Role Of Simplicity Research Articles

Understanding word-of-mouth (WOM) intentions of mobile app users: The role of simplicity and emotions during the first interaction

With the known poor user retention rates of mobile apps, mobile app developers and service providers can significantly benefit from positive word-of-mouth (WOM) as a cost-effective means to reach a critical mass. Many users abandon mobile apps after just a single use. As such, the first-time user experience of a mobile app is crucial as it might form a lasting impression about the app. However, little is known about some of the factors that can foster the creation of positive WOM intentions after a user’s first interaction with a mobile app. The main aim of the present study was to show how simplicity and emotions (based on the PAD model) could be used to understand WOM intentions of mobile apps users. Using a quasi-experimental design with 100 participants from South Africa, the study showed that simplicity and emotions (PAD model) were instrumental in shaping users’ satisfaction and WOM intentions. The findings have implications for emotional design in mobile apps, as well as for designing for simplicity.

Back to Basics: Belief Revision Through Direct Selection

Traditionally, belief change is modelled as the construction of a belief set that satisfies a success condition. The success condition is usually that a specified sentence should be believed (revision) or not believed (contraction). Furthermore, most models of belief change employ a select-and-intersect strategy. This means that a selection is made among primary objects that satisfy the success condition, and the intersection of the selected objects is taken as outcome of the operation. However, the select-and-intersect method is difficult to justify, in particular since the primary objects (usually possible worlds or remainders) are not themselves plausible outcome candidates. Some of the most controversial features of belief change theory, such as recovery and the impossibility of Ramsey test conditionals, are closely connected with the select-and-intersect method. It is proposed that a selection mechanism should instead operate directly on the potential outcomes, and select only one of them. In this way many of the problems that are associated with the select-and-intersect method can be avoided. This model is simpler than previous models in the important Ockhamist sense of doing away with intermediate, cognitively inaccessible objects. However, the role of simplicity as a choice criterion in the direct selection among potential outcomes is left as an open issue.

Cognitive Risk Framework for Cybersecurity: Bounded Rationality

Cyber risk professionals face a formidable challenge in keeping pace with the asymmetric nature of today’s advanced threats in cyber security. Spending on cyber security has skyrocketed yet the threat continues to grow exponentially. This phenomenon is called the Cyber Paradox and describes what has become an entrenched battle for security professionals in defending against an increasingly sophisticated adversary that, to date, has adapted faster than defensive measures to prevent loss of data or access to sensitive information. Conventional security defenses have proven less than effective resulting in a virtual “Maginot’s Line” of increased fortification by hardening the enterprise yet resulting in greater vulnerability to achieving the goals of defending the organization from cyber threats (“Maginot’s Line”, n.d.). This article reviews the causes of these misperceptions in security defense and explores research in decision science, intelligence and security informatics, machine learning, and the role of simplicity in shaping a cognitive risk framework. The findings conclude that the human-machine interaction is the greatest threat in cyber space yet very few, if any, security professionals are well versed in strategies to close this gap. The purpose of this article is to bring to light evolving new strategies with promising success and to reveal a few surprises in how simplicity is an under-appreciated strategy in cyber security. Complete text of “Cognitive Hack: The New Battleground in Cybersecurity … the Human Mind” is available here: https://www.crcpress.com/Cognitive-Hack-The-New-Battleground-in-Cybersecurity--the-Human-Mind/Bone/p/book/9781498749817

Simplicity and elegance in Millikan’s account of productivity: reply to Martinez

This paper responds to a problem, raised by Martinez (2013), for Millikan’s explanation of the interpretability of novel signs in terms of mapping functions. I argue that Martinez’s critique is a logically weakened (and hence more difficult to refute) version of Kripke’s skeptical argument about rule following. Responding to Martinez requires two things. First, we must correctly understand the role of simplicity and elegance in choosing the correct mapping function for a signaling system. Second, we need to understand that mapping functions are descriptions of the features that determine the content of signs; they do not themselves determine the content of signs. Bearing these facts in mind, Martinez’s concern is assuaged. However, we find that this position on the role of mapping functions is not fully consistent with Millikan’s (1990) response to Kripke. I modify her response to Kripke and demonstrate that the alterations do not undermine her view.

Social and political convergence on environmental events: the roles of simplicity and visuality in the BP Oil Spill.

This paper examines how and when newspapers, environmental nongovernmental organizations, businesses, and the government converge on environmental events. Using data on the 2010 BP Oil Spill from newspaper articles in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, press releases by Greenpeace and Sierra Club, press releases by BP, Halliburton, Transocean, ExxonMobil, and Shell, and press statements by the White House Press Secretary, we examine an event's potential to trigger convergence of social and political action. By treating events as political actants, we examine arguments from the agenda-setting and social movement literatures on timing, simplicity, and visuality to understand when political actors converge. We find that convergence is related to temporal cycles but not simplicity or visuality.

