incentivization (Cohen's d = .21) on CRT performance. In addition, we re‐examined the Brañas‐Garza et al. (2019) dataset (n = 39,385), taking into consideration not only whether incentivization was used but also the nominal and fiscal size of the incentive. The results show that surprisingly when including only studies that used monetary incentives, the effect of incentivization and incentive size are significant, even when taking into consideration other aspects of the studies. The results thus suggest a small but robust effect of incentives on judgment biases.

Fickle Judgments in Moral Dilemmas: Time Pressure and Utilitarian Judgments in an Interdependent Culture.

In the trolley problem, a well-known moral dilemma, the intuitive process is believed to increase deontological judgments, while deliberative reasoning is thought to promote utilitarian decisions. Therefore, based on the dual-process model, there seems to be an attempt to save several lives at the expense of a few others in a deliberative manner. This study examines the validity of this argument. To this end, we manipulate decision-making time in the standard trolley dilemma to compare differences among 119 Japanese female undergraduates under three conditions: intuitive judgment, deliberative judgment, and judgment after a group discussion. The current results demonstrate that utilitarian judgments decreased from 52.9% in the intuition condition to 43.7% in the deliberation condition and 37.0% after the discussion. Additional analysis suggests that the decrease in utilitarian judgments may be related to psychological unwillingness to assume responsibility for the lives of others rather than to an increase in deontological judgments. Finally, these results are discussed from an adaptationist perspective.

The powerful self: How social power and gender influence face perception

While ample evidence supports an association between power and dominance, little is still known about how temporary experiences of power influence the way people come to see themselves and others. The present research investigates the effect of social power on self- and other-face recognition, and examines whether gender modulates the direction of this effect. Male and female participants were induced to feel either powerful or powerless and had to recognize their own face and those of same-sex strangers from a series of images ranging from a dominant to a submissive version of the original. Results showed that males more frequently chose a dominant self-image under high power, whereas females selected a submissive self-image under low power. When presented with faces of same-sex targets female participants relied on low-power features (i.e., submissiveness) of the self in the perception of others (assimilation effect), whereas male participants more often selected a dominant image of strangers when feeling powerless (constrast effect). The effects of power did not extend to more deliberate judgments of dominance and likability, suggesting that respective biases in face recollection operated at an implicit level. This research underscores the cognitive and motivational underpinnings of power and related gender gaps in power attainment.

Negative affect impedes perceptual filling-in in the uniformity illusion

The notion of cognitive penetrability, i.e., whether perceptual contents can in principle be influenced by non-perceptual factors, has sparked a significant debate over methodological concerns and the correct interpretation of existing findings. In this study, we combined predictive processing models of visual perception and affective states to investigate influences of affective valence on perceptual filling-in in extrafoveal vision. We tested how experimentally induced affect would influence the probability of perceptual filling-in occurring in the uniformity illusion (N = 50). Negative affect led to reduced occurrence rates and increased onset times of visual uniformity. This effect was selectively observed in illusionary trials, requiring perceptual filling-in, and not in control trials, where uniformity was the veridical percept, ruling out biased motor responses or deliberate judgments as confounding variables. This suggests an influential role of affective status on subsequent perceptual processing, specifically on how much weight is ascribed to priors as opposed to sensory evidence.

The effect of group membership and individuating information on automatic and deliberate evaluation of well-known people.

People's automatic (unintentional, uncontrollable, and efficient) preference between social groups often determines their automatic preference between unknown individual members of these groups, a prominent example for automatic prejudice. What happens when the person making the judgment has long known the target individuals? Practice might automatize the deliberate judgment of the individuals. Then, if deliberate judgment is nonprejudiced, automatic prejudice might decrease. In 29 studies (total N = 4,907), we compared preferences between a famous member of a dominant social group and a famous member of a stigmatized social group on indirect measures of evaluation that were developed to measure automatic preference and on self-report measures. In most studies, we chose pairs based on prior self-reported preference for the member of the stigmatized group. The measures showed discrepancy, with indirect measures suggesting an automatic preference for the member of the dominant group. We replicated these results with various target individuals, two pairs of social groups (Black/White, old/young), two indirect measures, and in two countries (Studies 1-23). The indirectly measured prodominant preference was stronger when visual characteristics of the group were present rather than absent (Studies 24 and 25), suggesting a stronger effect of group characteristics on automatic than on deliberate preference between the individuals. On self-report and indirect measures, the preferences between individuals were related to the preferences between their groups (Studies 26 and 27) yet also to individuating information (Studies 28 and 29). Our results suggest that group evaluation plays a central role in the automatic evaluation of familiar (and not only novel) members of stigmatized groups. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Understanding mechanisms behind discrimination using diffusion decision modeling

