Individual Judgments Research Articles

Disinformation and Mutual Trust: An Economic Model

Information or disinformation is more likely to be believed when it originates from a trusted person or source, indicating that the impact of disinformation varies significantly based on the level of trust involved. Additionally, one individual's judgment can be influenced by the judgments of others, and conversely, an individual's judgment can influence those around them. To explore this dynamic, the author constructs a model for uncovering disinformation and integrates it with a model of disinformation dissemination. The findings show that as the level of mutual trust within an economy or society rises, the likelihood of uncovering disinformation increases. Furthermore, a high level of mutual trust significantly reduces the acceptance and belief in disinformation, which in turn enhances the efficiency of various economic activities. Thus, mutual trust emerges as a key factor in achieving high levels of economic, social, and potentially political performance.Copyright© 2024 The Author(s). This article is distributed under the terms of the license CC-BY 4.0., which permits any further distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Intimate Partner Violence: Access to Protection Beyond the Pandemic

Civil protection orders are the most common legal remedy victims pursue in response to intimate partner violence (“IPV”). They are more empowering for victims than the criminal legal system because victims themselves, instead of prosecutors, drive the process, and they offer more flexible and tailored relief. This Article argues that victims should be able to choose how they file petitions and participate in civil protection order hearings, and that judges should be required to honor those preferences absent good cause. This conclusion is driven by two new, original sets of empirical data collected from IPV survivors who have sought civil protection orders and legal services providers who assist victims with navigating the process. The data from legal services providers provide a picture of court protective order procedures in jurisdictions across the country from before, during, and in the late stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, once public health restrictions were generally lifted. This complements the rich data about the lived experiences of survivors who sought a protection order against their abuser during the pandemic in one of New York City’s five family courts. 85% of participants in this study are women of color, whose lived experiences are especially important to understand because they comprise a population that is disproportionately impacted by IPV. The data indicate that IPV victims have diverse preferences with respect to method of participation in hearings, based on their varying needs, concerns, priorities, and circumstances. The current landscape of procedures across the country largely fails to account for this diversity by mandating a particular participation method or by allowing individual judges to do so in accordance with their own preferences. Based on the research results, this Article argues for codifying “accessible process pluralism” in state protective order statutes. This statutory framework would give petitioners the opportunity to indicate their hearing participation preference on the petition itself and require judges to follow these choices absent good cause, among other accessibility-focused provisions. By harnessing the innovations and lessons from the pandemic, this proposal promotes survivor empowerment and access to justice for both petitioners and respondents.

Bringing patients out of the gloom: Examining the effects of patient power and affect labeling on emotional experience reflected in emotional judgement

ObjectiveNegative emotions are common among patients in medical settings. It is important to investigate impacts of patient power and affect labeling on emotional experience in patients. MethodsBehavioral judgments and event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants with high or low patient power made emotional judgments (positive, negative) about neutral faces, as well as investigating how affect labeling (affect labeling, viewing) influenced emotional judgments about neutral faces in participants with low patient power. ResultsIndividuals with low patient power made more and faster negative emotion judgements. A larger late positive component (LPC) amplitude was found in negative emotion judgments for individuals with low patient power, a component related to allocation of attentional resources to motivationally salient stimuli. Affect labeling elicited less and slower negative emotion judgments in individuals with low patient power. ConclusionsThese results suggest that low patient power triggers negative emotion, which can be reduced by affect labeling. Practice implicationsThe current findings provide valuable insights into reducing negative emotions in patients, fostering promising targets for training for medical professionals and education for patients aiming to ensure more humanistic and higher-quality care delivery.

