Judgments Of Actions Research Articles

Variations in judgments of intentional action and moral evaluation across eight cultures

Individuals tend to judge bad side effects as more intentional than good side effects (the Knobe or side-effect effect). Here, we assessed how widespread these findings are by testing eleven adult cohorts of eight highly contrasted cultures on their attributions of intentional action as well as ratings of blame and praise. We found limited generalizability of the original side-effect effect, and even a reversal of the effect in two rural, traditional cultures (Samoa and Vanuatu) where participants were more likely to judge the good side effect as intentional. Three follow-up experiments indicate that this reversal of the side-effect effect is not due to semantics and may be linked to the perception of the status of the protagonist. These results highlight the importance of factoring cultural context in our understanding of moral cognition.

An Ethical (Descriptive) Framework for Judgment of Actions and Decisions in the Construction Industry and Engineering-Part I.

The construction industry is usually characterized as a fragmented system of multiple-organizational entities in which members from different technical backgrounds and moral values join together to develop a particular business or project. The greatest challenge in the construction process for the achievement of a successful practice is the development of an outstanding reputation, which is built on identifying and applying an ethical framework. This framework should reflect a common ethical ground for myriad people involved in this process to survive and compete ethically in today's turbulent construction market. This study establishes a framework for ethical judgment of behavior and actions conducted in the construction process. The framework was primarily developed based on the essential attributes of business management identified in the literature review and subsequently incorporates additional attributes identified to prevent breaches in the construction industry and common ethical values related to professional engineering. The proposed judgment framework is based primarily on the ethical dimension of professional responsibility. The Ethical Judgment Framework consists of descriptive approaches involving technical, professional, administrative, and miscellaneous terms. The framework provides the basis for judging actions as either ethical or unethical. Furthermore, the framework can be implemented as a form of preventive ethics, which would help avoid ethical dilemmas and moral allegations. The framework can be considered a decision-making model to guide actions and improve the ethical reasoning process that would help individuals think through possible implications and consequences of ethical dilemmas in the construction industry.

Natural, Artifactual, and Moral Goodness

In Natural Goodness, Philippa Foot (2001) aims to provide an account of moral evaluation that is both naturalistic and cognitivist. She argues that moral evaluation is a variety of natural evaluation in the sense that moral judgments of human action and character have the same “grammar” or “conceptual structure” as natural judgments of the goodness (e.g., health) of plants and animals. We argue that Foot’s naturalist project can succeed, but not in the way she envisions, because her central thesis that moral evaluation is a variety of natural evaluation is not entirely correct. We show that both moral and natural evaluation are species of kind evaluation, which encompasses moral, natural, and artifact evaluation. Kind evaluation is a form of evaluation, according to which things are evaluated qua members of a kind, in such a way that the kind into which something is classified informs the standards of evaluation (or norms) for things of that kind. Because the source of the normative standards for moral evaluation is different from the source of the normative standards for natural evaluation, moral evaluation is not a species of natural evaluation. However, both are varieties of kind evaluation. This account of moral evaluation as a variety of kind evaluation is still an effective response to non-naturalism and to non-cognitivism.

東日本大震災における津波観測および港内係留船の被災実態調査に基づく係留限界津波高さの推定

After the 2011 Great east Japan earthquake disaster, many reports on the tsunami profile at ports and disaster surveys on vessels moored in ports along the Pacific Ocean have been published. We also conducted surveys on the sea disasters of several large vessels such as crude oil and coal carriers by reproducing the moored vessel's behavior through a numerical simulation method on ship motions and tsunami. In a judgement of ship refuge action from ports, it is important for ship onboard and fleet management to grasp tsunami information after huge earthquake. In this paper, we have tried to find out a threshold of tsunami wave height for ship-mooring based on surveys on the observed tsunami data and the ship status in the ports during the 2011 Tohoku earthquake tsunami.

