Cognitive finance: Behavioural strategies of spending, saving, and investing.

Research in economics is increasingly open to empirical results. The advances in behavioural approaches are expanded here by applying cognitive methods to financial questions. The field of "cognitive finance" is approached by the exploration of decision strategies in the financial settings of spending, saving, and investing. Individual strategies in these different domains are searched for and elaborated to derive explanations for observed irregularities in financial decision making. Strong context-dependency and adaptive learning form the basis for this cognition-based approach to finance. Experiments, ratings, and real world data analysis are carried out in specific financial settings, combining different research methods to improve the understanding of natural financial behaviour. People use various strategies in the domains of spending, saving, and investing. Specific spending profiles can be elaborated for a better understanding of individual spending differences. It was found that people differ along four dimensions of spending, which can be labelled: General Leisure, Regular Maintenance, Risk Orientation, and Future Orientation. Saving behaviour is strongly dependent on how people mentally structure their finance and on their self-control attitude towards decision space restrictions, environmental cues, and contingency structures. Investment strategies depend on how companies, in which investments are placed, are evaluated on factors such as Honesty, Prestige, Innovation, and Power. Further on, different information integration strategies can be learned in decision situations with direct feedback. The mapping of cognitive processes in financial decision making is discussed and adaptive learning mechanisms are proposed for the observed behavioural differences. The construal of a "financial personality" is proposed in accordance with other dimensions of personality measures, to better acknowledge and predict variations in financial behaviour. This perspective enriches economic theories and provides a useful ground for improving individual financial services

A study of the relationship between a child's achievement and adjustment in grades one and three.

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Accounting for health and illness: A social psychological investigation

This thesis identifies and describes some of the main accounts for health and illness that are current in British culture, placing them within broader contexts of psychological, sociological, traditional, religious and moral discourses; within broader explanatory frameworks; and, by way of an analysis of these ecological aspects, seeks to illuminate our understanding of such accounting. A combination of Q and ethnographic methods were used to elucidate a variety of alternative ways that people "make sense" of health and illness. Three main studies were conducted. The first two investigated accounting for health and illness within a broad framework of accounts as "explanations"; as moral judgements and prescriptions; and as defining meaning. The third study focussed on the external/internal explanatory framework, and demonstrated that accounting is far more complex than the Wallston and Wallston (1981) "Health Locus of Control Construct' would suggest. Some accounts stressed "internality", some "externality", some a combination of both, and others viewed this construct as non-salient. These latter included accounts about personal autonomy, and, importantly, the 'medical model" account. In the thesis overall, among the accounts identified were ones based upon notions of : "the wonders of modern medicine"; "stress"; "the cultural critique'; 'a healthy lifestyle", 'tradition"; "individual autonomy", 'Theism'; and "Willpower". These accounts are assumed to operate both within individual subjectivity and popular discourse, offering people a variety of complementary 'texts' with which to weave narratives, drawing upon different 'texts" according to situational and other demands. Thus accounting is portrayed as an active, thoughtful and sometimes contradictory 'storymaking" activity, and people as competent negotiators of reality