EXPLORING AI WITH SENSE THROUGH APPLYING THE GRAVITY IN MIND MECHANISM

The study of the laws of motion has been advancing, with significant contributions from key figures like Galileo and Newton. Analogous to the gravitational forces observed in the natural world, individuals occasionally find themselves irresistibly drawn to specific entities. The gravity in mind, the basis of free-fall motion in one’s mind, acts as a sensor to make an individual sense subtle judgments about things like common sense, as if it were whispering to our minds. Since it has been said for more than half a century that judging common sense is the most difficult task for AI, this paper explores whether AI can possess true intelligence by applying this mechanism. Empirical data from many different types of games show that Game Refinement (GR) zone is located in 0.07-0.08, which respectively corresponds to the lower limit (fairness) and upper limit (engagement). In other words, there is a border between objectivity and subjectivity in a thing, and this is the minimal objectivity, or the resignation in game context. Based upon this, in unconventional circumstances, when a greater gravitational acceleration operates within the mind, a sense of “playfulness” is generated, disrupting the harmony of comfort and discomfort sustained by the gravity in mind. The study concludes that applying the “gravity in mind” mechanism to AI could significantly blur the line between human and artificial intelligence, enhancing AI decision-making capabilities.

The Relationship Between Foreign Language Anxiety and Self-Efficacy: A Study in Chinese College Students' English Learning

In the process of foreign language learning, learners will encounter various psychological phenomena, among which anxiety and self-efficacy are two psychological variables that have received much attention. Foreign language anxiety refers to the emotional states of tension, unease, and worry that learners experience during the process of learning a foreign language. This emotional state can have a negative impact on learners' learning outcomes. Self-efficacy refers to an individual's judgment of their ability to perform a specific task, directly affecting their behavioral motivation and level of effort. This study will analyze the impact of foreign language anxiety and self-efficacy on the effectiveness of foreign language learning among Chinese college students and emphasize the use of multidimensional analysis methods, including listening, speaking, reading, and writing, to analyze and summarize previous literature. Foreign language anxiety and self-efficacy show a negative correlation and together influence the effectiveness of college students' foreign language learning. In China, the anxiety subjects of college students are ranked from high to low as follows: speaking, listening, writing, and reading. This article will also summarize and analyze ways to improve foreign language anxiety and enhance self-efficacy from the perspectives of student self-regulation and teacher assistance.

Interoceptive Accuracy Enhances Deception Detection in Older Adults.

Difficulties with deception detection may leave older adults especially vulnerable to fraud. Interoception, that is, the awareness of one's bodily signals, has been shown to influence deception detection, but this relationship has not been examined in aging yet. The present study investigated effects of interoceptive accuracy on 2 forms of deception detection: detecting interpersonal lies in videos and identifying text-based deception in phishing emails. Younger (18-34 years) and older (53-82 years) adults completed a heartbeat detection task to determine interoceptive accuracy. Deception detection was assessed across 2 distinct, ecologically valid tasks: (i) a lie detection task in which participants made veracity judgments of genuine and deceptive individuals, and (ii) a phishing email detection task to capture online deception detection. Using multilevel logistic regression models, we determined the effect of interoceptive accuracy on lie and phishing detection in younger versus older adults. In older, but not younger, adults greater interoceptive accuracy was associated with better accuracy in both detecting deceptive people and phishing emails. Interoceptive accuracy was associated with both lie detection and phishing detection accuracy among older adults. Our findings identify interoceptive accuracy as a potential protective factor for fraud susceptibility, as measured through difficulty detecting deception. These results support interoceptive accuracy as a relevant factor for consideration in interventions targeted at fraud prevention among older adults.

Investigating level descriptors and their impact on validity

This article presents a validation study which investigates the relationship between mastery level descriptors and item difficulty in the National Tests of English (NTE) in Norway. The aim is to establish the extent to which the descriptors indicate item difficulty and thus support the argument that the mastery levels are a reflection of the framework of the NTE. This argument strength has direct implications for validity and for the defensibility of moving from criterion-based descriptors to norm-based national data. The study involved a panel of 10 raters assigning level descriptors from 7 content categories to 80 test items, giving a total of 5,600 individual judgements. These judgements are compared to the real test scores of around 46,000 pupils to establish if the level descriptors assigned by raters can predict pupil performance on the tests. The results show a strong correlation between rater judgements and real test scores, meaning that the descriptors offer an indication of item difficulty. However, some individual descriptor categories contain deviations from the expected order. We conclude that, while the level descriptors reflect the test’s framework, and thus support the validity argument, the argument could be strengthened with the revision of some individual descriptors.

