Using Unexpected Simplicity to Control Moral Judgments and Interest in Narratives

The challenge of narrative automatic generation is to produce not only coherent, but interesting stories. This study considers the problem within the Simplicity Theory framework. According to this theory, interesting situations must be unexpectedly simple, either because they should have required complex circumstances to be produced, or because they are abnormally simple, as in coincidences. Here we consider the special case of narratives in which characters perform actions with emotional consequences. We show, using the simplicity framework, how notions such as intentions, believability, responsibility and moral judgments are linked to narrative interest

AEINS: Interactive Narrative Role in Fostering Character Education

Promoting ethical, responsible, and caring young people is a perennial aim of education. Efforts have been done to find other teaching ways other than traditional ones such as games and role play. Narrative-based computer games have found their way as engaging learning platforms that allow collaboration of humans and computers in the creation of innovative experiences. In this paper, we focus on the design of an adaptive, interactive narrative model that makes use of a student model to provide an individualized story-path and an individualized learning process. In other words, we aim to have strong learning objectives underpinned by effective story telling. The adaptive narrative model has been deployed in the educational game environment, AEINS, along with the use of the Socratic Method and pedagogical agents to help teaching in the ethics domain. Evaluation results indicate the usefulness of the design and provide evidence on the development of moral reasoning and the transfer of moral virtues to its users

Places in placelessness — notes on the aesthetic and the strategies of place–making

The paper discusses the aesthetic aspects of place‑making practices in the urban environment of Western metropoles that are struggling with the progressive undifferentiation of their space and the weakening of communal and personal bonds. The paper starts by describing the general characteristics of an urban environment as distinct from the traditional vision of a city as a well‑structured entity, and in relation to formal and informal aesthetics and participatory design ideas. The author then focuses on two contrary but complementary tactics for translating a space into a positively evaluated p l a ce: by dome ticating it through introducing nature into an urbanscape; and by accentuating its alienness with the example of the urban exploration movement. The growing popularity of the latter is presented in relation to the discourses related to the decline of cities and the romantic endeavours for reaching into the realm of the unknown or the uncanny in order to rediscover and enrich the unique identity of a place. The paper ends with conclusions that present the necessity for the cultivation of a multidimensional aesthetic awareness and an aesthetic engagement as a crucial issue in the complex task of endowing places with a density of meaning

Investigating the foreign language effect as a mitigating influence on the ‘optimality bias’ in moral judgements

Bilinguals often display reduced emotional resonance their second language (L2) and therefore tend to be less prone to decision-making biases in their L2 (e.g., Costa et al. in Cognition 130(2):236–254, 2014a, PLoS One 9(4):1–7, 2014b)—a phenomenon coined Foreign Language Effect (FLE). The present pre-registered experiments investigated whether FLE can mitigate a special case of cognitive bias, called optimality bias, which occurs when observers erroneously blame actors for making “suboptimal” choices, even when there was not sufficient information available for the actor to identify the best choice (De Freitas and Johnson in J Exp Soc Psychol 79:149–163, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2018.07.011). In Experiment 1, L1 English speakers (N = 63) were compared to L2 English speakers from various L1 backgrounds (N = 56). In Experiment 2, we compared Finnish bilinguals completing the study in either Finnish (L1, N = 103) or English (L2, N = 108). Participants read a vignette describing the same tragic outcome resulting from either an optimal or suboptimal choice made by a hypothetical actor with insufficient knowledge. Their blame attributions were measured using a 4-item scale. A strong optimality bias was observed; participants assigned significantly more blame in the suboptimal choice conditions, despite being told that the actor did not know which choice was best. However, no clear interaction with language was found. In Experiment 1, bilinguals gave reliably higher blame scores than natives. In Experiment 2, no clear influence of target language was found, but the results suggested that the FLE is actually more detrimental than helpful in the domain of blame attribution. Future research should investigate the benefits of emotional involvement in blame attribution, including factors such as empathy and perspective-taking

Making the Margins Legitimate: Travel, Family, and National Identity in Eighteenth-Century British Fiction

This study examines the first novels of Frances Burney and Tobias Smollett in order to analyze the effects of inner, familial forces and outer, worldly forces on the narrators’ national identity. Written thirty years apart, the novels follow a remarkably similar plot structure to arrive at different configurations of national identity. I argue that success creating a fictional character who fully enters British society is ultimately dependent upon the author’s own sense of marginalization. Indeed, Burney and Smollett configure their sense of Britishness around their own social positions as a woman and Scot respectively. Finally, these findings maintain that the differing pictures of national identity raised in these novels indicate a changing national situation. While the image of an ideal Briton remains unstable, the forces moving authors and readers to define Britishness are widespread

