Health care is ubiquitous in the industrialized world. Yet, every medical development, technique, and procedure impacts the environment. Green bioethics synthesizes environmental ethics and biomedical ethics, thus creating an interdisciplinary approach to sustainable health care. Notably, green bioethics addresses not the structure of environmental sustainability in health-care institutions but the sustainability of individual health-care offerings. It parallels traditional biomedical ethics by providing four principles for ethical guidance: distributive justice, resource conservation, simplicity, and ethical economics. Through these four principles, green bioethics (...) presents a coherent framework for evaluating the sustainability of medical developments, techniques, and procedures. The future of our world may very well depend on how effectively we halt ecological destruction and conserve our resources in all areas of life. The principles of green bioethics, outlined in this book, will advance sustainability in health care. (shrink)

The US healthcare industry emits an estimated 479 million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year; nearly 8% of the country’s total emissions. When assessed by sector, hospital care, clinical services, medical structures, and pharmaceuticals are the top emitters. For 15 years, research has been dedicated to the medical structures and equipment that contribute to carbon emissions. More recently, hospital care and clinical services have been examined. However, the carbon of pharmaceuticals is understudied. This article will focus on the carbon emissions (...) of pharmaceuticals since they are consistently calculated to be among the top contributors to healthcare carbon and assess the factors that contribute to pharmaceutical carbon emissions. Specifically, overprescription, pharmaceutical waste, antibiotic resistance, routine prescriptions, non-adherence, drug dependency, lifestyle prescriptions, and drugs given due to a lack of preventive healthcare will be identified. Prescribing practices have environmental ramifications. Carbon reduction, when focused on pharmaceuticals, can lead to cleaner, more sustainable healthcare. (shrink)

The carbon emissions of global health care activities make up 4–5% of total world emissions, placing it on par with the food sector. Carbon emissions are particularly relevant for health care because of climate change health hazards. Doctors and health care professionals must connect their health care delivery with carbon emissions and minimize resource use when possible as a part of their obligation to do no harm. Given that reducing carbon is a global ethical priority, the informed consent process in (...) health care delivery must change. I argue that the expanded role of bioethicists in this climate crisis is to promote and support “green informed consent:” the sharing of climate information with patients, offering options for lower-carbon health care, and accepting the patient’s right to decline treatments which are deemed too carbon intensive for their values. (shrink)

Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 5, Page 547-555, June 2022.

Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 5, Page 547-555, June 2022.

Approximately 47 percent of women ages fifteen to forty‐four are currently without children, and slightly more than 20 percent of white women in America will never bear children, the highest percentage in modern history. Many fertile women who are childless are voluntarily so. Although any competent person twenty‐one years or older is legally eligible for voluntary sterilization, many doctors refuse to sterilize childfree women. This essay explores various reasons a woman would want to continue in her childfree lifestyle, evaluates the (...) accessibility of sterilization for women who are childfree by examining the reported reasons for denial of sterilization—both from the woman's and the physician's perspective—and assesses the legal status of voluntary sterilization for nonparous women. The essay also urges physicians to follow recommended guidelines for counseling women who, regardless of parity, desire sterilization and to provide this contraception if, after careful consideration, there are no outstanding health or other reasons that the procedure should not be performed. (shrink)

The United States health care industry is the second largest in the world, expending an estimated 479 million metric tons (MMT) of carbon dioxide per year, nearly 8 percent of the country's total emissions. The importance of carbon reduction in health care is slowly being accepted. However, efforts to “green” health care are incomplete since they generally focus on buildings and structures. Yet hospital care and clinical service sectors contribute the most carbon dioxide within the U.S. health care industry, with (...) structures/equipment and pharmaceuticals ranking as the third and fourth highest emitters in the industry. Given the magnitude of health care carbon emissions—and the paucity of attention to the carbon of hospital care and clinical services—this essay identifies overuse of health care as a health threat with serious ethical implications, offers a data‐driven action plan for carbon reduction in health care, and provides practical suggestions for more sustainable health care delivery in the United States. (shrink)

In 2014, the United States health care industry produced an estimated 480 million metric tons of carbon dioxide ; nearly 8% of the country's total emissions. The importance of sustainability in health care — as a business reliant on fossil fuels for transportation, energy, and operational functioning — is slowly being recognized. These efforts to green health care are incomplete, since they only focus on health care structures. The therapeutic relationship is the essence of health care — not the buildings (...) that contain the practice. As such, this article will first postulate reasons for a lack of environmental sustainability in US health care. Second, the article will focus on current green health care initiatives in the United States in which patients and physicians participate. Third, the rationale for participation in green initiatives will be explained. Fourth, the article will propose that, based on the environmental values of patients and physicians, health care insurance plans and health care insurance companies can be targeted for green health care reform, thereby closing the loop of sustainable health care delivery. (shrink)

