Judgment Behavior Research Articles

The construction of moral agency in mother–child conversations about helping and hurting across childhood and adolescence.

This study examined mother-child conversations about children's and adolescents' past harmful and helpful actions. The sample included 100 mothers and their 7-, 11-, or 16-year-old children; each dyad discussed events when the child (a) helped a friend and (b) hurt a friend. Analyses suggested that conversations about help may serve to facilitate children's sense of themselves as prosocial moral agents; mothers focused on children's feelings of pride, positive judgments of the child's behavior, and positive insights about the child's characteristics that could be drawn from the event. In turn, conversations about harm were more elaborated and contentious than those about help, and reflected more complex maternal goals; although mothers highlighted children's wrongdoing (e.g., by noting negative consequences of the child's actions for others), they also engaged in a variety of strategies that may support children's ability to reconcile their harmful actions with a positive self-view (e.g., by noting what children did do well or their capacity for repair). With respect to age effects, results revealed that older children played an increasingly active and spontaneous role in discussions. Furthermore, as compared with 7-year-olds, conversations with 11- and 16-year-olds focused more on psychological insights that could be drawn from experiences and less on children's concrete harmful and helpful actions. Overall, results illuminate the processes whereby conversations with mothers may further children's developing understandings of their own and others' moral agency, and how discussions of prosocial and transgressive moral experiences may provide distinct but complementary opportunities for moral socialization.

Enculturation to musical pitch structure in young children: evidence from behavioral and electrophysiological methods

Children learn the structure of the music of their culture similarly to how they learn the language to which they are exposed in their daily environment. Furthermore, as with language, children acquire this musical knowledge without formal instruction. Two critical aspects of musical pitch structure in Western tonal music are key membership (understanding which notes belong in a key and which do not) and harmony (understanding which notes combine to form chords and which notes and chords tend to follow others). The early developmental trajectory of the acquisition of this knowledge remains unclear, in part because of the difficulty of testing young children. In two experiments, we investigated 4- and 5-year-olds' enculturation to Western musical pitch using a novel age-appropriate and engaging behavioral task (Experiment 1) and electroencephalography (EEG; Experiment 2). In Experiment 1 we found behavioral evidence that 5-year-olds were sensitive to key membership but not to harmony, and no evidence that 4-year-olds were sensitive to either. However, in Experiment 2 we found neurophysiological evidence that 4-year-olds were sensitive to both key membership and harmony. Our results suggest that musical enculturation has a long developmental trajectory, and that children may have some knowledge of key membership and harmony before that knowledge can be expressed through explicit behavioral judgments.

The perceived legitimacy of statutory rape laws: the effects of victim age, perpetrator age, and age span

AbstractStatutory rape laws are intended to protect minors below the age of consent from engaging in behavior that, although not forceful, may be harmful. Two studies explored how individual judgments of adolescent sexual behavior and statutory rape are affected by victim age, perpetrator age, and the age span between partners. Across studies, respondents were significantly more critical of scenarios depicting younger victims, older perpetrators, and larger age spans between the two. These findings, using indirect measures, suggest that college students believe 16 is an appropriate age of consent and that sexual acts between adolescents who are within 2 years of age should not be criminalized.

The Brazilian version of the Neuropsychiatric Inventory-Clinician rating scale (NPI-C): reliability and validity in dementia

