Empirical Confusion Research Articles

Strategic Alliance Outcomes: Consolidation and New Directions (WITHDRAWN)

The pursuit of outcomes is the raison d'être for strategic alliances, yet the literature is on outcomes rather fragmented. Moreover, conceptual and empirical confusion exists between strategic alliance outcomes and how the alliance is working. Important behavioral terms, such as conflict and tension, are also used without conceptual clarity. We tackle these issues by laying out a consolidated spectrum of strategic alliance outcomes and explaining how outcomes are often intertwined. We distill how well the alliance is working into three indicators of functioning and highlight their conceptual distinctiveness vis-à-vis outcomes. We disentangle definitions and implications for three important behavioral issues in alliances—tradeoffs, frictions, and tensions—and discuss how they are rooted in partner interdependence. Lastly, we offer an ‘outcome-centric’ perspective of strategic alliances, which shifts the emphasis from outcomes as an end result to pursuit of outcomes as an explanatory starting point. This perspective opens up interesting opportunities to theorize about functioning; behavioral manifestations of interdependence; and the pursuit of multiple outcomes in strategic alliances. Overall, our paper offers contributions in terms of conceptual clarity, a behavioral view of partner interdependence in strategic alliances, and an outcome-centric perspective resulting in novel opportunities for theorizing about strategic alliances.

There is no Stem: the Distribution of Verbal Allomorphs, a Distributed Morphology Analysis

It is widely accepted by traditional grammarians and linguists that Persian verbal roots fall into two forms depending on their tense feature: present stem and past stem. In contrast to this traditional view, the present study considers an alternative notion of allomorphy, indicating that a few verbs use a basic form, called “morph”, in all morphosyntactic contexts while some other roots allow for having two or more allomorphs. Within the framework of Distributed Morphology, especially on the basis of underspecification condition, I will review the empirical evidence adduced in favor of the hypothesis that the tense feature has no role in producing and selecting the so-called present and past stems. In this approach, the systematic distribution of verbal allomorphs like /suz/ and /sux/ (derived from “OSUZ” = burn) is constrained by some other formal features, such as adjacency to the morphophoneme {D}, absorbing the causative suffix (“-ān” or its free variation “-un”) or appearing in the boundary of a word. Finally, to avoid terminological and empirical confusion, I will suggest that we should avoid the use of the term “stem” altogether and speak of root, morph and allomorphs only. It should be added that the different variations in phonetic shape of lexical roots are divided into two classes: the first one follows from the phonological rules and the second one is affected by the morphophonological (or readjustment) rules. Phonological changes are predictable and produce automatic alternations, but unpredictable morphophonological changes lead to non-automatic alternations. Following the general trend of DM, I restrict the term “allomorphy” to those cases in which the variation in phonetic shape of a morpheme does not follow from the automatic phonological rules of the language. This analysis raises the theoretical question of whether language-specific readjustment rules (i.e. the alteration of root or affix phonology) are needed for morphological theory. Rejecting readjustment rules, I show that allomorphs of verbal roots are independently stored in Vocabulary.

A critical analysis of absorptive capacity research

The ability to absorb new external knowledge (ACAP) becomes a major source of innovation and competitive advantage. Despite the abundance of literature devoted to this concept, it remains shrouded in conceptual and empirical confusion. In this paper, we will attempt to shed light on this construct. Based on a thematic analysis of this literature, we identify five main themes covered by absorptive capacity research, such as: conceptualizations of ACAP, dimensions, measurement scales, main antecedents and organizational outputs of ACAP. The results show that, despite the efforts made in this field, the variety of conceptualizations, the diversity of measures used, the focus on “Content” of knowledge at the expense of “Processes”, “IT Systems” and “Context” of their integration, restrict our understanding of this concept. The paper then addresses some limitations of that works, and discusses avenues for future researches.