Exploring sentencing disparities in the Nordic context: A multilevel analysis of court- and judge-level variation in sentences of ‘aggravated driving under the influence’ in Finnish district courts

Sentencing studies have stressed the importance of looking beyond between-court sentencing disparities by also observing within-court sources of variation. In the current study, we examine court- and judge-level variation in aggravated driving under the influence sentences (N = 10,481) in Finnish district courts using a three-level regression approach. Results indicate that 6.4% of the variance in the decision to incarcerate are explained by the differences between judges and 4.3% by the differences between courts. Consequently, our results suggest that sentencing disparities cannot be attributed solely to differences between courts but also to the individual judges within those courts. In addition, certain extra-legal factors on all three levels are associated with the outcome, namely the mode of conviction, position of the judge, court’s driving under the influence caseload, crime rate of the court jurisdiction and the urbanization of the court jurisdiction. Implications of the findings for both future research and policies are discussed.

The Effect of Motivation on the Behavioral Intention to Protect Industrial Techniques of High-Tech Firms’ Employees

This study defines the intrinsic and extrinsic motivational factors that influence the prevention of industrial technology leakage by high-tech company employees. It also investigates how these factors affect the employees’ intention to prevent leakage. Based on the TPB (theory of planned behavior), this study analyzes the relationship between “attitude toward behavior”, “subjective norm”, and “perceived behavioral control”, which in turn influences the behavioral intention to prevent such leakage. Specifically, an online survey was conducted among office workers in South Korea’s high-tech industry. A total of 200 questionnaires were collected and analyzed. As the analysis results show, intrinsic motivation has a positive effect on attitude toward behavior, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control. Extrinsic motivation has a positive effect on subjective norms and perceived behavioral control but a negative effect on attitudes toward behavior. This study also proved, based on the TPB, that the three variables impact the behavioral intention to prevent technology leakage. These results confirm that, in the high-tech sector, where employees are highly specialized and autonomous, technical security behaviors are primarily influenced by individual professional ethics and judgment rather than by organizational regulation or extrinsic motivation.

Assessment of Clinical Reasoning in Undergraduate Medical Education: A Pragmatic Approach to Programmatic Assessment.

Clinical reasoning, a complex construct integral to the practice of medicine, has been challenging to define, teach, and assess. Programmatic assessment purports to overcome validity limitations of judgments made from individual assessments through proportionality and triangulation processes. This study explored a pragmatic approach to the programmatic assessment of clinical reasoning. The study analyzed data from 2 student cohorts from the University of Utah School of Medicine (UUSOM) (n = 113 in cohort 1 and 119 in cohort 2) and 1 cohort from the University of Colorado School of Medicine (CUSOM) using assessment data that spanned from 2017 to 2021 (n = 199). The study methods included the following: (1) asking faculty judges to categorize student clinical reasoning skills, (2) selecting institution-specific assessment data conceptually aligned with clinical reasoning, (3) calculating correlations between assessment data and faculty judgments, and (4) developing regression models between assessment data and faculty judgments. Faculty judgments of student clinical reasoning skills were converted to a continuous variable of clinical reasoning struggles, with mean (SD) ratings of 2.93 (0.27) for the 232 UUSOM students and 2.96 (0.17) for the 199 CUSOM students. A total of 67 and 32 discrete assessment variables were included from the UUSOM and CUSOM, respectively. Pearson r correlations were moderate to strong between many individual and composite assessment variables and faculty judgments. Regression models demonstrated an overall adjusted R2 (standard error of the estimate) of 0.50 (0.19) for UUSOM cohort 1, 0.28 (0.15) for UUSOM cohort 2, and 0.30 (0.14) for CUSOM. This study represents an early pragmatic exploration of regression analysis as a potential tool for operationalizing the proportionality and triangulation principles of programmatic assessment. The study found that programmatic assessment may be a useful framework for longitudinal assessment of complicated constructs, such as clinical reasoning.

