Suboptimal Behavior Research Articles

7. ASSOCIATION OF SELF-REPORTED QUALITY OF CARE MEASURES AND BURNOUT: AN INVESTIGATION FROM THE PEDIATRIC RESIDENT BURNOUT-RESILIENCE STUDY CONSORTIUM

Background The Pediatric Resident Burnout-Resilience Study Consortium (PRB-RSC), established in 2015, is committed to studying the epidemiology, natural history, and impact of interventions designed to address burnout and improve resilience in pediatric residents. Annual surveys demonstrate a prevalence of burnout of 40-55% over the last 4 years. Previous regional work has shown an association between resident burnout and sub-optimal patient care. Design/Methods The PRB-RSC distributed the annual survey to pediatric residents in participating programs in the spring of 2019. Data was de-identified, collected and maintained by the Association of Pediatric Program Directors’ Longitudinal Educational Assessment Research Network. Residents were classified as burned out on the basis of a 2-item screen for emotional exhaustion/depersonalization. An ordinal mixed effects generalized additive model regression was used to examine the effect of burnout on reported quality of care behaviors. For the ten behaviors queried, perceived stress scale (PSS), cognitive and affective mindfulness scale (CAMSR), and overall quality of life score (QOL) were compared between those with recent ( 12 months) poor quality behaviors reported. Results A total of 46 pediatric programs participated in the 2019 PRB-RSC survey, with an overall response rate of 62% (n=1648). The recency of reported sub-optimal behaviors between those with and without burnout is shown in the Figure. After controlling for training year, age, male gender, white race, program size and region, and clustering of learners in programs, each p-value is Conclusion(s) In this national survey, pediatric resident burnout is associated with sub-optimal care delivery, while recent experience with sub-optimal care is associated with higher stress, lower mindfulness, and decreased overall QOL.

Multimodal virtual environments: an opportunity to improve fire safety training?

Fires and fire-related fatalities remain a tragic and frequent occurrence. Evidence has shown that humans adopt sub-optimal behaviours during fire incidents and, therefore, training is one possible...

Within-trial contrast or Wagner's SOP model: Can they both account for two presumed complex cognitive phenomena?

When humans make biased or suboptimal choices, they are often attributed to complex cognitive processes that are viewed as being uniquely human. Alternatively, several phenomena, such as suboptimal gambling behavior and cognitive dissonance (justification of effort) may be explained more simply as examples of the contrast between what is expected and what occurs as well as Wagner's Standard Operating Procedure model based on reward prediction error. For example, when pigeons are attracted to choices involving a suboptimal, low probability of a high payoff, as in unskilled gambling behavior, it may be attributed to reward prediction error or the contrast between the low probability of reward expected and the sometimes high probability of reward obtained (when one wins). Similarly, justification of effort, the tendency to attribute greater value to rewards that are difficult to obtain, is typically explained in terms of the tendency to inflate the value of a reward to justify the effort required to obtain it. When pigeons prefer outcomes that require more effort to obtain, however, it is more likely to be explained in terms of contrast between the effort and the reward that follows. We readily attribute the behavior of animals to contrast-like effects or reward prediction error, however, when similar behavior occurs in humans, we also should be prepared to explain it in terms of simpler learning mechanisms. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The measurement of environmental economic inefficiency with pollution-generating technologies

This study introduces the measurement of environmental inefficiency from an economic perspective. We develop our proposal using the latest by-production models that consider two separate and parallel technologies: a standard technology generating good outputs, and a polluting technology for the by-production of bad outputs. While research into environmental inefficiency incorporating undesirable or bad outputs from a technological perspective is well established, no significant attempts have been made to extend it to the economic sphere. Based on the definition of net profits, we develop an economic inefficiency measure that accounts for suboptimal behavior in the form of foregone private revenue and environmental cost excess. We show that economic inefficiency can be consistently decomposed according to technical and allocative criteria, considering the two separate technologies and market prices, respectively. We illustrate the empirical implementation of our approach using a dataset on agriculture at the level of US states.