Maintenance of hierarchy

This work considers how it is that company structures, based on hierarchy, are able to persist over time. This question, though simple, is basic to industrial society, since although business organizations do in general operate with sufficient cohesion to produce their goods/services for sale, the traditional hierarchical structure has on occasions come under attack. Our aim will be to establish and understand the conditions under which hierarchy is able to persist - or conversely, under what conditions we might expect it to come apart. Our consideration does not however, preclude the possibility that the attack on hierarchy is more apparent than real - that any attack is at the level of limited ideology rather than social praxis. Hence it will be our position that we shall suspend belief in the persistence of the hierarchical structure and in this way be able to consider the conditions both for its persistence, and also for any challenge to be made to it. By pursuing the initial problem in this way we do not preclude the possibility of either 1) the permanence of hierarchy, or 2) the inevitability of its replacement with more/less democratic structures. Our aim is to understand the conditions for the persistence of hierarchical structures, and by implication the conditions under which they may be challenged by more democratic structures. There are two important features to our theoretical perspective: A) the process of knowledge selection to produce and structure expectations, B) a theory of power to structure the situation in which these expectations are made. In respect of the former we shall rely heavily on the work of Schutz, Habermas, and of Laing and Esterson, while for the latter we shall consider Lukes' three dimensional theory of power, developed from the perspective of Habermas, and in particular his Ideal Speech Thesis. This will result in a theory of the Lifeworld, which while substantially consistent with Schutz continues to establish in what respects the Lifeworld creates but conceals the possibility of the exercise of power. The importance of Schutz for us is that he provides a theoretical basis for knowledge creation for the individual social actor, and the structuring of knowledge into categories, which is consistent with our own view. We shall argue, however, that the view presented by Schutz does not take adequate account of the `restricting' or `limiting' aspects of the Lifeworld and the taken-for-grantedness (or uncritical attitude) which it sets up - that as Morgan's `Images' suggests the Lifeworld (as our `subjective stock of knowledge') can be a `Psychic Prison'. This argument in turn leads on to possible exercises of power of which the participants (ie power holder and subject) are not conscious. This will be developed by reference to Habermas's work. The importance of Lukes is his provision of an analytical framework for power, which recognises that power is a concept of greater variation than has been realised. Lukes, however, does not make sufficiently clear the meaning - particularly at the empirical level - of his third ('radical') dimension of power. For this reason we shall introduce the thesis of ideal speech, put forward by Habermas, to clarify and extend Lukes' work in a manner which is theoretically and empirically stronger, and methodologically more practical. We shall use a synthesis of Lukes and Habermas as a basis for our analysis of the social situation in which expectations are a) structured b) developed as a project in a social situation. By bringing together these two elements (ie the Habermasian adaption of Schutz and Lukes) we shall argue that individuals make expectations on their company which they develop from their Lifeworld and its subjective stock of knowledge. This process of knowledge selection and development of expectations, analytically sets a number of issues which shall be important to us in considering whether there is the social asymmetry we suggested exists as a support to existing organizational structures: 1) the knowledge selected may be so structured as to forestall the development of particular expectations, or so constrain behaviour that, in either situation, the structure of the organization goes unchallenged. 2) expectations can only be satisfied in competition with others - hence interaction with other employees will be important and particularly the Lifeworld definition of these employees (for instance competition between Management and Hourly paid may be influenced by the definition which the latter make of the former). 3) expectations shall be arbitrated upon by the company decision-making system (ie by the individual/group who have the authority to make the decision in question). At a relatively superficial level we must consider the values of this individual/group - but we have to go still deeper to understand the conditions under which this authority is regarded as legitimate or conversely regarded as illegitimate. These issues are closely connected since the legitimacy and illegitimacy or the decision-making system are largely determined - in our model - by the selection of knowledge, part of which is constituted by one's experience and/or interaction with other employees, as well as wider social knowledge which is employed by defining and interpreting the behaviour of others to develop expectations. Our perspective on this process is composed of two parts: 1) Employees make expectations of their company. 2) These expectations are generated in a process of experience and learning. We see no causal implications in this, but instead take the view that employees select from the knowledge available to them, in order to structure, guide and justify their behaviour. For instance this may be to A) justify the expectation of having more influence in their company's decision-making, and to indicate what would be appropriate behaviour to this end. Or alternatively B) indicate that this is not a reasonable expectation, and not a reasonable form of behaviour. Similarly the knowledge which is accessible can be employed to define and interpret the behaviour of relevant others in their own group and throughout the work situation -to account for, and explain what is happening, to foretell how to behave/not behave in the future. The process can, in other words, encourage or discourage the taking up of particular projects. Our particular interest is the dominance of hierarchy is maintained, restraining the development of more democratic organizational forms

A Method to Study the Organizational Dimension of Regional Programs

Our current research activities at IIASA provide the opportunity to study five cases on the organization of regional development. These cases are TVA, Bratsk-Ilimsk Territorial Production Complex, Scotland, Vistula-Lublin and Guayana in Venezuela. The aim of this paper is to present a research method for this purpose independent of the particular characteristics that each case might have. This method is supported by a model of the organizational structure of any viable system. In this case the "regional system" is postulated to be a viable system. If the program is going to be successful it should be viable. This suggests the need to define the "regional system" with precision. The elucidation of the components of this system is seen as a fundamental research step in this method. A second step focuses on the organizational functions that these parts fulfill, and on the linkages among them. A third step relates to the consistency of the regional organization and its effectiveness. The second step seeks to provide the basic structure to support the search for information. A set of questions, supported by this structure, will be presented for explanatory purposes. This "questionnaire" is by no means comprehensive and it is hoped that improvements will be made on it along this research process