Investigating an effort avoidance account of attentional strategy choice.

People often choose suboptimal attentional control strategies during visual search. This has been at least partially attributed to the avoidance of the cognitive effort associated with the optimal strategy, but aspects of the task triggering such avoidance remain unclear. Here, we attempted to measure effort avoidance of an isolated task component to assess whether this component might drive suboptimal behavior. We adopted a modified version of the Adaptive Choice Visual Search (ACVS), a task designed to measure people's visual search strategies. To perform optimally, participants must make a numerosity judgment-estimating and comparing two color sets-before they can advantageously search through the less numerous of the two. If participants skip the numerosity judgment step, they can still perform accurately, albeit substantially more slowly. To study whether effort associated with performing the optional numerosity judgment could be an obstacle to optimal performance, we created a variant of the demand selection task to quantify the avoidance of numerosity judgment effort. Results revealed a robust avoidance of the numerosity judgment, offering a potential explanation for why individuals choose suboptimal strategies in the ACVS task. Nevertheless, we did not find a significant relationship between individual numerosity judgment avoidance and ACVS optimality, and we discussed potential reasons for this lack of an observed relationship. Altogether, our results showed that the effort avoidance for specific subcomponents of a visual search task can be probed and linked to overall strategy choices.

Evaluation of synthetic electronic health records: A systematic review and experimental assessment

Recent studies have shown how synthetic data generation methods can be applied to electronic health records (EHRs) to obtain synthetic versions that do not violate privacy rules. This growing body of research has resulted in the emergence of numerous methods for evaluating the quality of generated data, with new publications often introducing novel evaluation methods. This work presents a detailed review of synthetic EHRs, focusing on the various evaluation methods used to assess the quality of the generated EHRs. We discuss the existing evaluation methods, offering insights into their use as well as providing an interpretation of the evaluation metrics from the perspectives of achieving fidelity, utility and privacy. Furthermore, we highlight the key factors influencing the selection of evaluation methods, such as the type of data (e.g., categorical, continuous, or discrete) and the mode of application (e.g., patient level, cohort level, and feature level). To assess the effectiveness of current evaluation measures, we conduct a series of experiments to shed light on the potential limitations of these measures. The findings from these experiments reveal notable shortcomings, including the need for meticulous application of methods to the data to reduce inconsistent evaluations, the qualitative nature of some assessments subject to individual judgment, the need for clinical validations, and the absence of techniques to evaluate temporal dependencies within the data. This highlights the need to place greater emphasis on evaluation measures, their application, and the development of comprehensive evaluation frameworks as it is crucial for advancing progress in this field.

Research on Influencing Factors and Strategies of Art Collection Investment Decision

The realm of art collection holds an irreplaceable position in the long-standing cultural heritage, showcasing the taste and status of the holders from ancient nobility to modern high-net-worth individuals. However, with the development of economic globalization, art collection is not merely a symbol of identity, but also a hot investment target sought after by numerous investors. In recent years, the market value of the global art industry has rapidly climbed, making art gradually an essential component of diversified investment portfolios for investors. The development of the art market has sparked widespread attention from various sectors, prompting scholars and companies to explore, through scientific methods and data analysis, how to maximize the investment returns of art collection. However, art differs significantly from other investment tools in the financial market, involving not only the intrinsic value judgment of the art itself but also complex market environments and individual judgment and psychological expectations of investors. Its unpredictability and unique value assessment system make art collection investment more challenging and research-worthy compared to other types of investments.

The Anchoring Effect in Study Time Allocation: Labor-in-Vain versus Labor-and-Gain.

How to allocate study time is an important decision-making problem learners face. Research on this problem can help improve the learning performance of learners and provide guidance for teaching activities. This research aimed to explore the potential of anchors (prior information that may influence individual decision-making and judgment under uncertainty) as clues for study time allocation and examine the effectiveness of study time allocation under the influence of anchors. Sixty-two Chinese university students (Mage = 21.21, SD = 1.74; 44 females) studied 20 word pairs under self-paced learning instructions. These instructions either set a high anchor (i.e., the typical participant spent 15 s learning each pair) or a low anchor (i.e., the typical participant spent 5 s learning each pair) for study time. After a brief distraction phase, participants took a cued recall test. The results showed that the higher the anchor value, the longer the corresponding study time, and the longer the study time, the better the memory performance. These results reveal that there is both an anchoring effect and a labor-and-gain effect in self-paced study time allocation. This study extends the range of observable anchoring effects and provides important information on allocating study time effectively.