In this paper we argue the need to reimagine research ethics frameworks to include notions of environmental sustainability. While there have long been calls for healthcareethics frameworks and decision-making to include aspects of sustainability, less attention has focused on howresearchethics frameworks could address this. To do this, we first describe the traditional approach to research ethics, which often relies on individualised notions of risk. We argue that we need to broaden this notion of individual risk to consider issues associated with (...) environmental sustainability. This is because research is associated with carbon emissions and other environmental impacts, both of which cause climate change health hazards. We introduce how bioethics frameworks have considered notions of environmental sustainability and draw on these to help develop a framework suitable for researchers. We provide a case study of data-driven health research to apply our framework. (shrink)

‘Bioethics still has important work to do in helping to secure status equality for LGBT people’ writes Timothy F. Murphy in a recent Bioethics editorial. The focus of his piece, however, is much narrower than human rights, medical care for LGBT people, or ending the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Rather, he is primarily concerned with sexuality and gender identity, and the medical intersections thereof. It is the objective of this response to provide an alternate account of bioethics from a Queer perspective. I (...) will situate Queer bioethics within Queer studies, and offer three ‘lessons’ that bioethics can derive from this perspective. These are not definitive rules for Queer bioethics, since it is a field which fundamentally opposes categorizations, favoring pastiche over principles. These lessons are exploratory examples, which both complement and contradict LGBT bioethics. My latter two lessons – on environmental bioethics and disability – overlap with some of Murphy's concerns, as well as other conceptions of LGBT bioethics. However, the first lesson takes an antithetical stance to Murphy's primary focus by resisting all forms of heteroconformity and disavowing reproduction as consonant with Queer objectives and theory. The first lesson, which doubles as a primer in Queer theory, does heavy philosophical lifting for the remainder of the essay. This response to Timothy F. Murphy, whose work is certainly a legacy in bioethics, reveals the multiplicity of discourses in LGBT/Queer studies, many of which are advantageous – even essential – to other disciplines like bioethics. (shrink)

Rieke van der Graaf, Karin Jongsma, Martine de Vries, Suzanne van de Vathorst, and Ineke Bolt have done well to voice ethical concerns over the decision of the IAB to host the next WCB in Qatar. Conferences should be more sustainable. Yet, attention to the carbon impact of conferences—and, perhaps, any country that a person might travel to for business or pleasure—are only one small part of environmentally responsible citizenship, especially for those trained in ethics and committed to health. Both (...) bioethics as a discipline and bioethicists as individuals need to interrogate their environmental choices. To this end, some ecological choices are more obvious targets of ethical scrutiny—diet and travel—while others appear sacrosanct, like reproduction and even healthcare use. This underscores the importance of making sustainable and ethical organizational choices, such as where to hold a conference, without absolving environmental accountability in other ethical calculations. Many organizations in academic and clinical medicine need to make drastic alterations in their practices and policies to effectively mitigate carbon. While the burden is not only on bioethics alone, the expectation that it should be remains. (shrink)

Volume 26, Issue 2, June 2020, Page 82-90.

Every day from the moment we wake up until the moment we sleep, we have the option to look outward or look inward. This is more than an outlook; it is also a metaphor. As we – citizens, ethicists,...

Medicalization occurs when an aspect of embodied humanity is scrutinized by the medical industry, claimed as pathological, and subsumed under medical intervention. Numerous critiques of medicalization appear in academic literature, often put forth by bioethicists who use a variety of “lenses” to make their case. Feminist critiques of medicalization raise the concerns of the politically disenfranchised, thus seeking to protect women—particularly natal sex women—from medical exploitation. This article will focus on three feminist critiques of medicalization, which offer an alternative narrative (...) of sickness and health. I will first briefly describe the philosophical origins of medicalization. Then, I will present three feminist critiques of medicalization. Liberal feminism, trans feminism, and crip feminism tend to regard Western medicine with a hermeneutics of suspicion and draw out potential harms of medicalization of reproductive sexuality, gender, and disability, respectively. While neither these branches of feminism—nor their critiques—are homogenous, they provide much-needed commentaries on phallocentric medicine. I will conclude the paper by arguing for the continual need for feminist critiques of medicalization, using uterus transplantation as a relevant case study. (shrink)

