Different Types Of Explanations Research Articles

Attitude Predictability and Helpfulness in Online Reviews: The Role of Explained Actions and Reactions

This article examines explanation type in online word of mouth (WOM), focusing on what individuals explain: their actions (“I chose this product because …”) or their reactions (“I love this product because …”). Results show that review writers explain their actions more than their reactions for utilitarian products, but they explain their reactions more than their actions for hedonic products. They do so to be helpful to review readers, who find explained actions more helpful for utilitarian products and explained reactions more helpful for hedonic products. Explained actions and reactions are differentially helpful across product type because they increase readers’ ability to predict their attitude toward the reviewed product: explained actions increase attitude predictability for utilitarian products, whereas explained reactions increase attitude predictability for hedonic products. These increases in attitude predictability and review helpfulness ultimately increase readers’ choice of the product in question. This article contributes to the explaining and the WOM literatures by focusing on what individuals explain, rather than on how they explain, by identifying product type as a novel moderator of what review writers explain (actions or reactions), and by examining when and why review readers prefer different types of explanations.

Effects of cognitive load on trusting behavior--an experiment using the trust game.

Last decades have witnessed a progressing decline of social trust, which has been predominantly linked to worsening economic conditions and increasing social inequality. In the present research we propose a different type of explanation for the observed decline – cognitive load related to technological development and the accelerating pace of modern life. In an experimental study participants played the trust game while performing one of two different secondary tasks – listening to a disturbing noise or memorizing a sequence of characters – or with no additional task in the control condition. Results show that in both cognitive load conditions participants expressed significantly less trust in the trust game than in case of no cognitive load. Additionally, when cognitive resources were limited, participants’ behavior was more impulsive than when their resources were fully available.

“Pozhalsta bez glupostey (please, no silly things), especially devant

In his American novels, Russian-born writer Vladimir Nabokov demonstrates his perfect mastery of the English language but he also exhibits his personal multilingualism. This can lead to the impression that his oeuvre was meant for an elite sharing the same idiolect as him. However, we intend to show that the inscription of foreign words (or xenisms) in the midst of English words is actually a means of preparing the monolingual English-speaking reader to Nabokov’s heteroglossia: indeed, the typography and many metalinguistic comments surround the foreign word with a cushion of precaution, so that the reader grows accustomed to this recurring transplant into her mother tongue. Moreover, the reader is granted intellectual access to xenisms thanks to different types of explanation and translation; but she’s also given a sensory and sensual perception of foreign languages, which become connoted with pleasure and even eroticism. The heteroglossic text turns out to be a palimpsest where the different layers of languages will be perceived according to the reader’s linguistic knowledge and acumen. This puts to the fore what the Nabokovian reader was supposed to be for the demanding writer: “a good reader is bound to make fierce efforts when wrestling with a difficult author, but those efforts can be most rewarding after the bright dust has settled.” (Nabokov 1990, 183)

On Computing Explanations in Argumentation

Argumentation can be viewed as a process of generating explanations. However, existing argumentation semantics are developed for identifying acceptable arguments within a set, rather than giving concrete justifications for them. In this work, we propose a new argumentation semantics, related admissibility, designed for giving explanations to arguments in both Abstract Argumentation and Assumption-based Argumentation. We identify different types of explanations defined in terms of the new semantics. We also give a correct computational counterpart for explanations using dispute forests.

Aging, Sex Ratio, and Genomic Imprinting: Functional and Evolutionary Explanations in Biology

Different types of explanations coexist in present-day biology. Functional explanations describe mechanisms, whereas evolutionary explanations provide answers to the question “why?” mostly by appealing to the past and present action of natural selection. But the relations between these two types of explanations, as well as the relative insights they offer, vary from one domain of research to another. We will illustrate this complex landscape of biological explanations with three examples involving aging, the sex ratio, and the phenomenon of genomic imprinting. We will show that the two types of explanations have recently often progressed towards each other. In consequence, they cease to be “pure” functional or evolutionary explanations and become explanations that may be alternatively considered as functional or evolutionary.