Patients with dementia may be unable to describe their symptoms, and caregivers frequently suffer emotional burden that can interfere with judgment of the patient's behavior. The Neuropsychiatric Inventory-Clinician rating scale (NPI-C) was therefore developed as a comprehensive and versatile instrument to assess and accurately measure neuropsychiatric symptoms (NPS) in dementia, thereby using information from caregiver and patient interviews, and any other relevant available data. The present study is a follow-up to the original, cross-national NPI-C validation, evaluating the reliability and concurrent validity of the NPI-C in quantifying psychopathological symptoms in dementia in a large Brazilian cohort. Two blinded raters evaluated 312 participants (156 patient-knowledgeable informant dyads) using the NPI-C for a total of 624 observations in five Brazilian centers. Inter-rater reliability was determined through intraclass correlation coefficients for the NPI-C domains and the traditional NPI. Convergent validity included correlations of specific domains of the NPI-C with the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS), the Cohen-Mansfield Agitation Index (CMAI), the Cornell Scale for Depression in Dementia (CSDD), and the Apathy Inventory (AI). Inter-rater reliability was strong for all NPI-C domains. There were high correlations between NPI-C/delusions and BPRS, NPI-C/apathy-indifference with the AI, NPI-C/depression-dysphoria with the CSDD, NPI-C/agitation with the CMAI, and NPI-C/aggression with the CMAI. There was moderate correlation between the NPI-C/aberrant vocalizations and CMAI and the NPI-C/hallucinations with the BPRS. The NPI-C is a comprehensive tool that provides accurate measurement of NPS in dementia with high concurrent validity and inter-rater reliability in the Brazilian setting. In addition to universal assessment, the NPI-C can be completed by individual domains.

Designing Better Pension Benefits Statements: Current Status, Best Practices and Insights from the Field of Judgment and Decisionmaking

Decisionmaking on saving for retirement requires individuals to have knowledge on fundamental issues, such as the functioning of pension systems, portfolio allocation, future expected benefits, contribution histories and risks. Currently, the information provided in pension benefits statements vary widely by plan provider as well as by the nature of benefits offered. The inconsistency could occur partly because recommended best practices for, and empirical studies that test, the design and content of statements vary widely in the literature. Furthermore, little is known on how people think about saving for retirement. Insights from the fields of behavioral economics, and judgment and decisionmaking can fill some of these literature gaps by applying psychological theories to help better inform consumers about their financial decisions and retirement status using benefits statements. In this paper, the authors provide a normative and positive review of pension benefit statement design. They begin by reviewing best practices and recommendations provided from the trade literature. Next, they describe the content and design of a cross section of statements that are currently being used by plan providers. Finally, they review the academic literature on individuals’ understanding of, and information needs related to, pension benefits statements. The latter includes a description of the few studies explicitly researching pension statement design related questions, general behavioral and decisionmaking literature that can be applied to the content and presentation of information, and general literature on whether and to what extent uncertainty should be presented.

Workplace-based assessment: A step to promote competency based postgraduate training

There has been an increasing emphasis on defining outcomes of medical education in terms of performance of trainees. This is a step beyond the description of outcomes in terms of competence that encompasses mostly potential abilities rather than the actual performance. The contextual adaptations and behavior judgments of the trainees are best assessed by a program of in-training assessment. Workplace based assessment (WPBA) is one of the modalities, which assesses the trainee in authentic settings. Though Postgraduate (PG) medical training in India is said to be competency-based, most institutions do not have any formative or in-training assessment program for the same. The two cardinal elements of WPBA are direct observation and conducted in work place in addition to provision of feedback to the trainee. The WPBA conforms to the highest (Level 4: Does) of Millers pyramid and also has the potential to assess at all four levels. Some of the tools used for WPBA are: Logbooks, Clinical Encounter Cards (CEC), mini-Clinical Evaluation Exercise (mini-CEX), Case based discussions, Direct Observation of Procedural Skills (DOPS), Multisource feedback (peers, co-workers, seniors, patients) etc. These can be documented in the form of a portfolio that provides a longitudinal view of experiences and progress of the trainee. The WPBA scores high on validity and educational impact by virtue of being based on direct observation in real situation and contextual feedback. The feasibility and acceptability is enhanced by making appropriate choices of tools, advance planning, building of mutual trust, and training of assessors. Given the established benefits of WPBA in shaping clinical learning, there is an imminent need for including this mode of assessment in our clinical training programs especially PG training.