The Issue Preclusive Effect of Arbitration Awards

Courts in the United States have two primary means (in addition to individual adjudication) by which to resolve disputes in which numerous claimants have claims against a defendant that raise the same or similar issues. The first is the class action, in which the class representative brings suit on behalf of similarly situated but absent plaintiffs. A judgment in the class action (assuming that a class has been certified) binds the defendant and the absent class members. Since the Supreme Court’s decisions in Concepcion and Italian Colors, however, businesses can reduce if not avoid the risk of class actions by using arbitration clauses with class arbitration waivers in their standard form contracts with consumers and employees. When businesses use such contract provisions, disputes are to be resolved in individual arbitration, with no aggregation of claims either in arbitration or in court. The second primary means of resolving duplicative litigation of similar claims is the doctrine of issue preclusion (also referred to as collateral estoppel). Issue preclusion bars a party from relitigating an issue that was resolved in a prior case involving the same party or parties. The issue must have been fully and fairly litigated and actually decided in the prior case, and only a party to the prior litigation or one in privity with a party is bound by the prior judgment. But a non-party to the prior case can, in appropriate circumstances, rely on issue preclusion against a party to the prior case (what is called “nonmutual issue preclusion”) and preclude relitigation of the issue — i.e., hold the other party bound by the resolution of that issue in the prior case. This paper examines the extent to which arbitration awards have issue preclusive effect, such that issue preclusion might substitute for class actions when businesses use arbitration clauses with class waivers. It further suggests that the law governing issue preclusion in arbitration might develop in ways parallel to the law governing class actions and arbitration: with businesses using “issue preclusion waivers” to avoid the issue preclusive effect of awards, consumers and employees challenging such waivers as unenforceable, and businesses relying on FAA preemption in response.

Substance abuse pattern among medical college students in Tumkur, Karnataka, India: a cross sectional study

Background: Globally, there are 2 billion alcohol users, 1.3 billion smokers and 185 million are drug users. These are accounting for 12.4% of all deaths worldwide. The doctors are vulnerable to substance abuse due to their ready accessibility to the substance of abuse. Medical training is identified as full of stress and it is also observed that students undergo tremendous stress during various years of medical training. Repeated use of drugs can damage essential decision making and effect judgment of actions. This could be disastrous if substance abusers are medical professionals who have direct dealing with human lives. Methods: A cross sectional study was conducted at a medical college in Tumkur district of Karnataka. A semi structured questionnaire was used to interview 379 medical students who were willing to participate.Results: Prevalence of substance abuse among the students was found to be 25.9%. Substance abuse was highest among VII term students (IIIrd year) which was 25.3%. Alcohol was the single most preferred substance of abuse which was used by 36.40% of students. Curiosity for experience (42.4%) was major reason for initiation of substance abuse. Majority of students (45.5%) attained the harmful substances through friends. 76.6% of hostellers used harmful substances.Conclusions: Prevalence of substance abuse among medical college students was high. Students preferred alcohol products and tobacco most. Hosteller students are more likely to be exposed to substance abuse.

A Moral (Normative) Framework for the Judgment of Actions and Decisions in the Construction Industry and Engineering: Part II.

The construction industry is typically characterized as a fragmented, multi-organizational setting in which members from different technical backgrounds and moral values join together to develop a particular business or project. The most challenging obstacle in the construction process is to achieve a successful practice and to identify and apply an ethical framework to manage the behavior of involved specialists and contractors and to ensure the quality of all completed construction activities. The framework should reflect a common moral ground for myriad people involved in this process to survive and compete ethically in today's turbulent construction market. This study establishes a framework for moral judgment of behavior and actions conducted in the construction process. The moral framework provides the basis of judging actions as "moral" or "immoral" based on three levels of moral accountability: personal, professional, and social. The social aspect of the proposed framework is developed primarily from the essential attributes of normative business decision-making models identified in the literature review and subsequently incorporates additional attributes related to professional and personal moral values. The normative decision-making models reviewed are based primarily on social attributes as related to moral theories (e.g., utilitarianism, duty, rights, virtue, etc.). The professional and moral attributes are established by identifying a set of common moral values recognized by professionals in the construction industry and required to prevent common construction breaches. The moral framework presented here is the complementary part of the ethical framework developed in Part I of this article and is based primarily on the personal behavior or the moral aspect of professional responsibility. The framework can be implemented as a form of preventive personal ethics, which would help avoid ethical dilemmas and moral implications in the first place. Furthermore, the moral framework can be considered as a decision-making model to guide actions and improve the moral reasoning process, which would help individuals think through possible implications and the consequences of ethical and moral issues in the construction industry.