How should I explain? A comparison of different explanation types for recommender systems

Recommender systems help users locate possible items of interest more quickly by filtering and ranking them in a personalized way. Some of these systems provide the end user not only with such a personalized item list but also with an explanation which describes why a specific item is recommended and why the system supposes that the user will like it. Besides helping the user understand the output and rationale of the system, the provision of such explanations can also improve the general acceptance, perceived quality, or effectiveness of the system.In recent years, the question of how to automatically generate and present system-side explanations has attracted increased interest in research. Today some basic explanation facilities are already incorporated in e-commerce Web sites such as Amazon.com. In this work, we continue this line of recent research and address the question of how explanations can be communicated to the user in a more effective way.In particular, we present the results of a user study in which users of a recommender system were provided with different types of explanation. We experimented with 10 different explanation types and measured their effects in different dimensions. The explanation types used in the study include both known visualizations from the literature as well as two novel interfaces based on tag clouds. Our study reveals that the content-based tag cloud explanations are particularly helpful to increase the user-perceived level of transparency and to increase user satisfaction even though they demand higher cognitive effort from the user. Based on these insights and observations, we derive a set of possible guidelines for designing or selecting suitable explanations for recommender systems.

Evolutionary Perspectives on the Obesity Epidemic: Adaptive, Maladaptive, and Neutral Viewpoints

The prevalence of obesity in modern societies has two major contributory factors-an environmental change that has happened in historical times and a genetic predisposition that has its origins in our evolutionary history. Understanding both aspects is complex. From an evolutionary perspective, three different types of explanation have been proposed. The first is that obesity was once adaptive and enabled us to survive (or sustain fecundity) through periods of famine. People carrying so-called thrifty genes that enabled the efficient storage of energy as fat between famines would be at a selective advantage. In the modern world, however, people who have inherited these genes deposit fat in preparation for a famine that never comes, and the result is widespread obesity. The key problem with this, and any other adaptive scenario, is to understand why, if obesity was historically so advantageous, many people did not inherit these thrifty genes and in modern society are able to remain slim, despite the environmental change favoring fat storage. The second type of explanation is that obesity is not adaptive and may never even have existed in our evolutionary past, but it is favored today as a maladaptive by-product of positive selection on some other trait. An example of this type of explanation is the suggestion that obesity results from variation in brown adipose tissue thermogenesis. Finally, a third class of explanation is that most mutations in the genes that predispose us to obesity are neutral and have been drifting over evolutionary time--so-called drifty genes, leading some individuals to be obesity prone and others obesity resistant. In this article, I review the current evidence for and against these three different scenarios and conclude that the thrifty gene hypothesis is untenable but the other two ideas may provide a cogent explanation of the modern obesity phenomenon.

Implicit and Explicit Measurement Approaches to Research on Policy Implementation: The Case of Race-Based Disparities in Criminal Justice

In 2011, more than 3% of all black men in the United States were imprisoned, compared to only 0.5% of all white men. Among prisoners ages 18 to 24, black men were imprisoned at a rate more than seven times that of white men (Carson and Sabol 2012). It is becoming increasingly urgent for researchers to understand what accounts for these race-based disparities. While a broad constellation of social problems exist that likely contribute to these disparities in concert, different fields of social science tend to focus on different types of explanations. Political scientists and sociologists have tended to emphasize the role of institutional factors, including criminal justice policies and practices, in maintaining race-based disparities. Social psychologists, in contrast, have tended to emphasize individual factors, including punitive responses to crime by jurors, judges, and criminal justice professionals.