The Midsession Reversal Task with Pigeons Does a Brief Delay Between Choice and Reinforcement Facilitate Reversal Learning?

In a midsession reversal task, the session begins with a simple simultaneous discrimination in which one stimulus (S1) is correct and the other stimulus (S2) is incorrect (S1+/S2-). At the midpoint of the session, the discrimination reverses and S2 becomes the correct choice (S2+/S1-). When choosing optimally, a pigeon should choose S1 until the first trial in which its choice is not reinforced and then it should shift to S2 (win-stay/lose-shift). With this task, pigeons have been shown to respond suboptimally by anticipating the reversal (making anticipatory errors) and continuing to choose S1 after the reversal (making perseverative errors). This suboptimal behavior may result from a pigeon’s relative impulsivity due to the immediacy of reinforcement following choice. In other choice tasks, there is evidence that the introduction of a short delay between choice and reinforcement may decrease pigeons’ impulsivity. In the present experiment, a delay was introduced between stimulus selection and reinforcement to assess whether it results in a decrease in anticipatory and perseverative errors. Pigeons that had a delay between choice and reinforcement were a bit slower in acquiring the midsession reversal task compared to those without a delay, but showed no decrease in either anticipatory or perseverative errors. It is likely that the pigeons’ natural tendency to use time from the start of the session to the reversal as a cue to reverse prevented the delay from increasing accuracy on this task.

Evidence for the ‘behavioural character’ hypothesis: does boldness programme disparate antipredator strategies?

Risk-taking behaviours that are optimal in one context (predators absent) may be suboptimal in a different context (predators present), suggesting that individuals with ‘bold’ behaviours will experience increased predation risk. Yet, in some instances, bold individuals experience lower predation. Thus, there is not always a direct trade-off between boldness and predation risk. To better understand the relationship between boldness and predation risk, suboptimal behaviours must be viewed within the context of an organism's entire integrated antipredator strategy. Using freshwater snails exposed to a predator cue, we examined whether quickly re-emerging from the shell was a repeatable, carryover behaviour that was tied to behavioural and morphological antipredator traits. Slow-emerging snails invested in morphological shell defence and remained in the predator environment, whereas quick-emerging snails consistently avoided the predator environment and did not invest in shell defences. Therefore, slow-emerging snails used a sit-and-wait antipredator strategy by relying on their shells for protection and were less likely to avoid the predator environment; conversely, quick-emerging snails used an avoidance (or dispersal) strategy by consistently associating with the water's surface and investing less in shell defences. A path analysis of these antipredator traits indicates that the carryover effect of bold behaviour may be an important factor that mediates complementary behavioural and morphological traits that reduce predation risks. This study supports the ‘behavioural character’ hypothesis, which suggests that boldness is a latent variable upon which selection can act and thereby shape a variety of quasi-independent traits (e.g. antipredator traits). According to this perspective, selection is not acting on a single antipredator behavioural trait in isolation, but rather on an integrated antipredator strategy that is facilitated by individual differences in carryover risk-taking behaviour.

How humans may co-exist with Earth? The case for suboptimal systems

Abstract Human societies rely on rules to function, curbing the interests of individuals in favor of the interests of the population. A review of recent progress in biology and digital sciences suggests that such strategies might be universal: many living and technological systems favor the interests of the population to the detriment of individuals, at all scales. They behave in a suboptimal manner, restraining short-term performances while ensuring a high level of global resilience. This paper describes the features of such suboptimal systems. By synthesizing numerous examples within biological, and socio-cultural systems, we show how suboptimality might constitute a powerful source of inspiration to address the numerous trade-offs humanity is facing in the anthropocene. Should human societies curb their performance for the now anthropic ecosystems to be resilient? New research themes, such as soft law, agroecology, and planetary health, already echo suboptimal behaviors. These examples suggest that a better knowledge of suboptimal systems could help formalize a rational limit to human development towards sustainability, very much like the planetary boundaries for their Earth counterpart. Conversely, this synthesis also raises a question of whether human societies could be resilient without being suboptimal?