THE USE OF SCHOLARSHIP BY THE EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS

AbstractThe relationship between scholarship and adjudication has attracted considerable attention in recent years, especially in those areas where significant academic expertise has been developed and academic scrutiny of decisions is common. Yet the role of scholars and scholarship in the context of the adjudicatory practices of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has remained palpably under-investigated. This article begins to fill this gap in the literature by carrying out the first large-scale empirical study of the use of scholarship by the ECtHR. The authors rely on a purpose-built dataset comprising all the citations made by the Grand Chamber of the Court in judgments and separate opinions appended to it. The study finds that the Court's majority uses scholarship for the purposes of reviewing facts and interpreting international and domestic law but does so rarely. The majority of the ECtHR does not use scholarship to interpret the European Convention on Human Rights or for persuasive purposes, unlike the individual Judges in their separate opinions. Indeed, individual Judges refer to scholarship more often, for more varied and arguably different purposes. This use, however, is inconsistent in terms of both frequency and the types of sources referred to.

Unveiling Unexpected Selfless Collectivism: Exploring Variances in Moral Beliefs Across Cultural Values.

The impact of moral beliefs on individuals' moral judgments, particularly within the framework of contrasting cultural values such as collectivism and individualism, continues to be a subject of interest. This research delves into whether individuals with distinct values display differences in moral beliefs, with a specific focus on selflessness. Through experiment 1 and 2, we scrutinize the moral judgments of individuals with diverse values concerning pro-social behaviors driven by selflessness and in-group favoritism. Experiment 3 investigates the underlying mechanisms by examining reward expectations. The findings from experiments 1 and 2 indicate that collectivists exhibit significantly higher moral judgment levels for selfless pro-social behaviors compared to individualists, highlighting a disparity in moral beliefs between the two value systems. Experimental 2 also found that collectivists' moral judgments rose and fell as rescuers' selflessness increased or decreased. However, individualist moral judgment did not change significantly with behavioral selflessness. The results reveal that collectivists hold higher reward expectations for selfless behavior, which contributes to their heightened moral judgment of selfless behavior. While it may be assumed that collectivists' moral beliefs would be dominated by in-group preferences, aligning with the conceptual in-group preference of collectivism, this study unexpectedly found evidence of collectivists' pursuit of selflessness in their moral beliefs. These findings offer initial evidence of distinct patterns of moral beliefs associated with collectivism and individualism, shedding light on potential reasons that lead collectivists to possess stronger moral beliefs about selflessness.

MULTI-CRITERIA DECISION- MAKING APPROACH IN SINGLE FACILITY LOCATION SELECTION: A PROPOSAL FOR AN INTEGRATED MODEL

Selecting the right single-plant facility is crucial to maximizing the use of limited resources and minimizing effort waste. This study aims to provide decision-makers with a practical and effective approach that is as far as possible from individual subjective judgments when deciding on a single-plant facility. It differs from some other studies in the literature that leave the prioritization and weighting of criteria in the background in that it proposes a model in which decision-makers can determine their criteria for the location selection of a single facility and determine the extent to which these criteria are present in their alternatives. The step-wise weight assessment ratio analysis (SWARA) and the weighted aggregated sum product assessment (WASPAS) methods were used with an integrated approach. The results revealed that the approach used in this study was highly successful in the selection of a community pharmacy facility as a single-plant organization.

