The behavioral and social sciences

Key attributes of health and environmental risk decision-making: A scoping review

Government agencies, international institutions, and independent experts have published approaches for the assessment and management of health and environmental risks. This includes evidence-based strategies and publications supporting risk decision-making frameworks reflecting contemporary practices, the overarching context, and governance structures for addressing known and emerging risk issues. This scoping review surveys the literature, over the last five decades, to identify key attributes of health and environmental risk decision-making and how these inherent characteristics are related to the overarching regulatory decision-making context. The findings provide insights on how these publications accounted for the circumstances and triggers at that time. This includes incorporating factors reflecting advances in science and technology, a better understanding of underlying values (e.g., societal), and an expansion in the scope and complexity required for conducting different evaluations relevant to health and environmental risks. Consequently, the evolution from linear to more expanded and holistic decision-making frameworks incorporates foundational elements, such as the well-established steps for assessing risks, while adding aspects reflecting transformative changes and paradigm shifts (e.g., the use of non-animal testing strategies for evaluating human safety). Our analysis also resulted in the generation of a consolidated listing of ten attributes: trigger/issue, regulatory context, regulatory factors, core values, risk decision-making principles, cross-cutting attributes, design (scope and steps), structure, decision-making pathway, and evidence-knowledge requirements for risk decision-making. A better understanding of this evolution in risk decision-making and the listing of key attributes will be used in future work aimed at developing considerations for next generation decision-making approaches for health and environmental risks.

Deviations of rational choice: an integrative explanation of the endowment and several context effects

People's choices are often found to be inconsistent with the assumptions of rational choice theory. Over time, several probabilistic models have been proposed that account for such deviations from rationality. However, these models have become increasingly complex and are often limited to particular choice phenomena. Here we introduce a network approach that explains a broad set of choice phenomena. We demonstrate that this approach can be used to compare different choice theories and integrates several choice mechanisms from established models. A basic setup implements bounded rationality, loss aversion, and inhibition in a natural fashion, which allows us to predict the occurrence of well-known choice phenomena, such as the endowment effect and the similarity, attraction, compromise, and phantom context effects. Our results show that this network approach provides a simple representation of complex choice behaviour, and can be used to gain a better understanding of how the many choice phenomena and key theoretical principles from different types of decision-making are connected.

Designing Behavioural Artificial Intelligence to Record, Assess and Evaluate Human Behaviour

The context of the work presented in this article is the assessment and automated evaluation of human behaviour. To facilitate this, a formalism is presented which is unambiguous as well as such that it can be implemented and interpreted in an automated manner. In the greater scheme of things, comparable behaviour evaluation requires comparable assessment scenarios and, to this end, computer games are considered as controllable and abstract environments. Within this context, a model for behavioural AI is presented which was designed around the objectives of: (a) being able to play rationally; (b) adhering to formally stated behaviour preferences; and (c) ensuring that very specific circumstances can be forced to arise within a game. The presented work is based on established models from the field of behavioural psychology, formal logic as well as approaches from game theory and related fields. The suggested model for behavioural AI has been used to implement and test a game, as well as AI players that exhibit specific behavioural preferences. The overall aim of this article is to enable the readers to design their own AI implementation, using the formalisms and models they prefer and to a level of complexity they desire.

Herbert Simon’s bounded rationality

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the historical advancements attained on the bounded rationality concept in management research, considering the key influencing discoveries in related fields. Understanding the cross-fertilization that has occurred is the first step to go beyond the current knowledge on bounded rationality and to face its challenges.

Design/methodology/approach

The adopted method is historical. This research approach helps to explain the evolution of a widespread concept in a scientific field and, particularly, to identify the parallel influencing advancements made in related domains.

Findings

Investigation of the irrational forces of human reasoning is at the centre of today’s research agenda on rationality in organizations, claiming to be an extension of the original bounded rationality concept. In this regard, scholars should commit themselves to build a more holistic approach to the investigation of human rationality, conjointly applying socio-biological and behavioural perspectives to explain the real behaviour of people in organizations and society. This reconnection will also help to overcome the inner limits of some “fashion of the month” streams that have yet to demonstrate their contribution.

Originality/value

This is the first study that offers an overall historical evolution of the bounded rationality concept which considers both management research and developments in related fields. The historically educed lessons learned are at the basis of the concluding recommendations for future research.

The Human-Nature Relationship and Its Impact on Health: A Critical Review

Within the past four decades, research has been increasingly drawn toward understanding whether there is a link between the changing human-nature relationship and its impact on people's health. However, to examine whether there is a link requires research of its breadth and underlying mechanisms from an interdisciplinary approach. This article begins by reviewing the debates concerning the human-nature relationship, which are then critiqued and redefined from an interdisciplinary perspective. The concept and chronological history of "health" is then explored, based on the World Health Organization's definition. Combining these concepts, the human-nature relationship and its impact on human's health are then explored through a developing conceptual model. It is argued that using an interdisciplinary perspective can facilitate a deeper understanding of the complexities involved for attaining optimal health at the human-environmental interface.

Faculty Interest in Policy-Oriented Advising and Research

In contrast to the "two communities" metaphor, a survey of 800 faculty at the University of California, Davis, revealed that 42% had participated in some form of policy advising or research during the previous two years. An analysis of three models purporting to explain such behavior tentatively concludes that faculty interest in such activities was somewhat independent of perceived contributions to professional advancement but that a longitudinal, dyadic research design is really needed.

Reflections on Behavior Analysis and Evolutionary Biology: A Selective Review of Evolution Since Darwin—The First 150 Years. Edited by M. A. Bell, D. J. Futuyama, W. F. Eanes, & J. S. Levinton

This review focuses on parallels between the selectionist sciences of evolutionary biology and behavior analysis. In selectionism, complex phenomena are interpreted as the cumulative products of relatively simple processes acting over time—natural selection in evolutionary biology and reinforcement in behavior analysis. Because evolutionary biology is the more mature science, an examination of the factors that led to the triumph of natural selection provides clues whereby reinforcement may achieve a similar fate in the science of behavior.

Neither a mentalist nor a reductionist be!

There is basis for concern that applied psychophysiology, if not the field of biofeedback, is being coopted by, and merged into, a reborn "inner" model, with the return of "cognition" to preeminence in the "psych" and "neuro" disciplines. Despite currently fashionable views that such mentalistic inventions and neuro/psychological developments somehow illuminate behavior or offer simpler accounts of behavioral facts, there is little or no evidence that any such construction has ever told us anything new about behavior.

Behavioral science in medical education: an updated bibliography

Holmes, et al. in 1979 compiled 125 studies in a bibliography of behavioral science in undergraduate and graduate education. Since 1979, 75 additional studies of behavioral science in medical education have been identified. The current updated bibliography contains 200 entries. Foreign medical journals, Index Medicus, and Psychological Abstracts were reference sources for the bibliography.