Values Activation and Present Bias

Present bias—difficulty resisting instant gratification over a future and larger reward (also called delay discounting)—has been associated with various suboptimal behaviors and health outcomes. Several methods have been proposed to produce reductions in this bias and promote self-control. In this randomized experimental study of 137 undergraduate college students, the authors examined the effect of a 10-minute values clarification writing exercise on present bias in a monetary decision-making task compared with a neutral writing activity. While participants in the values clarification condition showed less present-biased behavior, this finding was not statistically significant at the .05 level. Thus, they place emphasis on implications for future research and practice with the aims of reducing present bias and building better communities.

Are “fun” sources of windfalls destined to be spent hedonistically?

Recently, Richard Thaler was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work in developing Behavioral Economics. While much of economics assumes that people act rationally, Areily (2008), expanding on Thaler’s body of work, proves that we are not only often irrational, but we are predictably irrational. When an interviewer asked Thaler how he would spend the roughly $1.1 million in prize money, he responded, “This is quite a funny question.” Thaler added, “I will try to spend it as irrationally as possible.” We know that affective tags for money exist but what specifically are those affective tags? More specifically still, is one of those tags for sources of income “fun,” and if so, does that affect whether the money will be spent on fun? Classical economics would assume that satisfaction comes from the consumption of goods and services, that money is a medium of exchange, and that the source of that medium of exchange does not enter into the choice of the goods or services consumed. Thaler’s (1999) works show that people create mental accounts, indicating that the source of the money may not be as completely irrelevant as classical economics predicted. This is important because where irrational behavior is suboptimal behavior, if we can anticipate it, we can construct environments to support better choices. We find that fun sources of income are significantly more likely to be spent on fun expenditures. However, as the amount of the windfall increases, the amount spent on fun levels off, indicating that this affect may be bounded. We were unable to find statistically significant support that more “adult” sources of income are more likely to be spent on more adult uses, but money from adult sources was significantly more likely to be invested. This is important because understanding more about affective tags and how they affect decisions to use money, we become better predictors of irrational behavior.

Analysis of High-Power Charging Limitations of a Battery in a Hybrid Railway System

Fuel cell (FC)-driven railroad propulsion systems (RPSs) have been much appreciated for the past two decades to get rid exhausts of fossil fuels, but the inability of FCs to capture regenerative power produced by propulsion systems during regenerative braking and the dependency of its power density on operating current density necessitates the hybridization of FCs with batteries and/or supercapacitors to utilize the best features of all three power sources. Contrary to the research trend in hybridization where the purpose of hybridization such as fuel saving, high efficiency, or high mileage is achieved by certain operational algorithms without going into detail models, this study using detailed models explores the impact of high-power charging limitations of batteries on the optimization of hybridization, and proposes a solution accordingly. In this study, all three power sources were modeled, the optimal and suboptimal behaviors at the individual level were identified, and power distribution was implemented for a propulsion system, as recommended by the optimal features of all individual power sources. Since the detailed modeling of these power sources involves many mathematical equations and requires the implementation of continuous and discrete states, this study also demonstrates how, using C-MEX S-Functions, these models can be implemented with a reduced computational burden.

Effects of Climate Change on Marine Organisms

Global warming has become a global challenge having dire consequences on different aspects of the environment due to the melting of glaciers, excess carbon dioxide (CO2), and excess warming of water bodies among others. At a faster pace recently, climate change is affecting the marine environment, causing numerous alterations. Here, we address its consequences and the numerous alterations, which are more vital for researchers and global agencies to advocate more on why it’s essential to lessen the impact of climate change. Our review showed that the impacts of climate change are articulated at several stages of the marine ecosystem where it affects the inhabitants and their habitats. In response to climate change (ocean warming) marine species shift their latitudinal range to find suitable conditions leading to the redistribution of species. In addition, we found that growth reduction, sub-optimal behaviors, and reduced immune-competence of marine organisms, are as a result of thermal stress due to climate change. Also, the periodic changes in temperature above or below the optimum have a meditative reproductive effect on marine species, including fish. Finally, we discovered that due to higher water temperatures, several diseases showcase greater virulence in the sense that the marine species become less resistant to these diseases due to stress, increased virulence stimuli, or increased transmission.