Specific and general skills: Concepts, dimensions, and measurements

A number of academic debates rely on the distinction between general and specific skills as being valuable to a large number or a few firms. However, the meaning attributed to these concepts as well as empirical measurement strategies have significantly varied in the literature. To address the resulting theoretical and empirical confusion, we propose a multidimensional approach for defining skill specificity, which encompasses four distinct concepts: accessibility and similarity of skill sets as well as the portability and replaceability of skills. The former two refer to skills acquired by an individual (i.e. skills are substantively specific), while the latter two depend on the structure of labour demand and supply, institutions and firms’ strategies (i.e. on economic factors) that are time and place dependent. This paper proposes and tests empirical strategies for measuring each concept. The results challenge assumptions in the literature that graduates of vocational training and high-skilled blue-collar occupations have substantively specific skills. The multidimensional conceptualization and empirical results provide a number of theoretical implications. We focus on three conceptual debates regarding firms’ incentives to fund training, workers’ demand for social insurance and types of skills that facilitate or obstruct adjustment to technological and economic shocks.

Syndemics: A theory in search of data or data in search of a theory?

The concept of a syndemic was proposed more than two decades ago to explain how large-scale social forces might give rise to co-occurring epidemics that synergistically interact to undermine health in vulnerable populations. This conceptual instrument has the potential to help policymakers and program implementers in their endeavors to improve population health. Accordingly, it has become an increasingly popular heuristic for advocacy, most notably in the field of HIV treatment and prevention. However, most empirical studies purporting to validate the theory of syndemics actually do no such thing. Tomori et al. (2018) provide a novel case study from India illustrating how the dominant empirical approach fails to promote deeper understanding about how hazardous alcohol use, illicit drug use, depression, childhood sexual abuse, and intimate partner violence interact to worsen HIV risk among men who have sex with men. In this commentary, I relate the theory of syndemics to other established social science and public health theories of disease distribution, identify possible sources of conceptual and empirical confusion, and provide concrete suggestions for how to validate the theory using a mixed-methods approach. The hope is that more evidence can be mobilized -- whether informed by the theory of syndemics or not -- to improve health and psychosocial wellbeing among vulnerable populations worldwide.

Las violencias escolares en el escenario educativo chileno. Análisis crítico del estado del arte

La institución educativa no ha permanecido indiferente a los preceptos democratizadores imperantes en el Chile de las últimas décadas. En este contexto, la violencia escolar, al transgredir tales preceptos, representa una problemática que genera un importante interés público, mediático y académico. Sin embargo, en el tratamiento de este fenómeno ha predominado una alta dosis de confusión teórica, conceptual e, incluso, empírica. El presente trabajo tiene por objetivo analizar críticamente los estudios orientados a comprender la violencia escolar en el contexto educativo nacional. Esto se llevará a cabo a través de una revisión de las matrices teóricas preponderantes que se han ocupado de su análisis y la delimitación de múltiples lógicas o figuras de la violencia que emergen y se reproducen en las escuelas. La constatación de esta pluralidad de figuras permitirá clarificar y, al mismo tiempo, ampliar el espectro de investigaciones y líneas interpretativas abocadas al estudio de la violencia escolar en Chile.

Re‐examining diversity as a double‐edged sword for innovation process

SummaryExisting results on the relationship between ethno‐cultural diversity and innovation remain mixed. The authors argue that these inconsistencies were partly due to conceptual and empirical confusion regarding two aspects of ethno‐cultural diversity. By conceptually and empirically teasing apart these two aspects of diversity, the authors demonstrated that diversity arising from ethnic categorization (referred to as ethnic diversity) impairs innovation, while diversity arising from cultural distance (referred to as cultural diversity) enhances innovation, but only when ethnic polarization is low. Consistent with the National Innovation System perspective, the present study using country‐level data shows that structural innovation input positively contributes to innovation output. Furthermore, the authors found that ethnic diversity has a direct negative effect on innovation input, which in turn dampens innovation output. By contrast, cultural diversity has a direct positive effect on innovation output over and above the contribution of innovation input only when ethnic polarization is low. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Parasocial Interaction and Parasocial Relationship: Conceptual Clarification and a Critical Assessment of Measures

Parasocial interaction and parasocial relationship are often conflated conceptually and methodologically, leaving researchers unclear as to which concept is being tapped. This research clarifies these concepts and experimentally compares the most common measure of parasocial interaction, the Parasocial Interaction Scale (PSI-Scale), with a newer measure, the Experience of Parasocial Interaction Scale (EPSI-Scale). Participants (N = 383) viewed a brief videorecording of a woman who either bodily addressed the viewer or not, then completed a questionnaire. The EPSI-Scale was a better measure of parasocial interaction, understood as a within-viewing experience of mutual awareness, whereas the PSI-Scale may measure short- or long-term liking, or something else. To avoid conceptual and empirical confusion, researchers must choose measures with greater care.