Different Sciences as Answers to Different Why Questions

Behaviorists have often insisted that mental or cognitive explanations are not explanations of behavior at all, and that “true” explanations lie in the historical contingencies of reinforcement and of survival of the species. Such insistence has occasioned continuing and vivid attacks from more traditionally oriented psychologists and professionals in other behavioral sciences who, from their own perspective, have insisted that behavioral explanations are not explanations at all, because they say nothing about the internal workings of organisms. Conflicting perspectives have been described as based upon different conceptual frameworks or paradigms. An alternative approach may be to recognize that there are different types of explanations – corresponding to different types of Why questions with which we are familiar in colloquial speech. Such a distinction between different types of Why questions and, accordingly, different types of explanations, lead to a recognition of different research areas as separate fields of inquiry. I will argue that the main problem from a behavior-analytic perspective lies, not so much in accepting mentalistic explanations as explanations on their own but, in the confusion of different types of explanations as if they were answers to the same kind of Why question.

Formal versus Functional Explanation for a Universal Theory of Syllable Structure: The Case of Vowel Epenthesis in Winnebago

This paper first contrasts formal versus functional explanations for language processes. It suggests that the different types of explanation can be...

A temporal model of neural activity and VSD response in V1

Mechanistic developmental models of the primary visual cortex (V1) in mammals have been able to replicate many of the large-scale spatial features of V1 neurons from experiments, such as their spatial receptive fields and the spatial organization into maps in V1 (reviewed in ref [1]). However, the models have previously been formulated at a very abstract level that does not account for the detailed, transient time course of neural responses. Conversely, there are a number of detailed, large-scale spiking models of the adult visual cortex, but these have not explained the development of feature preferences and feature maps, relying instead on prespecified patterns of connectivity. Here we present a new temporally and spatially calibrated model of cortical activity using ratebased units that could help unify these different types of explanation and levels of modelling. The model is called TCAL (Temporally CALibrated), and is a small variant on the GCAL model from the LISSOM family [1]. Compared to GCAL, the only change to the model mechanisms is to add hysteresis to the model LGN and V1 units. Hysteresis allows the damping of temporal responses to be controlled with one time-constant parameter per sheet. These two new parameters were set first for the LGN and then for V1to match results from electrophysiological recordings. Both onset and offset responses are matched against experimentally recorded peristimulus time histograms (PSTHs) for LGN [2] and cortical [3] neurons using the Invariant Response Description model. Despite the two orders of magnitude difference in time scales between GCAL and TCAL and

Types of student intertextuality and faculty attitudes

Intertextuality is a prominent feature of academic writing, and the ability to use sources effectively and appropriately is an essential skill which novice writers must acquire. It is also a complex skill, and student performance is not always successful. It is presumably beneficial for students to receive consistent messages about what source use is and is not appropriate, but some evidence suggests that university teachers and other gatekeepers may fall short of this consistency. This paper reports the findings of semi-structured text-based interviews aimed at understanding the basis of teacher attitudes and responses to intertextuality in academic writing. Teachers who were asked to evaluate the same examples from student texts differed in their judgments about whether the examples were appropriate, and provided different types of explanation for their judgments. These explanations enable us to develop a four-part typology of intertextuality which allows analytic discussion of differing judgments. The implications both of the teacher judgments and of the typology for second language writing instruction are discussed and an assessment of the relevance of our findings for the theme of this special issue is provided.

The Ethnic-Civic Dichotomy and the Explanation of National Self-Understanding

AbstractIn his paper Ethnicity as Cognition (2006), Rogers Brubaker held that cognitive psychology can enrich the understanding of the practices of categorisation that underpins ethnicity, nationhood and race. I shall argue that the philosophical debate concerning the different types of explanation in social sciences – the explanations based on reasons and the explanations based on causal mechanisms – can throw some light on this issue. To analyse beliefs requires use of both approaches. It can be shown with the classical opposition between an ethnic and a civic conception of national belonging which derives from a reason-based approach. The causal mechanism approach underlying cognitive psychology can offer alternative models accounting for national self-understanding, notably the prototype model of categorisation. I confront empirically these two theories – the ethnic civic dichotomy and the prototype model – using theisspdata from 2003 and evidence the advantages and shortcomings of each theory.