Weighting Positive Versus Negative: The Fundamental Nature of Valence Asymmetry

The relation between weighting of valence information in attitude generalization and evaluation of novel/hypothetical situations was explored. Undergraduate participants played a computer game requiring them to learn which stimuli (beans) would increase/decrease their points. Later, participants classified the valence of game beans and novel ones varying in resemblance to game beans. The weighting bias in attitude generalization was estimated as the average response to novel beans, controlling for game bean learning. We examined whether this bias related to judgments of hypothetical situations concerning interpersonal relationships (Study 1), threat assessment (Study 2), risk propensities (Study 3), and risk behavior (Study 6). We also assessed whether valence weighting is specifically predictive of novel situations (Studies 4 and 5). Finally, we explored participants' ability to self-report their weighting bias (Study 7). Valence weighting in attitude generalization was related to judgments of novel situations and risk behavior. The performance-based measure did not correlate with responses to various questionnaires related to valence weighting. There is a fundamental individual difference associated with valence weighting, resulting in the relation between two processes unrelated in content, but sharing the essential characteristic of valence weighting-attitude generalization and evaluation of novel situations.

相手との駆け引きや情報の不確かさを考慮した出合い頭における歩行者の行動判断モデルの構築

相手との駆け引きや情報の不確かさを考慮した出合い頭における歩行者の行動判断モデルの構築

Construction of Decision Model for Determining the Behavior of Pedestrians Encountering at a L-shaped Corner by Considering Dynamics of Judgment Characteristics Caused by Interplays with the Other

In the paper, we construct a decision model for determining the behavior of pedestrians encountering at a L-shaped corner taking into consideration the dynamics of judgment characteristics caused by interplays with each other. First, we formulate parameters that characterize the behavioral judgment of pedestrians according to the model, based on the game theory. Further, we extend the decision model to exhibit dynamic behaviors of changing their judgment characteristics using evolutionary game theory and reinforcement learning. Then, the extended model was experimented to verify the effectiveness by simulation. Based on such a model as to take human judgment characteristics into account, robot navigation control is expected to realize the safe operations even at indoor blind corners that contain a high risk of collision.

The Neural Correlates of Recollection: Transient Versus Sustained fMRI Effects

Prior research has identified several regions where neural activity is enhanced when recollection of episodic information is successful. Here, we investigated whether these regions dissociate according to whether recollection-related activity is transient or sustained across the time that recollected information must be maintained before a behavioral judgment. Human subjects studied a series of word-picture pairs under the requirement to judge which of the denoted objects was smaller. Following each of 4 study sessions, a scanned test phase occurred in which a series of studied and unstudied words was presented. The requirement at test was to judge whether each word was old or new and, if judged old, to retrieve the associated study picture and hold it in mind until a cue appeared. The delay interval varied between two and eight seconds. The cue instructed subjects which of three different judgments should be applied to the retrieved picture. Separate responses were required when words were either deemed new or the associated image was not retrieved. Relative to studied words for which the associated picture could not be retrieved, words giving rise to successful recollection elicited transient responses in the hippocampus/parahippocampal cortex and retrosplenial cortex, and to sustained activity in prefrontal cortex, the intraparietal sulcus, the left angular gyrus and the inferior temporal gyrus. The finding that recollection-related activity in the angular gyrus tracked the period over which recollected information was maintained is consistent with the proposal that this region contributes to the online representation of recollected information.

Brand Attachment and Consumer Emotional Response to Unethical Firm Behavior

ABSTRACTAttaching consumers to a brand is a cornerstone of relationship marketing as attachment increases loyalty. This research investigates another possible benefit of attachment, its potential and limits for shielding brands from firms’ ethical missteps. Merging motivated reasoning and attachment theories, two studies focus on how brand attachment influences consumer judgments of firm ethics and the emotional and behavioral consequences developing from those. A field study indicates that attachment attenuates judgments of unethical behavior, contributes to emotional ambivalence, and affects purchase intentions. A subsequent experiment corroborates these findings and shows that the buffering role of attachment is limited to conditions when the information about firm ethics is moderately rather than extremely negative. Implications focus on advancing research on ethics and emotional ambivalence in consumer brand relationships and on managerial implications.