Popular Culture as a Lens on Legal Professionalism

Why use art to teach lawyering?\u27 Despite divergences in method and intention, the two disciplines overlap. If the prevalence of lawyers in movies, television, literature, and even humor means anything, popular culture remains fascinated with lawyers. Our practices, our ethics, and our professional personae serve as a mine for image and narrative, a target for cultural critique, and a catalyst for expression. Not surprisingly, images of lawyers in cartoons, film, television, and literature offer unique opportunities to teach and explore professionalism. The proliferation of lawyer images in popular culture provides an array of material ranging from career choice to particular actions and behavior. This material elicits powerful responses about the morality, purpose, role, and identity of lawyers, in addition to traditional questions of legal ethics. The responses prompt students to reflect on career choice, professional persona in the legal world, and their development as human beings within a web of professional commitments. This Article argues that the cultural images of lawyering provide opportunities for teaching professionalism that go well beyond the teaching of ethical rules using hypothetical facts. We contend that use of different media allows teachers to chart the broad middle ground between disciplinary minima and aspirational maxima-the map of realistic professional practice. This ground includes both rule- and conduct-based ideas ofprofessionalism: careful role definition; responsible practice management; appropriate balance between public and private commitments; and concerns over manners, dress, and work ethic. The middle ground also includes less traditional content, discussion of which brings students to appreciate the subjective disciplines of lawyering. The subjective dimension includes the feel of lawyering for the practitioner: the psychic demands of an active, fully engaged practice. It also includes the subjective experience of the clients who use lawyers, as well as the complex interweaving of subjective and external factors in the situations in which lawyers are called to act. Using cultural representations of lawyers thus expands the notion of professionalism outside the bounds of the codified professional rules of conduct. One professor of ethics and professionalism refers to the examination of the varying layers of legal work as involving macro and micro contexts. We accept this distinction, and extend it: the rules of ethics provide a micro-context, around which popular media provide a macro context within which to appraise a different (and fuller) notion of professionalism. What renders the use of media unique is its tendency to prompt immediate imaginative experience and assessment of the various dimensions of professionalism. Through a well-chosen excerpt, one can consider both what the rules of ethics require alongside discussions of the moral complexity, emotional content, or even spiritual challenge posed by the situation. From these conversations, students can emerge with their language and awareness enlarged to include a richer and more reflective vision of their own identities as lawyers. Our argument proceeds in three phases. First, we review widespread notions of professionalism, illustrating and explicating our notion of professionalism as occupying the middle ground between discipline and aspiration. Second, we provide examples of teaching plans in which we have used different media, including examples of cartoons, movies, and short fiction as vehicles for teaching. Finally, we appraise the common challenges and objections to using the arts for these purposes; while law students form our first and most immediate pool of critics, these objections may have also occurred to others who have used the arts in this way. We recognize that our approach builds on the enthusiastic use of fictional representation in many modem law school ethics classes. We do not criticize, but rather seek to expand the range of what a teacher can do by using the arts in this way. We also hope to suggest the richness and power of conversations with students in which the traditional focus of classes on professionalism intersects with the more open-ended, expressive concerns of art

The female aesthetic subject : questions of taste, sublimity and beauty in women's prose, 1778 to 1828, with particular reference to the works of Clara Reeve, Sophia and Harriet Lee, Elizabeth Hamilton and Jane Porter.

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN042836 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Framing Jewell: a discourse analysis of newspaper coverage in the aftermath of the Atlanta Olympics bombing and discussion of legal and ethical standards for such practices

This study examines the newspaper coverage of Richard Jewell during the weeks after the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing. Jewell, a security guard working in the Olympic Park on July 27, 1996, was initially hailed as a hero due to his discovery of a bomb minutes before the explosion. After Jewell’s name was leaked to the press as an FBI person of interest in the case, many reporters began to frame Jewell in a negative light and, in some instances, even implied his guilt. Through a discourse analysis of news stories published between the date of the bombing and the date Jewell was officially removed as a suspect (three months), four distinct framing clusters are identified in this study: The Reluctant Hero, He is Guilty, United We Stand, and Media Self-Coverage. Discursive tactics used to support these themes are identified as word choice, source choice and use of unnecessary information. The roles of myths, symbols, storytelling, and society in frame-making provide the foundation for an in-depth discussion about the broader meanings and implications of the news frames found in the coverage of the bombing. This study finds that frames are prevalent in media coverage and play an essential role in society, but they are sometimes misused by the press in such a way that harms individuals. A subsequent legal discussion underscores the courts’ dogged protection of First Amendment rights in these situations and the dilemmas that develop when a private individual is ruled to be a public figure in the defamation lawsuit. An additional examination of news media ethics offers possible reasons journalists resort to the types of discursive tactics found in the Jewell coverage; specifically, this study finds explanations that pertain to the journalist, the newsroom, industry guidelines, and the collective mindset of the profession