Explanations: if, when, and how they aid service recovery

PurposeThis study aims to investigate if, when, and how the use of four different types of explanations affect customer satisfaction after a service failure.Design/methodology/approachThe study used written scenarios of a hypothetical service failure to manipulate explanation type, failure magnitude and compensation offered. Participants were randomly assigned to read and respond to one version of the scenario, whilst imagining they were the customer experiencing the service failure.FindingsThe paper finds that explanation type, explanation quality, failure magnitude and compensation each had significant effects on customer evaluations. Explanation type and explanation quality interactively affected the extent to which customers were satisfied with service recovery: Apologies and excuses yielded higher satisfaction levels than did justifications and referential accounts but only when the explanations were perceived to be of high (vs low) quality. Specific types of attributions and forms of justice were shown to mediate the effects of three of the explanation types.Practical implicationsThe study shows that customer evaluations following service failure vary with the type of explanation provided. Service firms need to provide an explanation in such circumstances, preferably a high quality excuse or apology, and need to understand the “process variables” that determine whether the explanation will satisfy aggrieved customers.Originality/valueThis is one of very few studies that have compared the efficacy of different types of explanations in service situations. The research sheds light not only on what types of explanations work best, but also on how they have their effect.

Astrophysical models for the origin of the positron “excess”

Over the last three years, several satellite and balloon observatories have suggested intriguing features in the cosmic ray lepton spectra. Most notably, the PAMELA satellite has suggested an “anomalous” rise with energy of the cosmic ray positron fraction. In this article, we summarize the global picture emerging from the data and recapitulate the main features of different types of explanations proposed. The perspectives in testing different scenarios as well as inferring some astrophysical diagnostics from current/near future experiments are also discussed.

The Subject of Functional Foods: Accounts of Using Foods Containing Phytosterols

This paper explores the notion of the late modern or reflexive subject, for whom consumption, rationality, autonomy and a reflexive attitude to risk are said to be constitutive. Drawing on an example of ‘ordinary’ health consumption ( GRONOW and WARDE, 2001 ), the paper addresses what kinds of consumer identities emerge in people's talk about buying or eating foods containing phytosterols. These are ‘functional foods’ which are marketed on the basis that they actively lower cholesterol. Based on interviews with people who say that they buy or eat these foods, the analysis focuses on participants’ reported trajectories relating to how this came about. Participants’ accounts contain a number of explicit and implicit reasons for buying or eating the foods, which I characterise as agential, contextual, or non-agential, depending on the degree to which they draw on the agency of the actual purchaser or eater. These different types of explanations can be ordered in terms of their appeals to rationality, risk consciousness and autonomy. In agential explanations, people talk, for example, of doing something good for themselves, or experimenting with the foods. These explanations explicitly position consumers as health conscious, autonomous and rational to varying degrees. Contextual explanations drew on, for example, the role of doctors or family history in alerting people to a potential problem. These suggest both a different sense of risk consciousness, which may be prompted or contextual, and a less autonomous kind of consumer who is connected to others through a set of family and other relationships. Non-agential explanations, for example, where people attributed their consumption to others or to habit, appeal neither to the rationality, the health consciousness nor the autonomy of the actual consumer. The analysis helps to reinforce the potentially contextual or fluctuating nature of risk consciousness, and the relational and non-instrumental aspects of daily practices.

Children's and Adults’ Judgments of the Certainty of Deductive Inferences, Inductive Inferences, and Guesses

ABSTRACT Children and adults rated their own certainty following inductive inferences, deductive inferences, and guesses. Beginning in kindergarten, participants rated deductions as more certain than weak inductions or guesses. Deductions were rated as more certain than strong inductions beginning in Grade 3, and fourth-grade children and adults differentiated strong inductions, weak inductions, and informed guesses from pure guesses. By Grade 3, participants also gave different types of explanations for their deductions and inductions. These results are discussed in relation to children's concepts of cognitive processes, logical reasoning, and epistemological development.