Past as prologue: Entrepreneurial inaction decisions and subsequent action judgments

We add richness and depth to entrepreneurial action theory by investigating the role of entrepreneurial inaction decisions—deliberate decisions not to pursue a perceived opportunity—in influencing entrepreneurs' paths both away from and toward action judgments on subsequent opportunities. Doing so, we utilize a sequential decision-judgment perspective to uniquely theorize that entrepreneurs' mental representations qualified by doubt carry over from initial entrepreneurial inaction decisions to consequentially impact assessments of opportunities that follow. Using two multi-stage scenario experiments where 244 founder entrepreneurs made a total of 690 sequential opportunity decisions, we find that initial inaction decisions negatively affect entrepreneurs' likelihood of subsequent action judgments. However, this effect is mitigated when entrepreneurs perceive subsequent opportunities as dissimilar, rather than similar. In that way, the initial inaction decision reduces assessments of the likelihood of subsequent action, but opportunity characteristics, such as dissimilarity, can spur entrepreneurs back toward action.

The effects of cognitive load during intertrial intervals on judgements of control: The role of working memory and contextual learning

When there is no contingency between actions and outcomes, but outcomes occur frequently, people tend to judge that they have control over those outcomes, a phenomenon known as the outcome density (OD) effect. Recent studies show that the OD effect depends on the duration of the temporal interval between action-outcome conjunctions, with longer intervals inducing stronger effects. However, under some circumstances OD effect is reduced, for example when participants are mildly depressed. We reasoned that working memory (WM) plays an important role in learning of context; with reduced WM capacity to process contextual information during intertrial intervals (ITIs) during contingency learning might lead to reduced OD effects (limited capacity hypothesis). To test this, we used a novel dual-task procedure that increases the WM load during the ITIs of an operant (e.g., action-outcome) contingency learning task to impact contextual learning. We tested our hypotheses in groups of students with zero (Experiments 1, N=34), and positive contingencies (Experiment 2, N=34). The findings indicated that WM load during the ITIs reduced the OD effects compared to no load conditions (Experiment 1 and 2). In Experiment 2, we observed reduced OD effects on action judgements under high load in zero and positive contingencies. However, the participants' judgements were still sensitive to the difference between zero and positive contingencies. We discuss the implications of our findings for the effects of depression and context in contingency learning.

A JURISPRUDÊNCIA DO SUPREMO TRIBUNAL FEDERAL E A CURIOSA DIFERENÇA DE TRATAMENTO TRIBUTÁRIO NO TRANSPORTE DE PASSAGEIROS POR VIAS AÉREA E TERRESTRE

O estudo tem por objeto a tributação da prestação dos serviços de transporte, especificamente do transporte de passageiros, bem como a estranha diferença de tratamento, criada diretamente pela jurisprudência do Supremo Tribunal Federal, entre os regimes aplicáveis ao transporte de passageiros por via aérea e por via terrestre. Aborda-se a evolução da legislação sobre o tema e, especialmente, examina-se criticamente como a jurisprudência do STF se posicionou a respeito da questão, por meio do julgamento de diversas ações diretas de inconstitucionalidade. O estudo considera juridicamente inconsistente o posicionamento jurisprudencial segundo o qual é inconstitucional a cobrança do ICMS sobre o transporte de passageiros por via aérea e constitucional a cobrança do ICMS sobre o transporte de passageiros por via terrestre.

Sentence plausibility influences the link between action words and the perception of biological human movements.

The present study aimed to assess the role of sentence plausibility in the functional link between action words and visual judgments of point-light human actions. Following the oral presentation of action verbs included in a plausible or implausible sentence, participants were asked to detect the presence of congruent or incongruent biological movements. Sentence plausibility was manipulated by inverting the positions of the subject and the complement (e.g., the neighbor is running in the garden vs the garden is running in the neighbor). The results showed that for both plausible and implausible sentences, the detection of human movements is greater following presentation of congruent action verbs. These results suggest that the presentation of action verbs affects the subsequent perception of point-light human movements, regardless of the associated semantic context. However, the link between action verbs and judgment of biological movements is strengthened when plausible sentences are presented, as illustrated by the increase in visual detection capacity in plausible congruent conditions. Concerning the analysis of the detection speed, the performance is only affected in plausible sentences with slower response times associated with the presentation of an incongruent action verb. These findings are discussed in light of an embodied mechanism and the domain of biological movement perception.

