Auditory reverse correlation: a choose-your-own-adventure presentation

International audienceDoctora

Digging Communicative Intentions: The Case of Crises Events

International audienceIn emergency situations users of social networks convey all sorts of what have been called communicative intentions, well-known since the work of Austin (1962) and Searle (1969) as speech acts (SA). While speech acts have been the focus of close scrutiny in the philosophical and linguistic literature (see (Portner, 2018) for extended discussion), their role has been only rarely understood and exploited in processing social media content about crisis events, our focus here. Current work on communicative intentions in social media are topic-oriented, focusing on the correlation between SA and specific topics such as crisis (e.g., earthquakes) but also politics, celebrities, cooking, travel, etc. It has been observed that people globally tend to react to natural disasters with SA distinct from those used in other contexts (e.g., celebrities, which are essentially made up of comments). Here, we explore the further hypothesis of a correlation between different SA types and urgency and propose an in depth linguistic and computational analysis of communicative intentions in tweets from an urgency-oriented perspective. Indeed, SA are mostly relevant to identify intentions, desires, plans and preferences towards action and to ultimately produce a system intended to help rescue teams. Our contribution is four-fold and consists of: (1) A two-layer annotation scheme of speech acts both at the tweet and sub-tweet levels, (2) A new French dataset of about 13K tweets annotated for both urgency and SA, targeting both expected (e.g., storms) and unexpected or sudden (e.g., building collapse, explosion) events, (3) A thorough analysis of the annotations studying in particular the correlation between SA and the urgency of the message, SA and intentions to act categories (e.g., human damages), and SA and crisis types, finally, (4) A set of deep learning experiments to detect SA in crises related corpora. Our results show a strong correlation between SA and urgency annotations at both the tweet and sub-tweet levels with a particular salient correlation in the latter case, which constitutes a first important step towards SA-aware NLP-based crisis management on social media

Mechanisms of mobbing call recognition: exploring featural decoding in great tits

International audienceRecent research on bird calls has unearthed a striking result: birds sometimes react to the calls of other species that are neither geographically nor phylogenetically close. One mechanism explaining this response may be the recognition of specific acoustic features, also present in their own vocalisations, rather than the recognition of complete notes, with the result that unfamiliar calls may be understood if they contain the critical feature. Parids and other passerines produce mobbing calls with similar properties that are responded to across species (i.e., noisy, large frequency range notes reaching low frequencies and with numerous harmonics), that are therefore good candidates for recognition based on features. In a playback experiment, we explored the featural interpretation hypothesis by testing the response of free ranging great tits to artificial mobbing calls with varying acoustic properties. We first confirmed that they respond to artificial calls sharing all the targeted spectral properties (large frequency range, low frequency, noise and harmonics). In contrast, great tits did not respond to calls with the same rhythmicity but without the targeted features. We then tested whether great tits respond to calls that possess only one of the four above-mentioned properties. We show that great tits did not respond to any of the four treatments, and therefore no single specific spectral feature seems likely to explain great tits’ response to unknown calls. We discuss alternative mechanisms for decoding novel calls, notably through a similarity threshold

When do people dislike self-enhancers? When they claim to be superior

International audienceWhen do people dislike self-enhancers? When they claim to be superior Abstract. Self-enhancing statements can provide useful information. Why do we resent those who make them? We suggest that the resentment comes from a broader claim of superiority that self-enhancing statements can imply. In three experiments, we compared one condition, designed such that the self-enhancing claim would be perceived as a claim of superiority, to three conditions providing different contextual reasons for why the self-enhancing claim might not be a claim of superiority. In those conditions the self-enhancing claim is either called for, addressed to someone who performs better than the self-enhancer, or addressed to someone who doesn't compete in the domain mentioned of the self-enhancing claim. The results show that participants disliked the self-enhancer more and were more likely to deem the self-enhancing claim to be a brag when the self-enhancing claim was manipulated to be a claim of superiority

Epistemic gratitude and the provision of information

International audienceHuman society rests on communicated information, much of which is shared without an expectation of reward. We suggest that, like other forms of prosociality, this type of information provision is fueled by gratitude. To reflect the fact that information differs in some ways from other goods, we call this form of gratitude epistemic gratitude. In a first experiment (N=185), we show that participants are more grateful for information that provides more benefits, at a greater cost to the sender, that was sent intentionally, and gratuitously. Experiment 2 (N=198) shows that information shared with a large audience generates less gratitude in individual audience members. Experiment 3 (N=200) shows that information that can be further passed on to others elicits more gratitude. Experiment 4 (N=259) failed to show that gratitude increased especially when an initially doubted piece of information is confirmed. All experiments were pre- registerered, implemented online through Prolific with participants from the US, UK and Ireland. In the supplementary materials, we also report a series of inconclusive experiments testing whether participants think others communicate in a way that maximizes gratitude in the audience. In conclusion, we speculate on the consequences of epistemic gratitude—in particular, which type of information is more likely to elicit epistemic gratitude—for diverse cultural phenomena, from personalization in marketing to rumor diffusio

Revisiting Stanley Milgram’s Experiment: What Lessons Can We Learn from It Today?