Modeling coastal flood risk and adaptation response under future climate conditions

The National Coastal Property Model (NCPM) simulates flood damages resulting from sea level rise and storm surge along the contiguous U.S. coastline. The model also projects local-level investments in a set of adaptation measures under the assumption that these measures will be adopted when benefits exceed the costs over a 30-year period. However, it has been observed that individuals and communities often underinvest in adaptive measures relative to standard cost-benefit assumptions due to financial, psychological, sociopolitical, and technological factors. This study applies an updated version of the NCPM to incorporate improved cost-benefit tests and to approximate observed sub-optimal flood risk reduction behavior. The updated NCPM is tested for two multi-county sites: Virginia Beach, VA and Tampa, FL. Sub-optimal adaptation approaches slow the implementation of adaptation measures throughout the 100-year simulation and they increase the amount of flood damages, especially early in the simulation. The net effect is an increase in total present value cost of $1.1 to $1.3 billion (2015 USD), representing about a 10% increase compared to optimal adaptation approaches. Future calibrations against historical data and incorporation of non-economic factors driving adaptation decisions could prove useful in better understanding the impacts of continued sub-optimal behavior.

Evolution of robust high speed optical-flow-based landing for autonomous MAVs

Automatic optimization of robotic behavior has been the long-standing goal of Evolutionary Robotics. Allowing the problem at hand to be solved by automation often leads to novel approaches and new insights. A common problem encountered with this approach is that when this optimization occurs in a simulated environment, the optimized policies are subject to the reality gap when implemented in the real world. This often results in sub-optimal behavior, if it works at all. This paper investigates the automatic optimization of neurocontrollers to perform quick but safe landing maneuvers for a quadrotor micro air vehicle using the divergence of the optical flow field of a downward looking camera. The optimized policies showed that a piece-wise linear control scheme is more effective than the simple linear scheme commonly used, something not yet considered by human designers. Additionally, we show the utility in using abstraction on the input and output of the controller as a tool to improve the robustness of the optimized policies to the reality gap by testing our policies optimized in simulation on real world vehicles. We tested the neurocontrollers using two different methods to generate and process the visual input, one using a conventional CMOS camera and one a dynamic vision sensor, both of which perform significantly differently than the simulated sensor. The use of the abstracted input resulted in near seamless transfer to the real world with the controllers showing high robustness to a clear reality gap.

Satisficing Consequentialism Still Doesn't Satisfy

AbstractSatisficing consequentialism is an unpopular theory. Because it permits gratuitous sub-optimal behaviour, it strikes many as wildly implausible. It has been widely rejected as a tenable moral theory for more than twenty years. In this article, I rehearse the arguments behind this unpopularity, before examining an attempt to redeem satisficing. Richard Yetter Chappell has recently defended a form of ‘effort satisficing consequentialism’. By incorporating an ‘effort ceiling’ – a limit on the amount of willpower a situation requires – and requiring that agents produce at least as much good as they could given how much effort they are exerting, Chappell avoids the obvious objections. However, I demonstrate that the revised theory is susceptible to a different objection, and that the resulting view requires that any supererogatory behaviour must be efficient, which fails to match typical moral verdicts.

Reward Responsiveness and Inhibition Traits Differentially Predict Economic Biases in Gain and Loss Contexts.

