Forgetting as a way to avoid deception in a repeated imitation game

Adversarial decision making is aimed at determining optimal decision strategies to deal with an adaptive opponent. A clear example of such situation is the repeated imitation game presented here. Two agents compete in an adversarial model where one agent wants to learn how to imitate the actions taken by the other agent by means of the observation and memorization of the past actions. One defense against this adversary is to make decisions that are intended to confuse him. To achieve this, randomized strategies that change along time for one of the agents are proposed and their performance is analysed from both a theoretical and empirical point of view. We also study the ability of the imitator to avoid deception and adapt to a new behaviour by forgetting the oldest observations. The results confirm that wrong assumptions about the imitator’s behaviour lead to dramatic losses due to a failure in causing deception.Grupo de investigación TIC-169: Modelos de Decisión y Optimización (MODO

Ethically Adrift: How Others Pull Our Moral Compass from True North, and How We Can Fix It

This chapter is about the social nature of morality. Using the metaphor of the moral compass to describe individuals' inner sense of right and wrong, we offer a framework to help us understand social reasons why our moral compass can come under others' control, leading even good people to cross ethical boundaries. Departing from prior work focusing on the role of individuals' cognitive limitations in explaining unethical behavior, we focus on the socio-psychological processes that function as triggers of moral neglect, moral justification and immoral action, and their impact on moral behavior. In addition, our framework discusses organizational factors that exacerbate the detrimental effects of each trigger. We conclude by discussing implications and recommendations for organizational scholars to take a more integrative approach to developing and evaluating theory about unethical behavior

Neuroeconomics: How Neuroscience Can Inform Economics

Neuroeconomics uses knowledge about brain mechanisms to inform economic analysis, and roots economics in biology. It opens up the "black box" of the brain, much as organizational economics adds detail to the theory of the firm. Neuroscientists use many tools— including brain imaging, behavior of patients with localized brain lesions, animal behavior, and recording single neuron activity. The key insight for economics is that the brain is composed of multiple systems which interact. Controlled systems ("executive function") interrupt automatic ones. Emotions and cognition both guide decisions. Just as prices and allocations emerge from the interaction of two processes—supply and demand— individual decisions can be modeled as the result of two (or more) processes interacting. Indeed, "dual-process" models of this sort are better rooted in neuroscientific fact, and more empirically accurate, than single-process models (such as utility-maximization). We discuss how brain evidence complicates standard assumptions about basic preference, to include homeostasis and other kinds of state-dependence. We also discuss applications to intertemporal choice, risk and decision making, and game theory. Intertemporal choice appears to be domain-specific and heavily influenced by emotion. The simplified ß-d of quasi-hyperbolic discounting is supported by activation in distinct regions of limbic and cortical systems. In risky decision, imaging data tentatively support the idea that gains and losses are coded separately, and that ambiguity is distinct from risk, because it activates fear and discomfort regions. (Ironically, lesion patients who do not receive fear signals in prefrontal cortex are "rationally" neutral toward ambiguity.) Game theory studies show the effect of brain regions implicated in "theory of mind", correlates of strategic skill, and effects of hormones and other biological variables. Finally, economics can contribute to neuroscience because simple rational-choice models are useful for understanding highly-evolved behavior like motor actions that earn rewards, and Bayesian integration of sensorimotor information

The operation of the eye

"The overall project is about practices of exchange, particularly theft, cheating, and humor, which are elusive for an outsider. As a native ethnographer with family members involved in the fish business, I was able to gain insights otherwise unattainable for a woman and an outsider to this almost all-male community. My American academic training offered ways of de-familiarizing the native context, opening new lines of interpretation. To expound a topic that is somewhat out of the ordinary, I have mobilized the existing anthropological literature, which largely ignores urbanization in Sardinia, and theories from other fields, such as psychoanalysis and literature. This composite methodology mimics the multivocality of the fish market, where a unitary assessment of what is property, legality, and truth is not universal and determined in advance, but it is constructed in a certain context and often determined by that context.