Corporate Philanthropy and Corporate Financial Performance

To resolve empirical inconclusiveness and conceptual confusion found in the literature relating corporate philanthropy and financial performance, in this paper we suggest a stakeholder sensemaking ...

The contributions of confusion and position swapping to crowding between letter-like symbols: Evidence and a Confusion-and-Position-Swapping model

Most current explanations of visual crowding are descriptive. Greenwood et al. (2009, 2010) built a feature position average (FPA) model to explain crowding with letter-like symbols. Here we used crowding errors observed with a similar experimental paradigm to compare this and an alternative model. A T target in one of four cardinal orientations 12.5° above the fixation was paired with a flanker which was one of 25 "cross-like" symbols (including four Ts). The target and flanker had four configurations (flanker on the top, bottom, left, or right side of the target). Observers reported the T target orientation. T target identification rate was 92.3% when presented alone and 68.2% when accompanied by a flanker. When the target and flanker were both Ts, 62.7% of the errors were the flanker being reported as the target. When the flanker was a No-T symbol, a T symbol that was more confusable to the flanker than to the target was often reported, accounting for 50-70% of errors across stimulus configurations. A confusion and position swapping (CPS) model was thus built in which a No-T flanker was allowed first to be misperceived as a T symbol according to an empirical confusion rate and then to swap position with the target at a to-be-determined rate, PSR, the only model parameter. Greenwood’s three-parameter FPA model was also tested. The correlations between observed and model generated errors were 0.442 and 0.604 for FPA and CPS, respectively, suggesting the CPS model being able to better explain the experimental data. The best-fitting PSRs of the CPS model were 0.33, 0.21, 0.28 and 0.27 for the top, bottom, left, and right flanker configurations, respectively indicating the strongest and weakest symbol-level position swapping with outer and inner flankers, respectively, and average swapping when the target and flanker were equal distance from the fovea. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2012

Land transition estimates from erroneous maps

If a scientist overlays two perfectly accurate maps of land categories of the same place from two points in time, then the differences indicate land change. A land transition matrix summarizes the amount of land that changes from each category at the initial time to each category at the subsequent time. This article proposes methods to compute the land transition matrix in a manner that accounts for errors in the maps, where confusion matrices estimate those errors. If empirical confusion matrices are not available, sensitivity analysis can show the effect of possible errors. The proposed methods produce maps that show the probability of any land transition, given the maps and their confusion matrices. Additional techniques show how possible errors in the maps influence the total land change in terms of two components of quantity and allocation. This article illustrates the methods using data from 1971 to 1999 in Massachusetts, USA.

Issues and Challenges in Studying Parental Control: Toward a New Conceptualization

Abstract— Although investigators have long considered parents’ exertion of control over children as a central part of the socialization process, the study of control has been marked by conceptual and empirical confusion. This article outlines some of the history of the construct of control in the context of parenting, delineating the development of the contemporary approach that distinguishes among multiple forms of control. It proposes a refinement of this approach such that only parenting characterized by pressure, intrusion, and domination should be considered control, whereas parenting frequently labeled control but characterized mainly by guidance should be considered structure. This article highlights the benefits of distinguishing between these two dimensions of parenting rather than multiple forms of control.

Metadiscourse in Academic Writing: A Reappraisal

Metadiscourse is self-reflective linguistic material referring to the evolving text and to the writer and imagined reader of that text. It is based on a view of writing as social engagement and in academic contexts reveals the ways that writers project themselves into their discourse to signal their attitude towards both the propositional content and the audience of the text. Despite considerable interest in metadiscourse by teachers and applied linguists, however, it has failed to achieve its explanatory potential due to a lack of theoretical rigour and empirical confusion. Based on an analysis of 240 L2 postgraduate dissertations totalling 4 million words, we offer a reassessment of metadiscourse, propose what we hope is a more robust model, and use this to explore how these students used metadiscourse. Essentially our argument is that metadiscourse offers a way of understanding the interpersonal resources writers use to present propositional material and therefore a means of uncovering something of the rhetorical and social distinctiveness of disciplinary communities.