The interpretation of Indirect Speech Acts in relevance theory

Despite being mentioned by most textbooks on semantics and pragmatics, only very little research on indirect speech acts has been published since the beginning of the 1980s 1 . One possibility, one might speculate, is that its advocates, predominantly Searle (1979: 30-59) and Bach & Harnish (1979: 173-202), have said everything on the subject that needs to be said. However, judging from the few things that have been published, the reason seems rather to be one of general puzzlement about the significance of indirect speech acts. A couple of more prominent figures among these are Sperber & Wilson (1995: 243-254) who, although they do not address indirect speech acts directly, argue that speech act theory has very little to contribute to pragmatics. This paper examines their general skepticism about speech act theory and tries to establish what implications it might have for the notion of an indirect speech act. More specifically, the author is interested in the question as to whether it would be desirable to preserve the notion for a specific set of data extracted from the 2004 US Presidential debates between George W. Bush and John F. Kerry. This data not only appears to be different from that examined by Searle (1979: 30-59) and Bach & Harnish (1979: 173-202), but also to require a different type of explanation. However, in an attempt to keep the parallel to their work as transparent as possible, the paper mainly considers interrogative utterances that can be argued, or already have been argued, to involve indirect speech acts – questions being one of, if not the, dominant category among the original examples. Finally, in the end of the paper a revised, relevance-theoretic, definition of an indirect speech act is offered; which suggests that it might comprise as many as four different types of phenomena.

Age-Related Changes in Children's and Adults’ Explanations of Interpersonal Actions

ABSTRACT We investigated the content of children's and adults’ explanations of interpersonal actions. Participants were 5-, 7-, and 9-year-old children, as well as adults, who were presented with 8 stories containing either prosocial or antisocial target actions, and asked to explain why each actor performed that action. In half of the stories, an interpersonal event preceded the action. Children and adults provided situational and mental-state explanations, but mental-state explanations were especially common for antisocial actions not preceded by an interpersonal event. With increasing age, participants explained prosocial actions by referring to the actor's goals, but referred to the actor's emotions and beliefs to explain antisocial actions. Finally, adults were most likely to mention psychological goals. These results suggest that (a) elementary school children provide a variety of explanations for interpersonal events; (b) children use different types of explanations flexibly, depending on the context and nature of the target action; (c) the frequency of different types of explanations for interpersonal actions changes during childhood; and (d) between middle childhood and adulthood, the recognition of psychological goals increases greatly.

Calculating and Understanding: Formal Models and Causal Explanations in Science, Common Reasoning and Physics Teaching

This paper presents an analysis of the different types of reasoning and physical explanation used in science, common thought, and physics teaching. It then reflects on the learning difficulties connected with these various approaches, and suggests some possible didactic strategies. Although causal reasoning occurs very frequently in common thought and daily life, it has long been the subject of debate and criticism among philosophers and scientists. In this paper, I begin by providing a description of some general tendencies of common reasoning that have been identified by didactic research. Thereafter, I briefly discuss the role of causality in science, as well as some different types of explanation employed in the field of physics. I then present some results of a study examining the causal reasoning used by students in solid and fluid mechanics. The differences found between the types of reasoning typical of common thought and those usually proposed during instruction can create learning difficulties and impede student motivation. Many students do not seem satisfied by the mere application of formal laws and functional relations. Instead, they express the need for a causal explanation, a mechanism that allows them to understand how a state of affairs has come about. I discuss few didactic strategies aimed at overcoming these problems, and describe, in general terms, two examples of mechanics teaching sequences which were developed and tested in different contexts. The paper ends with a reflection on the possible role to be played in physics learning by intuitive and imaginative thought, and the use of simple explanatory models based on physical analogies and causal mechanisms.