Past research has documented where discrimination occurs or tested interventions that reduce discrimination. Less is known about how discriminatory behavior emerges and the mechanisms through which successful interventions work. Two studies (N > 4500) apply the Diffusion Decision Model (DDM) to the Judgment Bias Task, a measure of discrimination. In control conditions, participants gave preferential treatment (acceptance to a hypothetical honor society) to physically attractive applicants. DDM analyses revealed participants initially favored attractive candidates and attractiveness was accumulated as evidence of being qualified. Two interventions—raising awareness of bias and asking for more deliberative judgments—reduced discrimination through separate mechanisms. Raising awareness reduced biases in drift rates while increasing deliberation raised decision thresholds. This work offers insight into how discrimination emerges and may aid efforts to develop interventions to lessen discrimination.

The impact of intuition and deliberation on acquisition-retention ambidexterity and sales performance: comparing the Dual-Process and Uni-Process Models

According to the Dual-Process Model, salespeople might utilize intuitive and/or deliberate judgments to make sales decisions. These two systems are distinct and used in isolation by the decision-maker. On the contrary, the Uni-Process Model suggests an alignment between the two styles of thinking based on common rules and principles, meaning they are integrated into one decision-making process. The processes happen simultaneously, not independently. We subscribe to this logic and test these two judgments according to salespeople’s perception across three studies. First, we examine salespeople in the shoe industry, second salespeople working in the retail banking, and finally through a comprehensive meta-analysis. We investigate the effects of salespeople’s intuition, deliberation, and ‘intuition-deliberation alignment’ on sales performance through the mediating mechanism of acquisition-retention ambidexterity, finding effects across each context. While this does provide evidence that the two judgments may work well separately, it strongly supports the use of the Uni-Process Model to explain and predict sales outcomes. Specifically, while both intuitive and deliberate judgment isolate increase sales performance through salespeople’s ambidextrous behavior, the newly created intuitive-deliberative alignment construct suggests that sales performance is higher when salespeople’s intuitive and deliberative judgements are both high rather than when both are low, and this effect goes through A-R ambidexterity.

Dwelling on the Way: Pope Francis and Bernard Lonergan on Discernment

This essay draws on the Jesuit philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan to elucidate the way of discernment described in the writings of Pope Francis. After a reflection on the ‘First Principle and Foundation’ meditation of the Ignatian spiritual exercises highlights the Jesuit heritage shared by Francis and Lonergan, the way of discernment is located within Lonergan’s account of a contemporary cosmology. A discussion of Lonergan’s notions of affectivity, value, and deliberative judgment then illumines the challenge of practicing discernment in the context of cultural diversity. Finally, a brief review of the contributions of Patrick Byrne and Robert Doran clarifies the historical unfolding of the way of discernment.

The Lawful Use of Autonomous Weapon Systems for Targeted Strikes (Part 3): Evaluating the Outer Limits

Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems (LAWS) are essentially weapon systems that, once activated, can select and engage targets without further human intervention. While these are neither currently fielded nor officially part of any nation’s defence strategy, there is ample evidence that many States and defence contractors are currently developing LAWS for future deployment. The main international humanitarian law (IHL) problem posed by these weapon systems is that lethal action against specific targets may be taken by sensory hardware and control software, rather than human operators exercising deliberative reasoning and judgment. However, in the case of targeted strikes, commanders and their battle staffs do select specific targets during the targeting cycle, thereby restricting machine discretion to the choice of munition and the timing of weapons release. This ameliorates a significant concern often put forward by ban proponents, which is the lack of meaningful human control in weapons autonomy. In Part 1 of this sub-series of three articles, the concepts, advantages and technologies of LAWS were explained in order to lay down a basic understanding of how and why autonomous weapons (as opposed to remotely-piloted systems) will be used in targeted strikes. Part 2 built on this by explaining the US/NATO Joint Targeting Cycles and demonstrating that their (largely) human-led processes afford ‘meaningful human control’ (MHC). The corollary was that this precludes any prohibition on autonomous targeted strikes within an armed conflict. In addition, there was a consideration of the legal basis for specifically permitting autonomous targeted strikes in an armed conflict, using potential legal transplants from the Convention on Cluster Munitions. In this Part 3 article, there will be a discussion of four problems, which should arguably confine autonomous targeted strikes to ‘areas of active hostilities’, or ‘hot’ battlefields: one legal (human rights-based); the other three non-legal (‘non-obvious’ nature of drone strikes). This latter objection encompasses psychological harms to civilians, agency-denial and potential international disorder. Moreover, it will be considered whether there may be an exception to these limitations, in light of the rising use of social media by terrorist groups, and recent official statements on the meaning of ‘imminence’ in ad bellum self-defence. Thus, in very narrow factual circumstances, it may be both lawful and militarily useful to deploy autonomous drones outside the immediate boundaries of an armed conflict (or ‘areas of active hostilities’). This sub-series of three articles is the final of a four-part series, which comprises: 1) assessing the sense and scope of autonomy; 2) whether and how LAWS can be designed/deployed in compliance with IHL; 3) issues relating to the explosive remnants of war; and 4) the lawful use of LAWS for targeted strikes (current sub-series of three article).

The Unbearable Automaticity of Being . in a Close Relationship

A recent surge in research on automatic processes in close relationships has revealed new insights into how people form and update relationship evaluations as well as the implications of these evaluations for their relationship outcomes. We begin by summarizing this research within the framework of interdependence theory—the predominant theory of how people evaluate and make decisions about their close relationships. In doing so, we review evidence that implicitly assessed automatic partner attitudes reflect pleasant and unpleasant experiences involving the partner and predict subsequent relationship outcomes, sometimes better than more deliberative judgments. Next, we describe several dual-process perspectives that suggest how and when these attitudes shape such outcomes, and we conclude by highlighting the potential benefits of examining automatic partner attitudes for theories of relationship science and beyond.

The relationship between implicit intergroup attitudes and beliefs

Intergroup attitudes (evaluations) are generalized valence attributions to social groups (e.g., white-bad/Asian-good), whereas intergroup beliefs (stereotypes) are specific trait attributions to social groups (e.g., white-dumb/Asian-smart). When explicit (self-report) measures are used, attitudes toward and beliefs about the same social group are often related to each other but can also be dissociated. The present work used three approaches (correlational, experimental, and archival) to conduct a systematic investigation of the relationship between implicit (indirectly revealed) intergroup attitudes and beliefs. In study 1 (n = 1,942), we found significant correlations and, in some cases, evidence for redundancy, between Implicit Association Tests (IATs) measuring attitudes toward and beliefs about the same social groups (mean r = 0.31, 95% confidence interval: [0.24; 0.39]). In study 2 (n = 383), manipulating attitudes via evaluative conditioning produced parallel changes in belief IATs, demonstrating that implicit attitudes can causally drive implicit beliefs when information about the specific semantic trait is absent. In study 3, we used word embeddings derived from a large corpus of online text to show that the relative distance of 22 social groups from positive vs. negative words (reflecting generalized attitudes) was highly correlated with their distance from warm vs. cold, and even competent vs. incompetent, words (reflecting specific beliefs). Overall, these studies provide convergent evidence for tight connections between implicit attitudes and beliefs, suggesting that the dissociations observed using explicit measures may arise uniquely from deliberate judgment processes.