Motivation Differences Between Different Groups of International Business Students in Guangdong Communication Polytechnic

This study investigated the motivations of 332 students from Guangdong Communication Polytechnic, conceptualizing the students’ motivations for studying international business. The students answered a motivation questionnaire with 30 Likert-type questions. This questionnaire was built to collect information about students’ motivations to study international business for international business teachers and researchers. The questionnaire was adopted from Glynn (2009). The grading of the questionnaire was reliable and related to the students’ preparation before entering the polytechnic, their grade point averages in international business courses, and their faith in the relevance of international business courses for their future occupations. The conceptualization of motivation for studying international business was divided into five aspects, including internal motivation and individual relevance, self-efficiency and judgement anxiety, independence, occupation motivation, and degree motivation (Glynn, 2009). The result of this study showed that in their final year, international business students achieved the best performance in internal motivation and individual relevance, self-efficiency, and independence for international business learning. Second-year students had the best extrinsic motivation. The freshmen reported the most anxiety in assessments.

Association between sex of the individual with untreated cleft lip and social judgement made by lay persons: A cross-sectional study.

To assess whether there is an association between an individual's sex and social judgements made by lay persons regarding untreated cleft lip. Lay individuals over 18 years old were recruited through an application to respond online to two questionnaires: a sociodemographic survey and the Brazilian Version of Lay Persons' Social Judgements about Cleft-lip Scale (B-LSojCleft-S). B-LSojCleft-S comprises 14 items evaluating social judgements made by laypersons concerning different types of untreated cleft lips in teenagers. The 14 items are linked to 8 images featuring untreated cleft lips and 1 image without a cleft (control). Higher scores represented more favourable social judgements. Independent samples t-test, paired, and multiple linear regression were conducted (P < 0.05). The study assessed judgements of untreated cleft lips in male and female adolescents using the B-LSojCleft-S. The mean age of the 217 participants was 37.78 ± 12.39 years, predominantly women (72.7%), married (47.7%), with a monthly income below three minimum wages (35.6%) in the majority of cases. Significantly higher social judgement scores were observed in the control group (no cleft) compared to any type of cleft (P < 0.001), with similar scores obtained for the same types of clefts with female or male images (P > 0.05). The participant's sex is associated with social judgement scores (F [1, 214] = 6.318, P = 0.013; adjusted R2 = 0.024), with females making more favourable judgements than males (P < 0.05). Individuals with cleft lips receive more negative social judgement scores, regardless of their own sex. Women make better social judgements than men.

Effectiveness of simulation-based interprofessional education on teamwork and communication skills in neonatal resuscitation

BackgroundThe role of effective interprofessional teamwork is especially vital in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) where infants facing emergency situations are admitted. Proper neonatal resuscitation, facilitated by comprehensive resuscitation training, can significantly decrease the mortality rates associated with neonatal asphyxia and respiratory failure. This study aimed to develop a simulation-based interprofessional education (IPE) programme for medical staff working in a nursery and NICU and to assess its effectiveness on teamwork, communication skills, clinical performance, clinical judgement, interprofessional attitudes, and education satisfaction.MethodsThrough a demand survey, neonatal resuscitation was selected as the theme, and an IPE team comprised of one doctor and two nurses was formed. The education programme consisted of three sessions lasting a total of 140 min: two simulation exercises and one theoretical education session. Data were collected from 18 nurses working in the nursery and NICU and 9 doctors working in the paediatrics department.ResultsA comparison of the metrics before and after applying simulation-based IPE programmes revealed teamwork (Z=-2.67, p = .008), communication skills (Z=-2.68, p = .007), clinical performance (Z=-2.52, p = .012), clinical judgement (Z=-4.52, p < .001), and interprofessional attitude (Z=-3.64, p < .001) to have significantly improved. Education satisfaction scores were 4.73 points on average out of a maximum of 5. The simulation-based IPE programme was effective in improving the teamwork, communication, and clinical performance of resuscitation teams, individual clinical judgement, and interprofessional attitude.ConclusionsSimulation-based IPE is effective for enhancing teamwork, team communication, clinical judgement skills, and clinical performance in neonatal resuscitation. This programme has the potential to contribute to the improvement of patient safety and the quality of neonatal care. Additional studies are needed to longitudinally examine the effects of the programme on patient safety and quality of neonatal care.