Humanness beliefs about behavior: An index and comparative human-nonhuman behavior judgments

Social psychological research suggests that two distinct dimensions describe lay conceptions of humanness: a species-typical sense (i.e., human nature) and a species-unique sense (i.e., human uniqueness). Although these two senses of humanness have been discerned among psychological traits and states, there has been no systematic research into lay beliefs about the humanness of human behaviors. Using a range of 60 prosocial, nonsocial, and antisocial behaviors, it was demonstrated that people discriminate between species-typical and species-unique behaviors and that the capacity to perform species-unique behaviors distinguishes humans from animals, whereas the capacity to perform species-typical behaviors distinguishes humans from robots. Behaviors that exemplify the two senses of humanness are identified, and data representing rankings, raw scores, and z-scores in two indices of species typicality and species uniqueness are provided. Taken together, these findings expand our understanding of lay conceptions of humanness and provide researchers of humanness with a wider range of validated stimuli to probe the boundaries of humanity.

Living in commodified history: constructing class identities in neotraditional neighbourhoods

This paper examines how residents of neotraditional neighbourhoods in the Netherlands socially construct a ‘classed’ place identity and what role the historicised architecture plays within that process. Given that place identity is constructed through social and cultural practices, the paper argues that residents' consumption of historicised environment is bound up with drawing symbolic boundaries that have been explored here by analysing residents' narratives. Three prominent types of narratives were found: (1) residents' locational choice, (2) their aesthetic judgement of the residential environment and (3) the way they use it. Through these layered narratives, all interviewees appear to use historicised aesthetics to classify themselves as part of a valued social category. However, the way of boundary drawing took several forms, based either on fostering moral judgements of social behaviour accompanied by sophisticated efforts to keep neighbourhoods' historicised image unchanged, or by conducting cultural practices shared with fellow residents by which ‘the other’ living outside the neighbourhood is ‘bracketed out’ symbolically and socially.

Do urban primary care physician judgments influence adolescents’ access to intrauterine contraception?

Intrauterine contraceptives (IUCs) are very effective forgettable forms of contraception, yet their use by US adolescents is low. Although primary care providers (PCPs) can counsel and provide IUCs, adolescents' concerns about clinician's judgment inhibit their seeking preventive reproductive health services. Our objective is to examine how PCPs' judgments of adolescents' behavior may influence IUC provision.

The Research on Behavioral Status Judgment Method Based on Skeleton Modeling and Vector Processing

Fast, simple and reliable method for judging the behavioral status of video object is the public research base of many application fields, including public safety monitoring, national defense, aeronautics, sports and so on. This paper focuses on the fast parametric skeleton modeling and simple process of vectorization. It proposes an improved thinning algorithm for fast skeleton modeling and then locates the key points by a new scanning and marketing method, ultimately, according to the coordinate of the key points, it constructs a matrix of pose estimation and formulates the behavioral status judgment as a problem of calculating the angle between vectors. This method not only resolves the problems of large volumes of data and high complexity of algorithm in the traditional approach, but also lays the foundation for the extended researches and applications of multi-field intelligent video behavior analysis.

Children’s judgments of social interactive behaviors with peers: the influence of age and gender

Participants (138 children; 7–12 years of age) rated how often nice and not nice behaviors occurred when (a) participants (boys/girls) were the actor and peers (males/females) were the target and (b) when participants were the target of peers’ actions in a school setting. Children indicated they were nicer to their same-gender peers than to their opposite-gender peers. Also, older boys, in comparison to young boys, indicated that not nice interactions occurred more often among them and male peers. Nice (e.g., helping) and not nice (e.g., verbal aggression) behaviors were also generated, which also differed by age and gender. Finally, this study has important implications for educators in that from children’s point of view these are the types of behaviors that are occurring during their time at school. Although there are programs in schools that are aimed at decreasing physical aggression, more attention should be given to the more indirect or subtle forms of aggression, such as social manipulation and verbal. At the same time, programs that encourage nice behaviors, such as helping and sharing, should be expanded.