On the concordance among empirical confusion matrices for visual and tactual letter recognition.

In this article, we examine the concordance among 19 empirical confusion matrices for visual and tactual recognition of capital letters of the alphabet. As a measure of concordance, we employed an index based on within-stimulus triads of letters. Unlike correlation measures of agreement that are based on a one-to-one matching of matrix elements, the selected index directly captures the internal structures of the confusion matrices prior to the comparison. Permutation tests revealed statistically significant concordance among 166 of 171 pairs of matrices in the study. Concordance of confusion structure among tactual matrices tended to be somewhat stronger than concordance among the visual matrices.

COMMENTARY: Mysticism, Creativity, and Psychoanalysis: Still Crazy After All These Years?

Kelley Raab (this issue) takes on a tough challenge in her article on mysticism and creativity. To begin with, despite the fact that the topic of mysticism and religious experience has been the object of much research (e.g., Hood, 1995) and has occupied an important place in the work of several founding fathers of the psychology of religion, such as James (1902), Otto (1917/1950), and Freud (1930), this research domain remains characterized by much conceptual and empirical confusion. This state of affairs should not surprise us. Mysticism and religious experience in general are private experiences that therefore pose tremendous theoretical and methodological problems for researchers. This was only recently illustrated by two discussions in this journal, one on the well-known model of religious experience of Batson, Schoenrade, and Ventis (1993) (Boyatzis, 2001; Edwards & Lowis, 2001; Hay, 2001; Schoenrade, 2001), the other on the role of the self in mystical experience (Baumeister & Exline, 2002; Hood, 2002; Keortge, 2002). Also, Raab doesn't make things easier when she, apart from mysticism, also tackles the problem of creativity and its relationship with mysticism and religious experience in general. Just as is the case for religious experience, creativity is difficult to investigate, which is probably one of the main reasons why it has been so long neglected by mainstream psychology. And finally, approaching the relationship between mysticism and creativity from a psychodynamic point of view doesn't make things easier. Psychoanalytic approaches toward religious behavior and experience, however interesting and encompassing they may be, are often considered overly reductionistic, simplistic, and not empirically supported (e.g., Wulff, 1997).

Structural Change And Fiscal Flows

The political and policy impacts of alternative governing arrangements are an enduring and important puzzle of urban politics. Locating the source of the empirical confusion over structural effects in the use of static data analysis, the author emphasizes the benefits of investigating the substantive consequences of identifiable events (e.g., changes in form of government, budgeting techniques, the election of a minority mayor) via dynamic multiwave panel data and appropriate estimation techniques. This point is illustrated by analyzing the fiscal effects of reformism in a panel of 222 cities (1946-1966). Findings suggest no more than transient decreases in per-capita city expenditures postadoption of council-manager government.

Compact integer-programming models for extracting subsets of stimuli from confusion matrices

This paper presents an integer linear programming formulation for the problem of extracting a subset of stimuli from a confusion matrix. The objective is to select stimuli such that total confusion among the stimuli is minimized for a particular subset size. This formulation provides a drastic reduction in the number of variables and constraints relative to a previously proposed formulation for the same problem. An extension of the formulation is provided for a biobjective problem that considers both confusion and recognition in the objective function. Demonstrations using an empirical interletter confusion matrix from the psychological literature revealed that a commercial branch-and-bound integer programming code was always able to identify optimal solutions for both the single-objective and biobjective formulations within a matter of seconds. A further extension and demonstration of the model is provided for the extraction of multiple subsets of stimuli, wherein the objectives are to maximize similarity within subsets and minimize similarity between subsets.

Challenging conventional explanations of international cooperation: negotiation analysis and the case of epistemic communities