Neural adaptation in pSTS correlates with perceptual aftereffects to biological motion and with autistic traits

The adaptive nature of biological motion perception has been documented in behavioral studies, with research showing that prolonged viewing of an action can bias judgments of subsequent actions towards the opposite of its attributes. However, the neural mechanisms underlying action adaptation aftereffects remain unknown. We examined adaptation-induced changes in brain responses to an ambiguous action after adapting to walking or running actions within two bilateral regions of interest: 1) human middle temporal area (hMT+), a lower-level motion-sensitive region of cortex, and 2) posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), a higher-level action-selective area. We found a significant correlation between neural adaptation strength in right pSTS and perceptual aftereffects to biological motion measured behaviorally, but not in hMT+. The magnitude of neural adaptation in right pSTS was also strongly correlated with individual differences in the degree of autistic traits. Participants with more autistic traits exhibited less adaptation-induced modulations of brain responses in right pSTS and correspondingly weaker perceptual aftereffects. These results suggest a direct link between perceptual aftereffects and adaptation of neural populations in right pSTS after prolonged viewing of a biological motion stimulus, and highlight the potential importance of this brain region for understanding differences in social-cognitive processing along the autistic spectrum.

The Indirect Ethics of AIG\u2019s \u2018Backdoor Bailout\u2019

We experimentally assess the ethics of the U.S. government’s indirect bailout of the bank counterparties of American International Group during the 2008 financial crisis. When the indirect bailout is jointly compared with a counterfactual where the government directly bails out the banks, subjects judge the indirect bailout to be far more unethical. On the other hand, when the two scenarios are judged separately, subjects consider a direct bailout of banks to be more unethical. This suggests that ethical judgments of indirect versus direct action exhibit a type of preference reversal that is dependent upon whether the evaluation mode is joint or separate. The pedagogical and policy implications of this preference reversal are discussed.

The effect of action semantics, context and judgment task on object affordance

The effect of action semantics, context and judgment task on object affordance

I-RM: An intelligent risk management framework for context-aware ubiquitous cold chain logistics

Owing to the increasing interest in food quality in terms of freshness, a special type of logistics, called ubiquitous cold chain logistics (UCCL), has become an essential part of the distribution of environmentally sensitive items. UCCL aims to guarantee that delivery items are held under proper environmental conditions. By incorporating ubiquitous technologies such as radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and various types of sensors, monitoring and tracking environmental conditions for delivery items in UCCL have been easily achievable without latency. Nevertheless, addressing the complex nature of risk management rules caused by a large number of possible risk cases in UCCL has not yet been fully developed. Therefore, in this research, we suggest an intelligent risk management framework for UCCL, namely i-RM, which is designed to accommodate various types of risk situations by introducing the notion of context-aware real-time risk management. More specifically, i-RM takes a divide-and-combine approach where rules for risk management functions, context identification, risk detection, and response action judgment are defined in semantic ontologies. While rules for the risk management functions are defined independently of the others, they are dynamically linked for handling risks during run time. Moreover, i-RM is fully responsible for all of the risk management tasks required in UCCL, from information acquisition to responses in real time, by adopting event-based processing techniques. The effectiveness of the risk management ability of i-RM is demonstrated based on a real-world UCCL scenario.

Instructional Design Students’ Design Judgment in Action

This case study examines the design practices of instructional design (ID) students while working on a realistic design project (Joel, 1987) to explore whether ID students make design judgments; how, when, and where they are making them; and what kinds of judgments they make during a realistic instructional design process. The perspective taken in this study is that design judgments comprise multiple, complex types and are not confined to moments of overt decision making (Nelson & Stolterman, 2012). In this small-scale case study, a group of students was observed in the process of designing instruction within a semester. The findings of the study suggest that these ID students continuously made design judgments of many kinds throughout the design process.