Framework for SLEPS : Self learning electoral results prediction system

Computational social science is the study that focuses on developing and analyzing computation models for social issues. Elections are major social events that impact society. Behavioral analysis is a factor which affects electoral result prediction. It imbibes geographic comments, sentiment, and psychology of the participants. Deliberation in judgment based on gender, place of birth, native tongue and genealogy affects the results of electoral polls. Study of the impact of any event whether positive or negative that directly or indirectly influence the comments of the people stands as a factor affecting the elections. SLEPS is a proposed framework that uses large heterogeneous data set to train dual layer neural nets to increase the credibility and authenticity of polls. In SLEPS, we map data of any presidential or gubernatorial election comprising of social traits to statistical learning using neural nets. It is “self-learning’’ as it involves importance weighting of experts that incorporates features that affect election prediction viz. facial appearance, deliberate judgment, character traits and background data of the contestant. SLEPS was evaluated over Indian Elections of 1985 and predicted the winner with root mean square error of 0.04 and 76% precision.

Ensuring Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems Comply with International Humanitarian Law

Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems (LAWS) are essentially weapon systems that, once activated, can select and engage targets without further human intervention. While these are neither currently fielded nor officially part of any nation’s defence strategy, there is ample evidence that many States and defence contractors are currently developing LAWS for future deployment. The main IHL problem posed by these weapon systems is that lethal action against specific targets will be taken by sensory hardware and control software, rather than human operators exercising deliberative reasoning and judgment. Commanders will exercise such reasoning, but will do so during earlier phases in the targeting cycle, and at locations further removed from the intended strike site. Accordingly, they will have less accurate knowledge of concrete threats or specific civilian risks. This may lead to unforeseen targeting errors in the field, which often bear heavily on civilians and their property. To guard against this, commanders will have to ensure that appropriate systems are deployed in a given operational environment, along with adequate precautionary measures to sufficiently mitigate civilian risk. After some introductory remarks, the following article will: reiterate both a working definition of LAWS and the kinds of weapon systems likely to emerge as LAWS; frame the LAWS IHL problem and explain how it will be addressed; provide a detailed account of the normative IHL framework and its application to LAWS, focusing on the principles of distinction, proportionality and precautions in/against the effects of attack; consider some general lessons learned from other weapons treaties, and how these may help to inform the lawful development, deployment and use of LAWS; and examine the lawful deployment and use of LAWS via the ‘meaningful human control’ concept. This latter part will be the most detailed, and will consider potential legal transplants from other weapons treaties that may help to make LAWS operations more IHL-compliant. A final section offers some concluding thoughts. This is the second of a seven-part series, which comprises: 1) assessing the sense and scope of autonomy; 2) whether and how LAWS can be designed/deployed in compliance with IHL (current article); 3) issues relating to the explosive remnants of war; 4) the lawful use of LAWS for targeted strikes; 5) legal and policy issues in the autonomous delivery of nuclear weapons; 6) arms control issues; and 7) non-proliferation.

Which Facial Expressions Are Highly Evaluated in Two-Person Interaction Scenes?: Intuitive vs. deliberative judgements

Which Facial Expressions Are Highly Evaluated in Two-Person Interaction Scenes?: Intuitive vs. deliberative judgements