Research on economic decision making has revealed specific biases in gain versus loss domains such that risky choice options are overvalued in gain conditions, implying optimism, but undervalued in loss conditions, implying pessimism. Individual differences in motivational traits and affective states have been shown to predict beliefs and behavior in risky decision making, but it is presently unclear which personal characteristics are most predictive of domain-specific biases. To address this gap in the literature, we investigated the relative influence of positive and negative motivational traits (general sensitivity to rewards and punishments) versus affective states (current levels of positive and negative emotions) on beliefs and choice behavior during a risky economic decision task. We also expanded on previous research by examining how the valence of one’s judgment context (positive context tested in Experiment 1, negative context tested in Experiment 2) may determine whether risky choice behavior is more strongly influenced by positive versus negative characteristics. Biases in belief were calculated using an economic decision task that involved estimating the value of risky “stocks” relative to safe “bonds” from experienced outcomes. Experiment 1 used a positive judgment context (likelihood of a “good stock”) while Experiment 2 used a negative judgment context (likelihood of a “bad stock”). Consistent with previous findings, we observed a domain-based bias in beliefs about stock values across experiments, such that participants exhibited optimism in gain domain and pessimism in the loss domain. Experiment 1 further revealed that domain-based bias and suboptimal choice behavior was predicted by trait-level reward sensitivity, while positive affective state (PAS) had a more limited influence on belief bias alone. Under the negative judgment context of Experiment 2, there was a similar relationship between reward sensitivity and choice behavior; however, results revealed a slightly stronger influence of negative affective state (NAS). A subsequent cross-study analysis found sensitivity to rewards was most predictive of domain-based biases. These results suggest that motivational traits – particularly those relating to reward sensitivity – are more consistent predictors of domain-based biases and risky choice behavior than affective states, but their predictive power depends the valence of the decision context.

Human and pigeon suboptimal choice.

Many studies have shown that pigeons will sometimes behave suboptimally by choosing an option that provides food less frequently over one that provides food more frequently. The critical factor in driving suboptimal behavior in these procedures is that the delayed outcomes are differentially signaled on the suboptimal alternative, but not the optimal alternative. Although this procedure is frequently cited as potentially analogous to human gambling, there is little empirical data to evaluate this assertion. The present study tested both pigeon (Experiment 1) and human (Experiment 2) subjects with a suboptimal choice task. Subjects chose between a suboptimal alternative that provided a large reinforcer 20% of the time and an optimal alternative that always provided a small reinforcer. Stimuli presented during the delays signaled the outcomes on the suboptimal alternative in some conditions. When outcomes were signaled, pigeons chose the suboptimal alternative more frequently than did humans. When the outcomes were not signaled, pigeons' choices became more optimal, but humans' choices did not. Humans' suboptimal choice was unrelated to performance on a probability discounting task. Overall, these findings suggest that although both pigeons and humans can choose suboptimally, more research is needed in order to determine whether non-human performance on this task can serve as a model for human gambling.

Leveraging Observations in Bandits: Between Risks and Benefits

Imitation learning has been widely used to speed up learning in novice agents, by allowing them to leverage existing data from experts. Allowing an agent to be influenced by external observations can benefit to the learning process, but it also puts the agent at risk of following sub-optimal behaviours. In this paper, we study this problem in the context of bandits. More specifically, we consider that an agent (learner) is interacting with a bandit-style decision task, but can also observe a target policy interacting with the same environment. The learner observes only the target’s actions, not the rewards obtained. We introduce a new bandit optimism modifier that uses conditional optimism contingent on the actions of the target in order to guide the agent’s exploration. We analyze the effect of this modification on the well-known Upper Confidence Bound algorithm by proving that it preserves a regret upper-bound of order O(lnT), even in the presence of a very poor target, and we derive the dependency of the expected regret on the general target policy. We provide empirical results showing both great benefits as well as certain limitations inherent to observational learning in the multi-armed bandit setting. Experiments are conducted using targets satisfying theoretical assumptions with high probability, thus narrowing the gap between theory and application.

