731,108 research outputs found
The Perception of Anthropogenic Global Warming Modeled by Game Theory Decision Tables
Society is living in fear of catastrophic climate scenarios, the so called Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory. It is a multidisciplinary subject; this paper analyzes the psychology behind such thinking which is governing the perception and politics of the subject. It does this in so-called Game Theory decision tables for people's thinking. We come to the conclusion that current opinion in society will shift from 'active believer' to 'passive believer' to 'active non-believer' if evidence against AGW will continue to accumulate
Protection motivation theory: a proposed theoretical extension and moving beyond rationality-the case of flooding
Despite the significant financial and non-financial costs of household flooding, and the availability of products that can reduce the risk or impact of flooding, relatively few consumers choose to adopt these products. To help explain this, we combine the existing theoretical literature with evidence from 20 one-to-one discussions and three workshops with key stakeholders, as well as five round tables, to draw practical evidence of actual responses to flood risk. This analysis leads us to propose an extension to Protection Motivation Theory (PMT), which more accurately captures the decision-making process of consumers by highlighting the role of 'ownership appraisal'. We then assess the extent to which behavioral biases impact on this revised framework. By highlighting the interaction with an augmented model of PMT and behavioral biases, the paper sheds light on potential reasons behind the fact that consumers are unlikely to adopt property-level flood resilience measures and identifies strategies to increase flood protection. The Augmented PMT suggests that policymakers might focus on increasing the Ownership Appraisal element, both directly and by targeting the creation of more supportive social norms. The work presented here opens up a wide range of areas for future research in the field
Actuarial Assessment of Damages in Personal Injury Litigation: The Hong Kong Position and The Comparative International Aspects
Conventionally, the Hong Kong Courts follow English authorities in choosing multipliers in personal injury litigation, Most judges select the multiplier by reference to a spread of multipliers in comparable English and Hong Kong cases, The House of Lords deviated from this approach recently in Wells v Wells [1999] AC 345. It approved actuarial evidence as the primary method of assessing future pecuniary loss. The actuarial tables, known as the 'Ogden Tables', issued by the British Government Actuary's Department should be regarded as the starting point for selection of the appropriate multipliers in England, Although in theory the courts of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region are not bound by this House of Lord decision, it is anticipated that the conventional approach to choosing multipliers in Hong Kong will be hotly contested. This article attempts to analyse the legal and practical implications of Wells v Wells in Hong Kong, and surveys the modern trend of using actuarial evidence in personal injury litigation in other major jurisdictions.published_or_final_versio
A Substruction Approach to Assessing the Theoretical Validity of Measures
Background
Validity is about the logic, meaningfulness, and evidence used to defend inferences made when interpreting results. Substruction is a heuristic or process that visually represent the hierarchical structure between theory and measures. Purpose
To describe substruction as a method for assessing the toretical validity of research measures. Methods
Using Fawcett\u27s Conceptual-Theoretical-Empirical Structure. an exemplar is presented of substruction from the Individual and Family Self-Management Theory to the Striving to be strong study concepts and empirical measures. Results
Substruction tables display evidence supporting theoretical validity of the instruments used in the study. Conclusion
A high degree of congruence between theory and measure is critical to support the validity of the theory and to support attributions made about moderating, mediating, causal relationships, and intervention effects
Interference Effects in Quantum Belief Networks
Probabilistic graphical models such as Bayesian Networks are one of the most
powerful structures known by the Computer Science community for deriving
probabilistic inferences. However, modern cognitive psychology has revealed
that human decisions could not follow the rules of classical probability
theory, because humans cannot process large amounts of data in order to make
judgements. Consequently, the inferences performed are based on limited data
coupled with several heuristics, leading to violations of the law of total
probability. This means that probabilistic graphical models based on classical
probability theory are too limited to fully simulate and explain various
aspects of human decision making.
Quantum probability theory was developed in order to accommodate the
paradoxical findings that the classical theory could not explain. Recent
findings in cognitive psychology revealed that quantum probability can fully
describe human decisions in an elegant framework. Their findings suggest that,
before taking a decision, human thoughts are seen as superposed waves that can
interfere with each other, influencing the final decision.
In this work, we propose a new Bayesian Network based on the psychological
findings of cognitive scientists. We made experiments with two very well known
Bayesian Networks from the literature. The results obtained revealed that the
quantum like Bayesian Network can affect drastically the probabilistic
inferences, specially when the levels of uncertainty of the network are very
high (no pieces of evidence observed). When the levels of uncertainty are very
low, then the proposed quantum like network collapses to its classical
counterpart
Reference Points and Effort Provision
A key open question for theories of reference-dependent preferences is what determines the reference point. One candidate is expectations: what people expect could affect how they feel about what actually occurs. In a real-effort experiment, we manipulate the rational expectations of subjects and check whether this manipulation influences their effort provision. We find that effort provision is significantly different between treatments in the way predicted by models of expectation-based reference-dependent preferences: if expectations are high, subjects work longer and earn more money than if expectations are low
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