Extended Book Review: Freedom and republicanism in Roberts’ Marx

Freedom and republicanism in Roberts' Marx William Clare Roberts Marx's Inferno, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017; 282 pp.: ISBN 9780691172903, $35.00 William Clare Roberts' new book undertakes to extract the critical kernel out of Marx's critique of political economy. Marx's Inferno is absorbing, wide-ranging, and original. Roberts enlists Inferno, the first part of Dante's Divine Comedy, to construct a structural analogy with the argument of Volume 1 of Capital. Roberts argues convincingly that Volume 1 (hereafter: Capital) is a self-contained work in political theory that mounts a freedom-based critique of capitalism. This critique, much like Dante's journey towards absolution, requires descent into a 'social Hell', the infernal depths of the capitalist mode of production. The book's overarching argument is that Capital must be understood as the 'self-consciousness of novel institutions of domination' and that 'therefore, if the laboring classes want to free themselves from this domination, they must get to the bottom of political economy itself, and destroy the social basis of its existence as a scientific discourse' (p. 17). In what follows, I take issue with three main themes of the book. The first theme deals with the 'impersonal' nature of domination embodied in the capital relation, the second with the putative connection between domination and republicanism, and the third with the political ramifications of this connection. Impersonal domination Chapter 3 of Marx's Inferno contains the basic ingredients of Roberts' account of capitalist domination. The chapter associates Marx's critique of political economy with its radical republican background, especially the work of William Thompson, John Francis Bray, Robert Owen in England, and Charles Fourier and Pierre Joseph Proudhon in France. It then argues for three main claims: (1) Marx kept the emphasis of republicanism on domination as subjection to arbitrary power, but (2) complemented it with an 'impersonal' account of domination of labour by capital that is at once anti-moralistic and structural, and (3) Marx's account of fetishism is, fundamentally, about 'a form of domination, rather than a form of false consciousness' (p. 85). The rest of this section discusses claims (2) and (3). I shall take up (1) in the next section. According to Roberts' Marx, the opening chapters of Capital 'contain, not a theory of price, but an account of the structure of human relations in commercial society. The concept of value they elaborate is, first and foremost, a tool for understanding the dominating form that these relations take' (p. 102). Because decisions about what to consume and produce are fundamentally dependent on prices, 'deliberate judgments about the place of commodities in a decent life' become 'extremely fragile' (pp. 84-85). Moreover, because capitalist social relations are price-mediated, that is, mediated by properties of things, 'there is no way to ensure that one's labor power, or one's commodity in general, is marketable' (p. 88). It follows that both capitalists and workers are dominated under capitalism: The capitalist, dominated by market imperatives, is compelled thereby to exploit labor, and to do so within the confines of competitive market transactions that secure for the laborer the fair value of his ... labor power, (p. 102) Therefore, Roberts thinks, 'the dominant class in modernity, the class of capitalists, is as subject to ... impersonal domination as are the laboring classes' (p. 102). The worker is, in this sense, 'a slave of a slave' (p. 103). Roberts infers--correctly, I think--that capitalist domination is not equivalent to class domination. There is, however, an ambiguity in his claim that the capitalist is 'dominated by market imperatives'. Are market imperatives the ground of domination or its subject? The former idea is coherent: markets are the structure in virtue of which capitalists dominate workers. …

Scrutinizing the Emotional Nature of Intuitive Coherence Judgments.

Dual‐system models propose that cognitive processing can occur either intuitively or deliberately. Unlike deliberate decision strategies, intuitive ones are assumed to have an emotional component attached to the decision process. We tested if intuitive decisions are indeed accompanied by an emotional response while deliberate decisions are not. Specifically, we conducted a psychophysiological study in which participants were instructed to decide either intuitively or deliberately if three simultaneously presented words were semantically coherent or incoherent (triad task). The degree of emotionality of these two decision strategies (intuitive vs. deliberate) was compared using changes in electrodermal activity (EDA) and the reaction time (RT) effect of an affective priming paradigm as primary measurements. Based on a valence‐arousal model, our results revealed that intuitive and deliberate judgments do not differ as to their emotional valence but that they do differ in emotional arousal. Most notably, sympathetic activation during intuitive judgments was significantly lower compared to sympathetic activation during deliberate judgments. Our results reflect that a relaxed state of mind—manifested in low sympathetic activity—could underlie the holistic processing that is assumed to facilitate the proliferation of semantic associations during coherence judgments. This suggests that coherence judgments made under an (instructed) intuitive decision mode have a specific psychophysiological signature and that arousal is the differentiating component between intuitive and deliberate decision strategies. © 2016 The Authors Journal of Behavioral Decision Making Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Fit between decision mode and processing style predicts subjective value of chosen alternatives

AbstractIntuition is associated with a global processing style, whereas deliberation is associated with a local processing style. Drawing on previous research on the effects of decisional fit on the subjective value attached to chosen alternatives, we examined the possibility that a fit between processing style and decision mode results in greater subjective value than a lack of fit. In three experiments employing various combinations of naturally occurring and experimentally manipulated processing styles and decision modes, we found that when congruence was high (i.e., global processing style and intuitive judgment, or local processing style and deliberative judgment), participants judged their chosen item to be more expensive than when congruence was low. These findings indicate that increased fit resulted in higher estimated value. We discuss implications for judgment and decision‐making.