Motor Knowledge Modulates Attentional Processing during Action Judgment

Several studies have revealed the role of motor experience when humans have to judge human actions. However, the possible influence of motor knowledge on attentionprocesses has been neglected. This study used a flanker paradigm (Eriksen andEriksen1974) to analyze the attentionresponses of male and female participants during the judgment of running movements. Three running actions appeared simultaneously on a computer screen, with the target in the center and the flankers in the periphery. The target and flankers could be compatible or incompatible concerning both the direction of the movement and the sex of the runner. Moreover, flankers were presented upright or upside-down. The results indicate that the distracting effect of the flankers was different for male and female participants. Whereas direction-incompatible flankers systematically disturbed the female participants’ performance, regardless of the sex and the orientation of the flanker, male participants were only distracted when the flankers were upright males. This finding offers new directions to explain sex differences in the judgment of human action.

Anaphylaxis in adolescents

The incidence of anaphylaxis is increasing across all ages, but the risk of morbidity and fatality is disproportionately high in adolescents. This may, at least in part, be a consequence of a constellation of potentially modifiable psychosocial factors that tend to manifest during adolescence. This study highlights the shortcomings in and the barriers to effective management of anaphylaxis in adolescents, and proposes an integrated tripartite framework that may help promote successful management. Existing mainstay anaphylaxis self-management approaches - comprising careful avoidance of triggers, recognition of early features indicative of anaphylaxis and prompt self-administration of intra-muscular adrenaline (epinephrine) - often fail in adolescents. Key barriers to successful management centre on the impact of the psychosocial environment during adolescents' developmental transition. As a result, risk-taking, poor judgement of actions during reactions and non-compliance to management instructions are common. To be successful, anaphylaxis management strategies require more multidimensional approaches among adolescents. We propose a tripartite management framework that emphasizes integration of the following components: better understanding of adolescence; incorporation of the constituents of adolescents' social networks; and adolescent-tailored healthcare perspectives. This theoretical framework now requires translation into an intervention, feasibility and pilot testing, and formal evaluation through randomized controlled trials.

How do i fit through that gap? Navigation through apertures in adults with and without developmental coordination disorder.

During everyday life we move around busy environments and encounter a range of obstacles, such as a narrow aperture forcing us to rotate our shoulders in order to pass through. In typically developing individuals the decision to rotate the shoulders is body scaled and this movement adaptation is temporally and spatially tailored to the size of the aperture. This is done effortlessly although it actually involves many complex skills. For individuals with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) moving in a busy environment and negotiating obstacles presents a real challenge which can negatively impact on safety and participation in motor activities in everyday life. However, we have a limited understanding of the nature of the difficulties encountered. Therefore, this current study considered how adults with DCD make action judgements and movement adaptations while navigating apertures. Fifteen adults with DCD and 15 typically developing (TD) controls passed through a series of aperture sizes which were scaled to body size (0.9-2.1 times shoulder width). Spatial and temporal characteristics of movement were collected over the approach phase and while crossing the aperture. The decision to rotate the shoulders was not scaled in the same way for the two groups, with the adults with DCD showing a greater propensity to turn for larger apertures compared to the TD adults when body size alone was accounted for. However, when accounting for degree of lateral trunk movement and variability on the approach, we no longer saw differences between the two groups. In terms of the movement adaptations, the adults with DCD approached an aperture differently when a shoulder rotation was required and then adapted their movement sooner compared to their typical peers. These results point towards an adaptive strategy in adults with DCD which allows them to account for their movement difficulties and avoid collision.

Development of the Correspondence Between Real and Imagined Fine and Gross Motor Actions

The development of the correspondence between real and imagined motor actions was investigated in 2 experiments. Experiment 1 evaluated whether children imagine body position judgments of fine motor actions in the same way as they perform them. Thirty-two 8-year-old children completed a task in which an object was presented in different orientations, and children were asked to indicate the position of their hand as they grasped and imagined grasping the object. Children’s hand position was almost identical for the imagined- and real-grasping trials. Experiment 2 replicated this result with 8-year-olds as well as 6-year-olds and also assessed the development of the correspondence of the chronometry of real and imagined gross motor actions. Sixteen 6-year-old children and seventeen 8-year-old children participated in the fine motor grasping task from Experiment 1 and a gross motor task that measured the time it took for children to walk and imagine walking different distances. Six-year-olds showed more of a difference between real and imagined walking than did 8-year-olds. However, there were strong correlations between real and imagined grasping and walking for both 6- and 8-year-old children, suggesting that by at least 6 years of age, motor imagery and real action may involve common internal representations and that motor imagery is important for motor control and planning.