Since the publication of “Behavioral studies of obedience” in 1963, and then of “Obedience to Authority” in 1974, the experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram at Yale in the early 1960s has provoked many lively debates. The opening of his archives by Yale University (Blass 2002), the partial replication of the experiment (Burger 2009), interviews with former “guinea pigs” or collaborators (Perry 2012), as well as the more general context of the replicability crisis in experimental psychology (Ritchie 2020) have triggered a revival of these debates.On the basis of these new data, several aspects of Milgram’s experiments have been reexamined: their experimental protocol, which does not exactly match Milgram's account of it (Gibson 2019); the decision not to include in the interpretation interviews in which subjects claimed not to have been fooled by the device designed to deceive them (Perry, Brannigan & alii 2018); the lessons to be learned from the behavior observed (Burger, Girgis & Manning 2011; Reicher, Haslam & Smith 2012); the usefulness of these findings in explaining the behavior of ordinary perpetrators during genocides, and in particular the Shoah (Russell & Gregory 2015; Roth 2022); the moral legitimacy of the device itself (Perry 2012). Moreover, all of these investigations converge on the question of whether the crisis of reproducibility affects experiments on authority and, if so, to what extent. As Stuart Ritchie's (2020) cautious treatment of the Milgram case in his review of the reproducibility crisis shows, this question remains open.The fact remains that debates around one of the founding and paradigmatic works of experimental social psychology ultimately call into question the very value of this discipline or at least the direction it should take. Augustine Brannigan goes so far as to call for “the end of experimental social psychology” (Brannigan 2017, p. 141) in this regard. Finally, both Milgram and the psychologists and philosophers following in his wake interpreted the astonishment that his results aroused as a symptom of adherence to a mistaken anthropology. The situationist research program thus aimed to understand what this error is, where it comes from, and how to rectify it (Ross & Nisbett 1991; Doris 2005; Sabini & Silver 2005; Roth 2022). The subsequent interrogation of Milgram's results thus also calls into question the value of this philosophical program.The authority experiments were based on epistemological and ontological presuppositions that conditioned their design and interpretation, and that have thus far rarely been drawn out and directly discussed. For example, by designating his task as an “experiment on authority”, Milgram presupposed the existence of a concept of authority that would apply to the experiment in question, but about which he remained confused, because he was theoretically eclectic, relying as much on Hannah Arendt as on cybernetics (Milgram 1974). Stephen Gibson (2019) thus looked for a concept that could adequately describe what was actually taking place during the experiment and suggested that the Foucauldian concept of power was more suitable than the concept of authority.To take another example, Milgram's explicit goal was not only to reproduce in the laboratory an ordinary relationship of subordination, but to simulate the administrative and social structure that made possible the implementation of the extermination of the European Jews (Milgram 1963; Milgram 1974; Blass 2002). Against the prejudice according to which historical events are non-repeatable singularities, he thus presupposed the possibility of solving experimentally some of the explanatory problems that plague historians.In order to contribute productively to current debates on the value of Milgram's experiments, and more generally of social psychology, this special issue tries to identify the presuppositions, theoretical consequences, and justifications of the experiments

Event completion: a test case for theories of reference in memory

International audienceAlthough we encounter objects from a particular perspective, what we perceive and remember are typically whole objects. In ‘amodal completion’ our mind automatically fills in objects’ spatially occluded parts, and our memory then often discards infor- mation about the orientation from which the objects were perceived. An analogous phenomenon of ‘event completion’ has been demonstrated, which may be understood as the mind automatically filling in temporally occluded parts of events. Exemplifying typical experiments in this paradigm, Strickland and Keil (Strickland and Keil, Cog- nition 121:409–415, 2011) showed participants videos depicting a causal event (e.g., someone kicking a ball), which was edited so that a crucial part was missing (e.g., the moment of contact between foot and ball). Subjects were more likely to falsely remember having seen the moment of contact if (and only if) it was strongly implied by subsequent footage. We use this phenomenon of event completion as a test case for comparing different theories of reference in memory. We argue that event com- pletion puts pressure on both pure causal and pure descriptive theories of reference, and favors more nuanced hybrids of causal and descriptive theories, which integrate insights from cognitive and epistemic approaches

Addressing climate change with behavioral science: A global intervention tournament in 63 countries

International audienceEffectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an effortful tree-planting behavioral task. Across 59,440 participants from 63 countries, the interventions’ effectiveness was small, largely limited to nonclimate skeptics, and differed across outcomes: Beliefs were strengthened mostly by decreasing psychological distance (by 2.3%), policy support by writing a letter to a future-generation member (2.6%), information sharing by negative emotion induction (12.1%), and no intervention increased the more effortful behavior—several interventions even reduced tree planting. Last, the effects of each intervention differed depending on people’s initial climate beliefs. These findings suggest that the impact of behavioral climate interventions varies across audiences and target behaviors

Modelling contrast and feature inventory: The nature of [web] in French Sign Language

International audienceSign language feature-based models use distinctive features to describe the phonological structure of signs. We use near-minimal pairs and phonological processes like productivity and neutralisation in French Sign Language to show that the feature [web], which refers to the webbing part of the fingers, should be (re)introduced in the list of phonologically active features. In discussing potential cases of [web] in other sign languages and the impact on the shape of phonological inventories, we first offer an account of [web] in terms of a location feature in line with most traditional feature-geometry models. We then offer some speculations on why a more uniform characterisation of [web] and the features in the same subclass in terms of the orientation type results in more economical models

Assertion, cooperativity and evidence on X

International audienceCooperative assertion is known to be grounded in a strong veridical commitment and to fulfill Veridicality Principle : one must assert p if and only if one believes or knows p to be true (see a.o. Searle (1975), Grice (1975), Bach and Harnish, (1984), Davidson (1985), Vanderveken (1990), Harnish (1994), Williamson (1996), Portner (2018), Giannakidou and Mari (2021a), Lauer (2013))