Attention: A view suggested by systemic and cybernetic consideration

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Current views and models about attention regard man as a 'transmitter channel' and try to characterise the properties of that 'odd channel'. Another characteristic of the current views is that attention is regarded as a specific mental operation in a person which can be described, irrespective of the purposes of the subject. By contrast we examine attention as an activity at the service of the purposes of the person. Attention is examined as an activity by means of which the field of consciousness is structured around the 'object of attention'. This object of attention is not a specific 'stimulus' but a system in the sense of General System Theory. Hence, the approach is mainly holistic in character. Activity is looked upon as an INTERTRAFFIC between the person and his relation with the world. And where there is relatedness, information theory, in a cybernetic sense, can be used. The approach developed benefits of the advantages from previous models allowing also for a better explanation of the limitation present in the cognitive realm without appeal to some 'filter mechanism' in the physiological structure of a person.Consejo de Desarrollo Cientifico y Humanistico U. C. V. Caraca

Using visual representations to improve instructional materials for distance education computing students

Understanding how to develop instructional materials for distance education students is a challenging problem, but it is exacerbated when a domain is complex to teach, such as computer science. Visual representations have a history of use in computing as a means to alleviate the difficulties of learning abstract concepts. However, it is not clear whether improvements observed are as a result of improvements in the visual representations used in instructional materials or due to individual differences in students. This research examines the two themes of individual differences and visual representation in order to investigate how they collectively impact on improving instructional materials for distance education students studying computer science. It investigates the impact of different representations on learning while additionally investigating the relationship between individual differences and student learning.The research in this thesis shows that visual representations are important in designing instructional materials. In particular, texts with visual representations have the power to cue students to perceive instructional materials as easier to process and more engaging.Investigation into the impact of concrete high-imagery versus abstract low-imagery visual representations illustrated that concrete visual representations incurred fewer cognitive overheads for computer science students and were able to ameliorate the challenges of learning computing.The research in this thesis into individual differences demonstrated that Imagers did benefit more from studying instructional materials containing text with visual components. However the research indicates that appropriate selection of individual difference tests is dependent upon the application, i.e., whether the results are to be used to assess generalised tendencies or episodes in learning and whether the tests examine underlying approaches to cognition or practices in education.An underlying question was whether students studying instructional materials containing low-imagery visual representations would cope as well as those studying high-imagery ones. Accomplished learners demonstrated that they could perform as well as with those receiving high-imagery visual representations. However, studying and recalling these materials did incur more cognitive processing.This thesis argues that improving instructional materials by including appropriate visual representations is a useful basis for improving learning for distance education computer science students

Spartan Daily, May 4, 1973

Volume 60, Issue 114https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/5748/thumbnail.jp

Clean coal rhetoric: engaging the public on informal education websites about science and technology

Some scientific and technological problems require public engagement. Engagement, defined in this situation as a level of interest or investment that fosters changing attitudes and behavior, can be achieved through informal education websites that present scientific arguments to a general audience. These websites function as boundary objects between the scientific community and the general public, noticeably affecting the audience\u27s attitudes and opinions about the science in question.;This study focuses on several website elements stimulating engagement on two informal education websites that present clean coal technology, an advanced effort to increase the efficiency of coal power while capturing coal power\u27s greenhouse gas emissions. Informal education websites about clean coal technology are challenged to supplant the public\u27s misgivings about coal with acceptance and even excitement.;To examine the ways in which these two websites attempt to engage their audiences and the ways in which those audiences respond, this study uses three methods. The first is a rhetorical analysis of the engaging elements present on the websites. The second is a user survey that collects data about a test audience\u27s response to those engaging elements. The last is an interview process designed to collect further detail about individual survey participants\u27 reactions. Generally, the study found that even if users react negatively to specific website elements, they are often willing to separate that reaction from their response to the information presented. The results suggest that website elements designed to engage the audience might be useful as long as they do not obstruct the audience\u27s access to content they find interesting. The results of the study further suggest methods to refine the study of audience engagement as a goal of online communication

Changing Conceptions of Property and Sovereignty in Natural Resources Law: Questioning the Public Trust Doctrine

This Article considers and evaluates the \u27public trust doctrine, one of the most remarkable legal bases upon which natural resources law has relied in this ongoing transformation. The public trust doctrine is based on an amorphous notion that has been with us since the days of Justinian - the notion that the public possesses inviolable rights in certain natural resources. Commentators first hailed the doctrine in 1970 as offering the most promising legal basis upon which individual members of the public could maintain a lawsuit to protect natural resources from needless degradation and destruction. In the seminal article on the trust doctrine, Professor Joseph Sax reconstructed how the mostly dormant doctrine had historically functioned in the United States to safeguard public rights in navigable waterways, and he predicted that the doctrine could expand to embrace broader environmental concerns