Public Attitudes to the Welfare of Broiler Chickens

This paper reports results from two workshops held in York, England that investigated public attitudes towards the welfare of broiler chickens. At the outset the majority of participants admitted that they knew little about how broiler chickens are reared and were shocked at some of the facts presented to them. Cognitive mapping and aspects of Q methodology were used to reveal the range of variables that participants believed affected chicken welfare, the causal relationships between those variables, and what variables were considered most and least important. While some participants focused on the importance of meeting basic needs such as access to food, water, light and ventilation, others highlighted the role of welfare regulations and public opinion. Factor analysis of the results from a ranking exercise identified two factor groups, “Factor one - The bigger picture” and “Factor two – Basic animal rights”. The findings demonstrate that some members of the public are both interested in learning about how their food is produced and concerned about the conditions faced by broiler chickens. Some are able to see clear links between public opinion and the welfare of farm animals, an important connection if consumer behaviour is to contribute towards improving animal welfare.Animal welfare, broiler chickens, cognitive mapping, public attitudes, Q methodology., Livestock Production/Industries, Consumer/Household Economics,

How to play fair in international environmental agreements? - Bridging psychological and economic methods

Global public good provision (e.g. environmental quality) confronts us with problems demanding both national and international co-operation. However among sovereign nations reaching agreement on mutual public good provision is difficult. Slowing down global warming is just one example. Due to the diffusion of greenhouse gases in the earth's atmosphere it is attractive for each individual state that other countries commit themselves to climate protection, whereas one's own state using the free-rider-strategy benefits from the protective measures of the others without making any costly national contribution. On the other hand such a strategic behaviour clashes with moral values, especially concerning motives of justice within society. Should free-riding be preferred from the strategic point of view or rather, out of consideration to justice, national commitments to contribute to climate protection? Therefore, an analysis of how appraisals of justice and strategic considerations interact is a challenge to international (environmental) policy. Taking a game-theoretic point of view, we analyse three psychological-empirical conceptions of justice: need, equality and equity, and point out how these principles are able to determine the type of game nations are expected to play. --

Risk communication and participatory research: ‘Fuzzy felt’, visual games and group discussion of complex issues

Published

Understanding and Managing Behavioural Risks -The Case of Food Risks Caused by Malpractice in Poultry Production

The probability that actors in economic relationships break rules increases with the profits they thus expect to earn. It decreases with the probability and level of short- and long-term losses resulting from disclosure. It also decreases with the level of social context factors and intrinsic values which shield actors from yielding to economic temptations. This paper assesses the relative merits of various scientific approaches concerned with risks in economic relationships and outlines their contribution to the study of opportunistic rule-breaking. Since the identification of (misdirected) economic incentives faced by firms and individuals represents the starting point for a systematic analysis of opportunism in any field, we also outline a microeconomic approach that systematically provides this crucial information. The approach is applied to the problem of food quality and safety threatened by opportunistic malpractice of food business operators. Its essentials are illustrated through a study which systematically searches for the temptations to break production-related rules in the poultry industries.asymmetric information, control theories, economic misconduct, game theory, moral hazard, principal-agent model, opportunism, protective factors, relational risks, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, A13, K32, K42,

Status Quo Analysis of the Flathead River Conflict

Status quo analysis algorithms developed within the paradigm of the graph model for conflict resolution are applied to an international river basin conflict involving the United States and Canada to assess the likeliness of various compromise resolutions. The conflict arose because the state of Montana feared that further expansion of the Sage Creek Coal Company facilities in Canada would pollute the Flathead River, which flows from British Columbia into Montana. Significant insights not generally available from a static stability analysis are obtained about potential resolutions of the conflict under study and about how decision makers’ interactions may direct the conflict to distinct resolutions. Analyses also show how political considerations may affect a particular decision maker’s choice, thereby influencing the evolution of the conflict

Nobody Wants to Eat Them Alive:” Ethical Dilemmas and Dual Media Narratives on Domestic Rabbits as Pets and Commodity

Using semiotic analysis, this study explores changes occurring in the societal perception of rabbits as farm animals as juxtaposed to their increasing popularity as domestic companions. This study is based on a preliminary hypothesis that rabbits are increasingly perceived and portrayed in media as domestic companion animals similar to cats and guinea pigs, which challenges a parallel narrative that views rabbits as commodities for their meat and fur. Operating within a theoretical framework that considers news media as both socially constructed reality and recorded history, the study examines the dynamics of change in numbers of coded news narratives drawn as a 1000-piece convenience sample from a database of news stories published worldwide between 1990 and 2011

On Custom

Custom is a key factor for economic performance. Social and economic institutions build on it. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the motivational force of custom per se, as brought about by history. History creates entitlements, and these influence behavior. Custom is thus understood as a set of behavioral dispositions inherited from the past. In this, the present considerations deviate from earlier approaches that take custom as being stabilized by external rewards and sanctions alon

Game Theory Relaunched

The game is on. Do you know how to play? Game theory sets out to explore what can be said about making decisions which go beyond accepting the rules of a game. Since 1942, a well elaborated mathematical apparatus has been developed to do so; but there is more. During the last three decades game theoretic reasoning has popped up in many other fields as well - from engineering to biology and psychology. New simulation tools and network analysis have made game theory omnipresent these days. This book collects recent research papers in game theory, which come from diverse scientific communities all across the world; they combine many different fields like economics, politics, history, engineering, mathematics, physics, and psychology. All of them have as a common denominator some method of game theory. Enjoy

Perceptually Valid Facial Expressions for Character-Based Applications

This paper addresses the problem of creating facial expression of mixed emotions in a perceptually valid way. The research has been done in the context of a “game-like” health and education applications aimed at studying social competency and facial expression awareness in autistic children as well as native language learning, but the results can be applied to many other applications such as games with need for dynamic facial expressions or tools for automating the creation of facial animations. Most existing methods for creating facial expressions of mixed emotions use operations like averaging to create the combined effect of two universal emotions. Such methods may be mathematically justifiable but are not necessarily valid from a perceptual point of view. The research reported here starts by user experiments aiming at understanding how people combine facial actions to express mixed emotions, and how the viewers perceive a set of facial actions in terms of underlying emotions. Using the results of these experiments and a three-dimensional emotion model, we associate facial actions to dimensions and regions in the emotion space, and create a facial expression based on the location of the mixed emotion in the three-dimensional space. We call these regionalized facial actions “facial expression units.