Friendship As A Relationship Infiltration Tactic During Human Mate Poaching: An Experimental Investigation

Previous research has characterized human mate poaching as a prevalent alternative mating strategy that entails risks and costs typically not present during general romantic courtship and attraction. This study is the first to experimentally investigate friendship between a poacher and poachee as a risk mitigation tactic. Participants (N = 382) read a vignette that differed by whether the poacher was male/female and whether the poacher and poachee were friends/acquaintances. Participants assessed the likelihood of the poacher being successful and incurring costs. They also rated the poacher and poachee on several personality and mate characteristics. Results revealed that friendship increased the perceived likelihood of success of a mate poaching attempt and decreased the perceived likelihood of several risks typically associated with mate poaching. However, friend-poachers were rated less favorably than acquaintance-poachers across measures of warmth, nurturance, and friendliness. These findings are interpreted using an evolutionary perspective. This study complements and builds upon previous findings and is the first experimental investigation of tactics mate poachers may use to mitigate risks inherent in mate poaching

Crowd-powered systems

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2012.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 217-237).Crowd-powered systems combine computation with human intelligence, drawn from large groups of people connecting and coordinating online. These hybrid systems enable applications and experiences that neither crowds nor computation could support alone. Unfortunately, crowd work is error-prone and slow, making it difficult to incorporate crowds as first-order building blocks in software systems. I introduce computational techniques that decompose complex tasks into simpler, verifiable steps to improve quality, and optimize work to return results in seconds. These techniques develop crowdsourcing as a platform so that it is reliable and responsive enough to be used in interactive systems. This thesis develops these ideas through a series of crowd-powered systems. The first, Soylent, is a word processor that uses paid micro-contributions to aid writing tasks such as text shortening and proofreading. Using Soylent is like having access to an entire editorial staff as you write. The second system, Adrenaline, is a camera that uses crowds to help amateur photographers capture the exact right moment for a photo. It finds the best smile and catches subjects in mid-air jumps, all in realtime. Moving beyond generic knowledge and paid crowds, I introduce techniques to motivate a social network that has specific expertise, and techniques to data mine crowd activity traces in support of a large number of uncommon user goals. These systems point to a future where social and crowd intelligence are central elements of interaction, software, and computation.by Michael Scott Bernstein.Ph.D

The Effect of Elaborative Interrogation on the Synthesis of Ideas from Multiple Sources of Information

The new Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (ACRL, 2016) highlights the ability to synthesize ideas from multiple sources of information as one of the key knowledge practices as students navigate an increasingly complex information landscape. With the introduction of this new document, there is a strong need for evidence-based guidance for information literacy instruction in academic libraries. There is little generalizable empirical research based on cognitive science principles to guide information literacy instruction practice. The present study examined the effectiveness of elaborative interrogation instructional strategy on integration and transformation of ideas from multiple sources of information. 86 participants took part in the study via Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. The experiment involved reading five texts on the topic of climate change and responding to embedded elaborative interrogation prompts (treatment groups only), and writing a synthesis paragraph on the topic. Contrary to the research hypothesis, the results of descriptive analysis showed that participants in the control group achieved a slightly better performance in transformation measure, as compared to participants in treatment groups. However, two one-way ANCOVAs were employed to test the hypotheses which indicated that elaborative interrogation prompts did not significantly improve performance on transformation and integration measures. This study contributes to the growing body of literature addressing information literacy instruction based on the new Framework and provides a promising long-term cross-disciplinary research partnership in terms of linking evidence-based guidance for instruction based on cognitive science principles to information literacy knowledge practices in the new Framework

Assessment of Iso-Ahola’s Theory of Tourism Motivation on Willingness to Fly as a Point-to-Point Suborbital Space Tourist

Suborbital space tourism involves flight in an air vehicle to an altitude exceeding 100 kilometers (62 miles). This altitude is referred to as the Karman Line and the edge of space. Point-to-point space travel is transportation in an air vehicle where the vehicle flies around the earth in space to decrease the time to travel from one point on the earth’s surface to another point on the earth’s surface. The commercial space flight industry has a vision for point-to-point space travel. The study aimed to assess the influence of the four dimensions of Iso-Ahola’s (1982) theory of tourism motivation on willingness to fly as a point-to-point suborbital space tourist. The theory of tourism motivation was the primary theoretical construct for this study. Age, gender, and annual gross income served as control variables. A quantitative methodology and non-experimental, cross-sectional study design was executed using 870 participants from Amazon’s ® Mechanical Turk ®. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the survey results to test the proposed theoretical model. The study revealed that, in order of effect size, interpersonal seeking, personal seeking, and interpersonal escape influenced willingness to fly as a point-to-point suborbital space tourist. Iso-Ahola’s original (1982) theory of tourism motivation proposed that tourism has two motivational forces: seeking and escaping. A person may seek to visit a location or engage in a leisure activity that produces satisfaction or escape a current environment for a location or leisure activity that produces satisfaction. The results of this study suggest seeking is predominant within these dialectic motivational forces as interpersonal seeking and personal seeking had the greatest direct standardized effect on willingness to fly. Additionally, the theory also applies a personal or interpersonal dimension. The study suggests that interpersonal is the predominant dimension as personal escape did not have a statistically significant influence on willingness to fly, and interpersonal seeking and interpersonal escape did. The control variable, annual gross income, did not have a statistically significant effect on willingness to fly. Age and gender did have a slightly negative statistically significant effect on willingness to fly but did not contribute significantly to the final model. The squared multiple correlations (R2 ) for the endogenous (predicted) variable, willingness to fly, was 0.402; the model demonstrated, in order of effect, interpersonal seeking, personal seeking, and interpersonal escape explain 40% of the variance in willingness to fly as a point-to-point suborbital space tourist. The study created a model to assess tourists’ motivation toward a willingness to fly as a point-to-point suborbital space tourist. The partial validation of the theory of tourism motivation and willingness to fly scale provides application in future space tourism research. Finally, from a practical perspective, the results provide validated data to target marketing to policymakers and potential point-to-point space tourists and investors

