Multi-party Interaction in a Virtual Meeting Room

This paper presents an overview of the work carried out at the HMI group of the University of Twente in the domain of multi-party interaction. The process from automatic observations of behavioral aspects through interpretations resulting in recognized behavior is discussed for various modalities and levels. We show how a virtual meeting room can be used for visualization and evaluation of behavioral models as well as a research tool for studying the effect of modified stimuli on the perception of behavior

Redefining economic reason

Despite of Martin Heidegger’s warning not modern technology but modern economizing destroys the Being. With its exclusive focus on profit-making modern economizing endangers the integrity and diversity of natural ecosystems, autonomy and culture of local communities, and chances of future generations for a decent life. This paper gives a critique of the profit principle and redefines economic rationality in a more holistic, substantive and humanistic form

Risky Business

This article is part of an exchange including Anthony Alfieri and William Simon in the Georgetown Law Journal on the implications of law firms\u27 increasing reliance on the concept of risk management as the focus of efforts to ensure ethical conduct by lawyers. A risk management program involves the adoption of various policies and procedures designed to minimize conduct that may lead to individual and firm liability. Conflicts checking procedures, standard terms in engagement letters, and the requirement of a second signature by a disinterested partner on legal opinions are but a few of such measures. On one hand, the risk management paradigm reflects appreciation of the importance of situational incentives and pressures in shaping behavior in organizational settings. This is an advance over conceptions of legal ethics that assume that behavior is principally a function of individual character. Law firms are now major business enterprises, and their systems of rewards and sanctions, as well as their cultures, necessarily influence the conduct of those who work in them. Attending to the ways in which these influences can reinforce or discourage certain types of behavior can help firms establish and maintain environments that enhance the likelihood that lawyers will act ethically. On the other hand, a risk management approach risks inculcating an instrumental view of legal and ethical provisions. To the extent that it conceptualizes ethics as a matter of avoiding liability, risk management may foster the attitude of Holmes\u27s bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which . . . knowledge [of the law] enables him to predict. The bad man wants to avoid punishment, but has no commitment to legal compliance as a good in itself. This can lead to an impoverished view of law and ethics, in which the choice of behavior is contingent on the costs and benefits of a given course of action. This tension in the risk management model has been examined in the context of corporate legal compliance programs, and law firms may draw useful lessons from that research. Social psychologists and management theorists have identified complex connections among program characteristics, group dynamics, individual perceptions and motives, and employee behavior in the business setting. In particular, they have suggested that instrumental and values-based programs proceed on different premises and contribute to compliance in different ways. Instrumental programs can be effective by affecting employee cost-benefit calculations, while values-based programs can foster appropriate behavior because the employee identifies with the values that this behavior expresses. Scholars suggest that compliance programs with both dimensions generally are necessary, but integrating them into a single program requires careful consideration of how they may interact. The article closes by suggesting that this research on corporate programs may offer useful insights for law firms. It cautions, however, that applying this research will need to take account of the ways in which law firms both resemble and are different from typical business corporations

Animal moral psychologies

Observations of animals engaging in apparently moral behavior have led academics and the public alike to ask whether morality is shared between humans and other animals. Some philosophers explicitly argue that morality is unique to humans, because moral agency requires capacities that are only demonstrated in our species. Other philosophers argue that some animals can participate in morality because they possess these capacities in a rudimentary form. Scientists have also joined the discussion, and their views are just as varied as the philosophers’. Some research programs examine whether animals countenance specific human norms, such as fairness. Other research programs investigate the cognitive and affective capacities thought to be necessary for morality. There are two sets of concerns that can be raised by these debates. They sometimes suffer from there being no agreed upon theory of morality and no clear account of whether there is a demarcation between moral and social behavior; that is, they lack a proper philosophical foundation. They also sometimes suffer from there being disagreement about the psychological capacities evident in animals. Of these two sets of concerns—the nature of the moral and the scope of psychological capacities—we aim to take on only the second. In this chapter we defend the claim that animals have three sets of capacities that, on some views, are taken as necessary and foundational for moral judgment and action. These are capacities of care, capacities of autonomy, and normative capacities. Care, we argue, is widely found among social animals. Autonomy and normativity are more recent topics of empirical investigation, so while there is less evidence of these capacities at this point in our developing scientific knowledge, the current data is strongly suggestive

Cultures of Compliance

There has been a cultural turn in discussion and debates about the promise of corporate compliance efforts. These efforts are occurring quickly, without great confidence in their efficacy. Thus the interest in culture. This article explores what a culture of compliance means and why it is so hard to achieve. The dark side that enables non-compliance in organizations is powerful and often hidden from view, working via scripts that rationalize or normalize, denigrations of regulation, and celebrations of beliefs and attitudes that bring with them compliance dangers. The article addresses how both culture and compliance should be judged by those wishing for better corporate behavior