Analyses of international policy cooperation are often marked by analytic and empirical confusion. First, by largely treating cooperation as a binary phenomenon (typically, as cooperation versus defection), they direct attention away from crucial issues of distribution, the possibility of suboptimal cooperation, and the degree of unrealized joint gains. Second, even when simple matrix games with known payoffs capture distributional conflict and Pareto-inferiority, they typically do so by suppressing the inherent uncertainty and the need to learn, especially with respect to payoffs and values. And, third, even when they take both power and knowledge-dependent joint gains into account, they often treat the two as competing alternatives or as analytically separable, rather than as inherently bound together in the bargaining process. This article describes the emerging negotiation-analytic approach and argues that it provides a useful framework within which these conceptual problems can be avoided and explanatory power can be enhanced. From a negotiation-analytic perspective, it argues, epistemic communities can be viewed as distinctive de facto natural coalitions of “believers” whose main interest lies not in meeting material objectives but, rather, in expanding to become winning coalitions capable of ensuring the adoption of specific policy projects. An epistemic community's actions can thus be understood as changing the perceived zone of possible agreement through well-understood ways that are favorable to its objectives. Although ultimately a community's influence is exercised through bargaining, there is practically no theory of bargaining elaborated in the epistemic communities approach. Despite this and other drawbacks, the approach helps account for players' interests and usefully insists on the importance of perceptions and learning in negotiation. The article concludes that the effects of shared beliefs and of policy conflict can be readily incorporated into the negotiation-analytic model of bargaining, thereby giving rise to more precisely drawn observations about the conditions under which “believers” will have the strongest impact on negotiated outcomes. This will in turn make it possible to improve policy prescriptions in the actual or potential presence of epistemic communities.

Selecting a stimulus set with prescribed structure from empirical confusion frequencies

The problem of selecting a subset of stimuli when empirical confusion frequencies are given is discussed for a case in which a quartet of letter pairs must be found with maximum similarity within pairs and minimum similarity between pairs. As a preliminary step the Shepard–Luce model is fitted; a non‐metric three‐dimensional scaling analysis provides confirmation of the validity of the actually selected pairs.

Effect of attentional and neutral instructions and of forward and backward conditioning analogs on response to change from paired stimulus repetition: More evidence relevant to the role of orienting reaction recovery in short-interval classical autonomic conditioning

This paper reports two “conditioning analog” investigations of the role of orienting reaction recovery (ORR) in short-interval classical autonomic conditioning. In Experiment 1, 48 subjects received either attentional or neutral instructions and then were presented with a conditioning analog arrangement consisting of 15 pairs (0.5 sec ISI) of 0.5 sec tones and lights (for half the subjects) or lights and tones (for the remaining subjects). This stimulus arrangement was patterned analogously to CS and UCS presentations in classical conditioning and was followed by a single stimulus change trial (light alone or tone alone) with modality counterbalanced across subjects to form appropriate forward and backward conditioning analogs. Significant SCR habituation and recovery were observed over repetition and change trials, respectively, but no effects of the instructional or forward-backward manipulations were found. Only the attentional-forward and neutral-backward groups exhibited HR habituation while only the attentionally-instructed groups gave evidence of HR ORR. Pulse volume showed neither habituation nor recovery and blood volume showed only habituation. The SCR results were interpreted as being consistent with some previous findings on attentional instructions and habituation but not ORR, and as indicating that Badia and Defran's (1970) findings, supporting the involvement of ORR in short-interval classical autonomie conditioning, could not be attributed to their atypical attentional instructions. The HR data were interpreted as being consistent with the ORR literature and as pointing to a greater sensitivity of cardiac than electrodermal responding to attentional factors in a conditioning analog experiment. The SCR and HR data together confirm and extend Furedy and Ginsberg's (1975) findings of no difference in ORR between forward and backward conditioning analogs, yet the magnitude of recovery observed re-opens the issue of the extent of involvement of ORR in short-interval autonomic conditioning (SIAC). The vasomotor data add to the existing empirical confusion concerning the effects of repetition and change on these measures. In Experiment 2, 48 subjects received either the neutral or attentional instructions and then were presented with a conditioning analog arrangement consisting of 10 tone-light (or light-tone) pairings as above interspersed with five single stimulus trials (light alone or tone alone) with modality counterbalanced across subjects to form appropriate forward and backward conditioning analogs. SCR showed dishabituation on paired trials subsequent to a single stimulus trial but HR did not. SCR showed no effects of the instructional or forward-backward manipulations. The SCR, but not the HR, data extend those of Experiment 1, suggesting the need for further investigation of HR habituation and dishabituation. Contrary to OR theory and ORR interpretations of SIAC, however, SCR dishabituation was found to increase over trials. These data were interpreted as indicating a negligible role of ORR in short-interval classical autonomic conditioning.