Beneath the Human Capital Investment: Modelling student debt awareness and a Critical examination of financial aid materials using Construal-level Theory

As student loans are increasingly utilized to invest in higher education, it is important to consider how students perceive and understand their loan commitments. Study 1 surveyed a sample of 147 Bard students on their attitudes towards debt and how much they knew about their loan commitments. Over half of the students sampled could not report how much they currently owed in student loans (N=76, 51.4%), 23.8% (N=35) could not identify the types of loans they held, 25.2% of participants could not provide an estimate of how much debt they expect to graduate with within a range of $5,000-$10,000, and the strongest predictor of debt ignorance was whether parents completely managed the financial aid process. Parents and students alike report the financial aid process to be extremely confusing and overwhelming, and the present study suggests an intervention to support financial aid decision-making. Study 2 primed participants to either think abstractly (think about why you do something) or concretely (think about how you do something), and compared how participants processed financial aid information when presented in a list with additional written descriptions versus a table which summarized all aid information in a concise, uniform structure. Those that read the financial aid package in a list with written descriptions displayed better recall of details of the aid package, and focused more on the total amount of aid offered than those that read the financial aid package in a table. It is suggested that aid packages separate types of aid into financial gifts and loans rather than bundling them into a single category of financial aid. The need for more personal and engaging student loan education is pressing, and may have long-term effects on financial behavior if designed carefully

SOCIAL CLASS AND EMPLOYABILITY: EQUALIZING PERCEIVED COMPETENCE AND WARMTH TO CONTROL BIASED DECISION-MAKING DURING RESUMÉ SCREENING

Implicit bias during the resumé screening process can adversely impact the ability of an organization to achieve a competitive advantage through human capital (Coff & Kryscynski, 2011). The purpose of this study was to determine if teaching resumé screeners how to control biased decision-making during resumé screening results in equal employability ratings for upper-middle and lower-middle-class applicants. The study used a quantitative, causal, quasi-experimental, single-group pretest-post-test design. The target population was people in the United States who screen resumés as part of their current job duties (Thomas, 2018). The researcher used Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to recruit participants. Participants received a job description for a management training program and two resumés, one representing an upper-middle-class job applicant and one representing a lower-middle-class applicant (Thomas, 2018). Participants rated each resumé on perceptions of warmth, competence, and employability using the warmth and competence scales (Fiske, 2018) and an Employment Assessment scale (Cole et al., 2009). Participants viewed four short training videos that included two tactics to reduce biased behavior (Carter et al., 2020; Devine et al., 2012). After treatment, the researcher repeated the pretest procedure, and participants received two new resumés to rate. At the pretest, employability ratings were not significantly different between upper-middle-class and lower-middle-class applicants. At the post-test, participants rated the lower-middle-class applicant higher for employability. Perceived competence mediated the effect of social class on employability at the pretest and again at the post-test. Perceived warmth mediated the effect of social class on employability only at the post-test

The Neural Representation of Value and individual Differences in Human Intertemporal Choice

Intertemporal choices, or decisions that involve tradeoffs between rewards and time, are ubiquitous in our daily lives. The tendency to devalue, or discount, future rewards has been linked to maladaptive long-term health and financial outcomes. Despite their broad clinical relevance, individual differences in discounting preferences are poorly understood. In this thesis, we make progress on the understanding of the neural basis of these decisions and factors that affect individual differences. The first two chapters focus on neurobiology. Chapter 2 investigates the decision-related variables that best explain the observed patterns of BOLD activity in ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) and ventral striatum (VS) during intertemporal choice. We find that these regions carry different signals and likely contribute to different stages of the choice process. Across the brain, we find four kinds of value-responsive regions, each carrying different combinations of value-related signals. Next, we examine whether we can predict participants\u27 choices from any or all of these groups of regions, and find that we can predict choice from most value-responsive regions, with interesting exceptions. In Chapter 3, we identify a novel brain predictor of individual differences in discounting. When participants are making judgments about how far away some number of days feels, discount rates, measured a week later, can be predicted from how VMPFC and VS respond as a function of temporal distance. This difference in the basic response to delayed time intervals could be a target for interventions aiming to reduce discount rates. In the final chapter, we find several behavioral manipulations that are able to reduce discount rates persistently and to a significant degree. We find that there is a general lack of knowledge about the normative strategy in the monetary discounting task, and that providing information about this strategy - to accept all delayed offers that provide higher interest rates than one could obtain elsewhere - reduces discounting significantly, for at least one month. Information about peers\u27 strategies for making these decisions also reduces discounting. Taken together, this work advances our understanding of individual differences in discounting and further suggests interventions that could be used to reduce discounting