On standards and values: Between finite actuality and infinite possibility

This article explores the relation between subjects and standards in a way that is informed by a process orientation to theoretical psychology. Standards are presented as objectifications of values designed to generalize and stabilize experiences of value. Standards are nevertheless prone to becoming “parodic” in the sense that they can become obstacles to the actualization of the values they were designed to incarnate. Furthermore, much critical social science has mishandled the nature of standards by insisting that values are nothing but local and specific constructions in the mundane world of human activity. To rectify this problem, this article reactivates a sense of the difference between the idea of a finite world of activity and a world of value which points beyond and exceeds passing circumstance. Resources for the reactivation of this difference— which is core to a processual grasp of self, memory, and value—are found in the thinking of A. N. Whitehead, Max Weber, Marcel Proust, and Soren Kierkegaard

Folkloric behavior : a theory for the study of the dynamics of traditional culture

Revised edition of dissertation. Revisions from the original print edition held by the library are noted in the preface. Pagination also differs from original print edition."Folklore" may be defined as a class of learned, traditional responses forming a distinct type of behavior. The individual must undergo the psychological process of learning in order to acquire the responses of folkloric behavior, and this learning process occurs under conditions determined by social and cultural factors. The fundamental factors involved in learning are: drive, cue, response, and reward. Secondary factors such as repetition, recency, and ego involvement can contribute, but their presence is not required in the process of learning. Folkloric behavior is distinguishable from non traditional, non folkloric behavior, and consequently, folkloric responses are distinguishable from other classes of responses, such as those characteristic of modern science and technology. Thus, folklorists should initially concern themselves with folkloric responses (narrating, believing, singing, applying a proverb, or dancing) and relevant social and cultural factors before proceeding to the study of the folklore items themselves (narratives, beliefs, songs, proverbs, or dances). Through the application of psychological theories of individual and social learning to folkloric phenomena, we can gain an understanding of the forces affecting the perpetuation or extinction of folklore and thus can explain the function of a particular folkloric response in a particular community

The impact of interview style on the development, maintenance, and transfer of rapport

Investigative interviews are a central part of policing. Police interviewers use the information obtained from interviews to develop investigative leads or to make effective decisions. Therefore, it is important that the information is as detailed and accurate as possible. The recognized importance of interviewing has resulted in substantial research efforts being placed into the development of techniques that enhance information provision. One proposal for how these techniques lead to greater information provision is via increased rapport between the interviewer and interviewee. Although numerous interviewing models recommend rapport, the impact of interview style on rapport has rarely been tested directly in interviews with suspects. There has also not been a consideration of how rapport would be affected by repeated exposure to specific individuals and law enforcement in general. In this thesis, I aim to test whether rapport once established can be maintained between multiple interviews and across multiple interviewers. This is a critical gap in our knowledge, as in police interviews it is common practice for suspects to be interviewed more than once and by different interviewers at different times. It is therefore important to know whether previous interactions with the police could affect future interactions in terms of rapport. A second key aim of this thesis is to test if nonverbal mimicry measured via motion capture suits can serve as an objectively rated behavioural proxy of rapport as several studies showed that behavioural mimicry is higher in people with well-established rapport and further, mimicry results in increased rapport. My findings suggest that the interview style impacts on rapport and mimicry. However, I could not find evidence for a link between rapport and disclosed information, or rapport and mimicry

Selective learning from others : children’s motive-based inferences about an individual’s credibility

People are highly attentive to others’ motivations when assessing credibility. For instance, political candidates who appear to act against self-interests (e.g., praise an opponent) are considered more trustworthy than those who act in self-serving ways (e.g., attack an opponent or praise themselves). How early in life does self-interest based trust/skepticism develop? A main goal of the dissertation was to test whether children’s trust behaviors are influenced by self-interest cues. In two studies, adult and child participants (N = 136) played a finding game with another player. The other player served as the informant for the location of hidden prizes. Participants, seated in another room, had to guess (from two potential locations) where they thought the prize actually was. Informants were incentivized via reward rules to be truthful (informants only benefitted if participants guessed correctly) or deceitful (informants only benefitted if participants guessed incorrectly). If participants can infer the informants’ credibility solely from reward rules associated with self-interest, they should trust the other player less often if interests conflict. A second goal was to identify socio-cognitive skills that may be associated with people’s ability to (mis)trust selectively. Some of the skills that were investigated include: participants’ ability to remember and manipulate information, awareness that people can infer others’ intentions, understanding that people may arrive at different conclusions when reasoning about the same stimuli, and general intuitions about whether others are likely to keep their word. Like adults, children playing the finding game sometimes adjusted their behavior flexibly and strategically to match self-interests—without having prior expectations about another individual’s predisposition to cooperate. Specifically, children and adults trusted their partner more often when the game incentivized cooperation versus competition. However, our results also suggest that children’s ability to benefit from cooperation incentives has not fully developed in the elementary school years: even 9-year-olds seemed more suspicious of partners with common interests than did adults. Children’s working memory skills predicted whether they would perform similarly to adults. Taken together, these findings significantly advance our understanding of children’s trust judgments as guided by their self-interest based inferences.Psycholog