The Evolution of Religion: How Cognitive By-Products, Adaptive Learning Heuristics, Ritual Displays, and Group Competition Generate Deep Commitments to Prosocial Religio

Understanding religion requires explaining why supernatural beliefs, devotions, and rituals are both universal and variable across cultures, and why religion is so often associated with both large-scale cooperation and enduring group conflict. Emerging lines of research suggest that these oppositions result from the convergence of three processes. First, the interaction of certain reliably developing cognitive processes, such as our ability to infer the presence of intentional agents, favors—as an evolutionary by-product—the spread of certain kinds of counterintuitive concepts. Second, participation in rituals and devotions involving costly displays exploits various aspects of our evolved psychology to deepen people's commitment to both supernatural agents and religious communities. Third, competition among societies and organizations with different faith-based beliefs and practices has increasingly connected religion with both within-group prosociality and between-group enmity. This connection has strengthened dramatically in recent millennia, as part of the evolution of complex societies, and is important to understanding cooperation and conflict in today's world.by-product hypothesis, credibility enhancing displays, cultural 40 transmission, cooperation, group competition, high gods,min

The Blaming Function of Entity Criminal Liability

Application of the doctrine of entity criminal liability, which had only a thin tort-like rationale at inception, now sometimes instantiates a social practice of blaming institutions. Examining that social practice can ameliorate persistent controversy over entity liability\u27s place in the criminal law. An organization\u27s role in its agent\u27s bad act is often evaluated with a moral slant characteristic of judgments of criminality and with inquiry into whether the institution qua institution contributed to the agent\u27s wrong. Legal process, by lending clarity and authority, enhances the communicative impact, in the form of reputational effects, of blaming an institution for a wrong. Reputational effects can flow through to individuals in ways that reduce probability of future wrongdoing by altering individual preferences and forcing reevaluation and reform of institutional arrangements. Blame and utility are closely connected here: the impulse to blame organizations and the beneficial effects of doing so both appear to depend on the degree of institutional influence on the agent. These insights imply that the doctrine should be tailored, unlike present law, to more fully exploit criminal law\u27s expressive capital by selecting cases according to entity blameworthiness. Barriers to describing the phenomenon of organizational influence and culture prevent discovery of a first-best rule of institutional responsibility. A second-best step would be to enhance the existing doctrine\u27s examination of agent mens rea, to impose fault only if the agent acted primarily with the intent to benefit the firm

The Development and Evolution of the U.S. Law of Corporate Criminal Liability

In the United States, corporate criminal liability developed in response to the industrial revolution and the rise in the scope and importance of corporate activities. This article focuses principally on federal law, which bases corporate criminal liability on the respondeat superior doctrine developed in tort law. In the federal system, the formative period for the doctrine of corporate criminal liability was the early Twentieth Century, when Congress dramatically expanded the reach of federal law, responding to the unprecedented concentration of economic power in corporations and combinations of business concerns as well as new hazards to public health and safety. Both the initial development of the doctrine and the evolution in its use reflect a utilitarian and pragmatic view of criminal law. This article describes the evolution of the practice of corporate criminal liability and sentencing, arguing that administrative responses by the Department of Justice and the U.S. Sentencing Commission have responded to widespread criticism of the existence of corporate liability as well as the breadth of the respondeat superior standard of liability. As a result of this evolution in enforcement, only a very small number of corporations are convicted, and the penalties imposed on those that are convicted are adjusted to reflect corporate culpability. Nevertheless, the broad potential for criminal liability has significant consequences for a wide range of corporate behavior. Corporations have powerful incentives to perform internal investigations, cooperate with both regulators and prosecutors, and actively pursue settlement of claims of misconduct. To avoid criminal liability, corporations also enter into deferred prosecution agreements that often require changes in corporate business practices and governance as well as monitoring to ensure compliance. The purpose of these administrative responses attempt is to reduce or eliminate the negative effects of imposing criminal liability while exploiting the law’s power to deter criminal behavior, improve corporate citizenship, and bring about beneficial structural reforms. The persistence of the doctrine of respondeat-superior-based corporate criminal liability and its limitation in practice shed light on three key aspects federal criminal law. First, the Sentencing Guidelines have served as a more limited substitute for comprehensive criminal code reform. Second, the federal justice system lacks the resources to process the vast majority of cases falling under the criminal code, and prosecutorial discretion is relied upon to select a small fraction of cases for prosecution. Finally, like corporations, all defendants receive incentives for cooperation that may effectively compel them to plead guilty and/or assist in the investigation and prosecution of others