Joint physical-activity/screen-time trajectories during early childhood: socio-demographic predictors and consequences on health-related quality-of-life and socio-emotional outcomes

BackgroundUnderstanding the early roots of physical activity and sedentary behaviors is critical to developing intervention programs that promote healthy lifestyle habits in infants and children. There is, however, no evidence on how these behaviors cluster and develop together during early childhood. The aim of this study was to identify single and joint longitudinal trajectories in physical activity and screen time amongst children aged 0 to 9 years, their social-demographic predictors and their prospective health-related quality-of-life and socio-emotional outcomes.MethodsThree waves of data from The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, a national study tracking two cohorts every 2 years (B-cohort, 0–5 years, n = 4,164; K-cohort, 4–9 years, n = 3,974) were analysed. Growth mixture modelling was applied to longitudinal time-use diary data to identify joint trajectories in children’s physical activity and screen time over Waves 1–3. Key socio-demographic variables measured at Wave 1 were used to predict membership in different trajectories. The prospective consequences (at Wave 3) of time-use trajectories on health-related quality-of-life and socio-emotional outcomes were assessed.ResultsThree physical-activity/screen-time trajectories were identified for both cohorts: Cluster-A—children who maintained low levels of physical activity and screen time (∽50% of the sample), Cluster-B—children who progressively increased physical activity and maintained low screen-time levels (∽25%), and Cluster-C—children who maintained low physical-activity levels and increased screen time (∽25%). Children in Cluster-B experienced the best health-related quality-of-life and socio-emotional outcomes, while those in Cluster-C experienced the worst. Children who were female, Indigenous, from non-English-speaking backgrounds, not living with two biological parents, in more affluent households and neighbourhoods, without siblings and with parents with poor mental health were at greater risk of falling into Cluster-A or Cluster-C.ConclusionOur findings identified which children are most at-risk of falling into time-use trajectories that lead to poor health-related quality-of-life and socio-emotional outcomes later in life, increasing our ability to monitor, detect and prevent these suboptimal behaviours prior to their onset.

The Measurement of Environmental Economic Inefficiency with Pollution-generating Technologies

This study introduces the measurement of environmental inefficiency from an economic perspective that integrates, in addition to marketed good outputs, the negative environmental externalities associated with bad outputs. We develop our proposal using the latest by- production models that consider two separate and parallel technologies: a standard technology generating good outputs, and a polluting technology for the by-production of bad outputs (Murty et al., 2012). While research into environmental inefficiency incorporating undesirable or bad outputs from a technological perspective is well established, no attempts have been made to extend it to the economic sphere. Our model defines an economic inefficiency measure that accounts for suboptimal behavior in the form of foregone private revenue and social cost excess (environmental damage). We show that economic inefficiency can be consistently decomposed according to technical and allocative criteria, considering the two separate technologies and market prices, respectively. We illustrate the empirical implementation of our approach on a set of established and complementary models using a dataset on agriculture at the level of US states.

Beyond mistreatment: Learner neglect in the clinical teaching environment

Medical student mistreatment has been recognized as a deterrent to education as it interferes with the learning process and contributes to student burnout and attrition. Medical schools and leaders in undergraduate medical education have expended tremendous effort in addressing this phenomenon in hopes of eradicating mistreatment. However, there is a spectrum of behaviors that negatively impact the learning environment beyond that which is considered frank mistreatment. In this conceptual article, the authors propose the concept of learner neglect for the consideration by educators and researchers. This is a term for a range of behaviors exhibited intentionally or unintentionally by a supervisor that prevent a learner from reaching his or her potential. While the behaviors may overlap with mistreatment, they do not always fit within the definition of mistreatment. This concept is illustrated in the context of optimal and suboptimal teaching behaviors that commonly occur within the ecosystem of clinical education. Descriptions and examples are provided for both intentional and unintentional learner neglect. The authors hypothesize possible short- and long-term impacts of learner neglect, describe contributors to its prevalence, and offer questions for key stakeholders to consider in an effort to recognize, study, and ameliorate this issue within medical education programs.