A Behavioral Research Model for Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems for Data Gathering Operations

According to Hitlin (2017) of the Pew Research Center, only 8% of U.S. citizens own an unmanned aircraft. Additionally, regarding feelings if U.S. citizens saw an unmanned aircraft flying close to where they live, 26% say they would be nervous, 12% feel angry, and 11% are scared. As of March 9, 2018, there were 1,050,328 U.S. small unmanned aircraft system (sUAS) registrations compared to 947,970 November 29, 2017. While sUAS use has increased in the U.S., it has lagged when compared to other items for personal use available to U.S. citizens as 92% own cell phones (Anderson, 2015). This slower acceptance rate identifies a potential need for more research as to why. No studies have specifically focused on individual factors for the behavioral intention of using sUAS for data gathering, encompassing the variables used in this study, nor a Structural Equation Model that shows relevant factors and associated relationships. Also, current ground theories fall short, lacking appropriate variables or modeling ability. Thus, this dissertation study developed a new behavioral research model termed VMUTES to determine the factors that influenced individuals’ intentions to operate small sUASs for data gathering and relationships between those factors. A sUAS system is comprised of integrated hardware, software, processes, or firmware. Data gathering is defined in this study as the transmission or recording of audio, pictures, videos, or collection of other data for modeler, civil, or public use. The new VMUTES model integrates portions of the technology acceptance model (TAM) and theory of planned behavior (TPB) model integrated with new factors: perceived risk and knowledge of regulations. The study used random sampling of Amazon Mechanical Turk® (AMT) members using an AMT Human Intelligence Task (HIT) that included a link to an online cross-sectional large-scale survey to collect data. Data Analysis included descriptive statistics analysis and the SEM process. Besides developing and validating a model and determining influencing factors, attention was also on verifying the relationships between constructs. Study limitations and future research recommendations are also discussed. Results indicated the VMUTES model had a strong predictive power of sUAS use for data gathering with seven of the ten original hypotheses supported while having a good model fit. Four new hypotheses were also identified with three supported. Additionally, all VMUTES model factors except for facilitating conditions were determined to have either a direct or indirect effect on behavioral intention and/or actual behavior with the TAM and TPB related factors having the strongest effects. Practically, this study filled an aviation research knowledge gap for sUAS use for data gathering. It also provided a research model and identified influencing factors of individuals’ behavioral intentions related to sUAS for data gathering. Thus, the newly developed model incorporating new variables can be used for further sUAS research and can provide an adaptable model for aviation and other technology areas to predict and facilitate new technology implementation where current models fall short. Finally, this study explored new and verified previously existing demographic variables for individuals who use sUASs for data gathering

Motivational Mindsets about Change: Integrating Lay Theories of Personal and Situational Malleability.

The study of lay theories focuses on understanding people’s fundamental beliefs, the interpretations of the world that they shape, and their regulatory consequences. Central to this scientific endeavor is the subject of stability and changeability—a cornerstone concept of human motivation (Weiner, 1985). Theories of attribute stability motivate self-validation through performance and dispositional judgments of others, whereas theories of attribute malleability facilitate change-directed efforts and expectations of improvement (Kammrath & Peetz, 2012; Molden & Dweck, 2006). Thus far, research has primarily focused on people’s beliefs about their personal attributes (“self theories”); comparatively less has elucidated the implications of people’s beliefs about the external world (“situation theories”). The goal of this dissertation is to expand our understanding of how self theories and situation theories work and to introduce a new theoretical framework that integrates them. In Chapter 1, I introduce the lay theories of change literature and provide a general overview of the following chapters. In Chapter 2, I test an important boundary condition of previous self theory research: choice context. Four studies show that offering people the choice between persisting or quitting on an intellectual task replicates conventional lay theory differences in persistence, but these differences are eliminated when people’s choices are expanded to include switching problems. In Chapter 3, I examine the effects of people’s situation theories on behavior. Four studies show that construing situations as malleable rather than fixed galvanizes action to change unfavorable circumstances. In Chapter 4, I assess the implications of lay theories about how people should interact with their environments to achieve their goals. When it comes to achieving passion for work, some people believe that they should find work compatible with their interests whereas others believe that it comes through cultivating competence. These two mindsets lead to different affective forecasts and choices, but both are similarly effective at attaining passion. Assimilating these and past findings in Chapter 5, I propose the “Self by Situation Change” (SSC) model as a heuristic framework that integrates self and situation theories. Finally, I wrap up the dissertation with future directions and concluding thoughts in Chapter 6.PhDPsychologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113483/1/patchen_1.pd