Analogies and theories: The role of simplicity and the emergence of norms

We consider the dynamics of reasoning by general rules (theories) and by specific cases (analogies). When an agent faces an exogenous process, we show that, under mild conditions, if reality happens to be simple, the agent will converge to adopt a theory and discard analogical thinking. If, however, reality is complex, analogical reasoning is unlikely to disappear. By contrast, when the agent is a player in a large population coordination game, and the process is generated by all playersʼ predictions, convergence to a theory is much more likely. This may explain how a large population of players selects an equilibrium in such a game, and how social norms emerge. Mixed cases, involving noisy endogenous processes are likely to give rise to complex dynamics of reasoning, switching between theories and analogies.

On the role of simplicity in science

Simple assumptions represent a decisive reason to prefer one theory to another in everyday scientific praxis. But this praxis has little philosophical justification, since there exist many notions of simplicity, and those that can be defined precisely strongly depend on the language in which the theory is formulated. The language dependence is a natural feature - to some extent - but it is also believed to be a fatal problem, because, according to a common general argument, the simplicity of a theory is always trivial in a suitably chosen language. But, this trivialization argument is typically either applied to toy-models of scientific theories or applied with little regard for the empirical content of the theory. This paper shows that the trivialization argument fails, when one considers realistic theories and requires their empirical content to be preserved. In fact, the concepts that enable a very simple formulation, are not necessarily measurable, in general. Moreover, the inspection of a theory describing a chaotic billiard shows that precisely those concepts that naturally make the theory extremely simple are provably not measurable. This suggests that - whenever a theory possesses sufficiently complex consequences - the constraint of measurability prevents too simple formulations in any language. This explains why the scientists often regard their assessments of simplicity as largely unambiguous. In order to reveal a cultural bias in the scientists' assessment, one should explicitly identify different characterizations of simplicity of the assumptions that lead to different theory selections. General arguments are not sufficient.

Is kinematic geometry an internalized regularity?

A general framework for the explanation of perceptual phenomena as internalizations of external regularities was developed by R. N. Shepard. A particular example of this framework is his account of perceived curvilinear apparent motions. This paper contains a brief summary of the relevant psychophysical data, some basic kinematical considerations and examples, and several criticisms of Shepard's account. The criticisms concern the feasibility of internalization of critical motion types, the roles of simplicity and uniqueness, the contrast between classical physics and kinematic geometry, the import of perceived path curvilinearity, and the relation of perceptual and scientific knowledge.

From Protyle to Proton: William Prout and the Nature of Matter 1785–1985

W H Brock 1985 Bristol: Adam Hilger xii + 252 pp price £25 (IOP members' price £20) ISBN 0 85274 801 9 As the author says, the 'Proutian theme of the roles of simplicity, aesthetics and patterning in understanding the nature of matter since the early 1800s forms the core of this book'. This theme is as essential for 20th century physicists who – following Aston – make it their business to explore the inner atom and its exotic particles, as it was for 19th century chemists who – like Prout – sought to regain a certain classical simplicity after Dalton had suggested there were as many different atomic particles as there were different elements.

On Simplicity in Empirical Hypotheses

The title of this symposium, “Formal Simplicity as a Weight in the Acceptability of Scientific Theories,” to some people might seem to suggest that we are to be making positive proposals about how the concept of simplicity could be defined for formalized languages, defined so as to figure in a formalized theory of confirmation. I must confess at the start that I do not have any such ambitious object in view. I now feel, indeed, that premature formalizations have little power to illuminate the philosophically interesting questions which cluster round the problem of the role of simplicity in scientific thinking. So in this short paper I wish merely to present some elementary considerations, not very novel ones, concerning the role which simplicity seems to me to play in our non-demonstrative reasoning about matters of empirical fact. Although many writers have sought to analyze the logical character of such reasoning, little unanimity has been attained in their over-all views; thus it is that though the considerations which I wish to present are elementary, they are not wholly uncontroversial. But because these matters are elementary in nature, I do feel it appropriate in discussing them to use homely examples of uncomplicated kinds, rather than elaborate examples drawn from the more sophisticated reaches of scientific theory; in doing so, I am taking it for granted that scientific inference as regards its logical character is fundamentally a refinement of everyday thinking, rather than a procedure of some essentially different nature.

On Verifiability, Simplicity, and Equivalence

This paper is intended to provide a rather brief, suggestive, though not very precise, analysis of the significance of “contextualism” for “meaning”, and more specifically of the significance of “systematic (contextual) simplicity” in relation to “meaningful operations” in the language of natural science. The notion of “equivalent theories” is examined in conjunction with the question of simplicity, and finally, these ideas are brought to bear upon “realism” and “semantic realism” in particular. The pragmatic-aesthetic question of the role of simplicity in scientific theories is of some concern to philosophers of science. Henry Margenau (7:96) has pointed out that, among the metaphysical (epistemological) requirements of scientific theories, the “most embarrassing … is one which is often called the postulate of simplicity….” When a topic is embarrassing, the best way to help remove such embarrassment is to indulge further in frank and open discussion of the topic. This I have tried to do in what follows.