Impersonal you and stance-taking in social research interviews

The pronoun you is prototypically used to refer to the addressee or addressees in an interaction, but it also has other uses, including a kind of impersonal reference that does not pick out any particular person, but is the equivalent of someone, anyone, or one. This paper focuses on how the shift to impersonal you works in one genre of interaction, research interviews by academic social science researchers, where the participants often use you where the previous turn might have projected the use of I or they. We argue that the shift, and related cues of the dimension of specific vs. general, can be seen as a form of stance-taking. We explore three possible functions: (1) recategorising of the speaker and their category-associated experiences, (2) displaying perceptions as shared, not merely individual, and (3) invoking commonplaces to deal with dilemmas posed by the question. These rhetorical actions can be related to the demands of the research interview, with the interviewee claiming or disclaiming an entitlement to have a stance, supporting their stances against possible challenge, and giving accounts or resisting judgments of the interviewee's behaviour or views. Attention to these shifts can make social science researchers more aware of the interactions underlying the transcripts.

Fast Coding of Orientation in Primary Visual Cortex

Understanding how populations of neurons encode sensory information is a major goal of systems neuroscience. Attempts to answer this question have focused on responses measured over several hundred milliseconds, a duration much longer than that frequently used by animals to make decisions about the environment. How reliably sensory information is encoded on briefer time scales, and how best to extract this information, is unknown. Although it has been proposed that neuronal response latency provides a major cue for fast decisions in the visual system, this hypothesis has not been tested systematically and in a quantitative manner. Here we use a simple ‘race to threshold’ readout mechanism to quantify the information content of spike time latency of primary visual (V1) cortical cells to stimulus orientation. We find that many V1 cells show pronounced tuning of their spike latency to stimulus orientation and that almost as much information can be extracted from spike latencies as from firing rates measured over much longer durations. To extract this information, stimulus onset must be estimated accurately. We show that the responses of cells with weak tuning of spike latency can provide a reliable onset detector. We find that spike latency information can be pooled from a large neuronal population, provided that the decision threshold is scaled linearly with the population size, yielding a processing time of the order of a few tens of milliseconds. Our results provide a novel mechanism for extracting information from neuronal populations over the very brief time scales in which behavioral judgments must sometimes be made.

How the brain distinguishes bugs from birds

The brain has specialized areas for recognizing categories such as faces and houses, but how does it distinguish items within a category? The authors showed human volunteers pictures of bugs, birds and primates and compared neural response patterns in the lateral occipital complex area with the volunteers' behavioural judgements of the pictures. This revealed a continuum of cortical activity patterns that reflected the degree of 'animacy' of the pictured animals (increasing from insects to birds to primates). Future studies may establish whether inanimate objects and humans are reflected on this same continuum of neural representations.

“What’s the Harm in Being Unethical? These Strangers are Rich Anyway!” Exploring Underlying Factors of Double Standards

Previous studies show evidence of double standards in terms of individuals being more tolerant of questionable consumer practices than of similar business practices. However, whether these double standards are necessarily due to the fact that one party is a business company while the other is a consumer was not addressed. The results of our two experimental studies, conducted among 277 (Study 1) and 264 (Study 2) participants from a Western European country by means of an anonymous self-administered online survey, demonstrate that the respondents were not only harsher in their judgments of unethical business (vs. consumer) behavior, but also harsher in their judgments of unethical behavior by prosperous (vs. non-prosperous) consumers and prosperous (vs. non-prosperous) business companies (Study 1). Further, they were also less tolerant of unethical behavior by consumers (vs. one’s best friend) and business companies with which they have a less than good (vs. a good) relationship (Study 2). These results indicate that double standards are due to differences in perceived wealth between subjects and in the individual’s relationship with subjects. These two factors imply that double standards are not strictly reserved to consumer–business relations, but might also be used in business–business and consumer–consumer relations. Further, these results indicate that companies need to be aware of the fact that good financial figures may backfire as they might lead individuals to be more critical of a company’s deceptive practices. Moreover, these findings point to the importance of businesses investing resources—and to keep investing resources—in developing a good relationship with stakeholders as these good relationships lead to stakeholders being less prone to make moral condemnations.