Background:Since 2010, the United States has experienced 228 disasters, affecting over 86 million people. Because of population shifts, the growing number of people living with chronic conditions or disabilities, and the growing number of older citizens living independently, access and service gaps often exist for those without money or other transferable resources. There is a lack of evidence regarding individual community members’ capacity to prepare for emergencies.Research objective:The purpose of this study is to highlight participant experiences in becoming better prepared (...) for emergencies and provide insight from a social justice perspective.Research design:This is a descriptive qualitative study, staying very close to the data as an end product rather than a beginning for interpretation.Participants and research context:A total of 13 low-income, uninsured, or under-insured attendees at a medical outreach clinic were interviewed.Ethical considerations:Institutional Review Board approval was obtained from the University of Texas at Tyler.Findings:Four themes emerged from the interview data: (a) evaluation of the emergency-preparedness education, (b) making emergency plans, (c) challenges in preparing for emergencies, and (d) facilitators of emergency preparedness.Discussion:Identifying the potential challenges to individual emergency preparedness among vulnerable populations is the first step in overcoming them. The capacity to comply with such measures, especially the ability of those with limited incomes and other vulnerable populations, must be considered.Conclusion:Synchronized, well-ordered assistance will close gaps in recovery and enhance efficiency in pre- and post-event aid. Theoretically, doing so will promote engaged and resilient members of society who are better able to withstand adverse events. The importance of the relationship between individual preparedness levels and the resiliency of nations supports the social justice imperative to address the needs of vulnerable populations in the mitigation and planning phase of the emergency management cycle. (shrink)

The carbon emissions of global healthcare activities make up 4%–5% of total world emissions, with the majority coming from industrialised countries. The solution to healthcare carbon reduction in these countries, ostensibly, would be preventive healthcare, which is less resource intensive than corrective healthcare in itself and, as a double benefit, reduces carbon by preventing diseases which may require higher healthcare carbon to treat. This leads to a paradox: preventive healthcare is designed to give humans longer, healthier lives. But, by extending (...) life spans, the carbon emissions of a person increase both over a lifetime and in the medical industry overall. At the same time, the need for higher carbon end-of-life care does not disappear, particularly in resource intensive countries. This article will first identify sources of healthcare carbon, focusing on the industrialised world, and explain various efforts towards healthcare carbon reduction, which include preventive healthcare. Second, it will develop the ‘paradox of prevention’—that preventive healthcare may save healthcare carbon by proximally reducing the need for medical treatments, but also, paradoxically, result in more healthcare carbon both in an individual’s life and in the medical industry. The third section will offer ethical principles for approaching the paradox of prevention. The conclusion will emphasise the need for institutional approaches to healthcare carbon reduction in the industrialised world, which will relieve some of the tensions of healthcare industry decarbonisation and individual healthcare carbon use. (shrink)

Abstract:Increasing attention to climate change and health has re-centered environmental ethics on the medical industry and biomedical ethics on the environment. Yet, without a belief in climate change, there is little reason for sustainability in medicine. In the United States, about one-quarter of all adults self-identify as Evangelical Christians, with a sizable subset of "climate change deniers." In order for millions of Evangelicals to be persuaded about the importance of sustainability in medicine, there must be a theological justification. This article (...) will lay the foundation for an Evangelical environmental bioethic. I will first provide a brief history of environmental bioethics. Then, Christian theology will be introduced. In the following section, the work of Richard Bauckham—as a representative of Evangelical ecological theology—will be explored. His scholarship on biblical limitation can form the basis of an Evangelical environmental bioethic. The views and actions of American Evangelicals demands special attention, not only because of their number, but also because of their influence in one of the most environmentally noxious countries in the world. (shrink)

This article will examine the Catholic concept of global justice within a health care framework as it relates to women's needs for delivery doctors in the developing world and women's demands for assisted reproduction in the developed world. I will first discuss justice as a theory, situating it within Catholic social teachings. The Catholic perspective on global justice in health care demands that everyone have access to basic needs before elective treatments are offered to the wealthy. After exploring specific discrepancies (...) in global health care justice, I will point to the need for delivery doctors in the developing world to provide basic assistance to women who hazard many pregnancies as a priority before offering assisted reproduction to women in the developed world. The wide disparities between maternal health in the developing world and elective fertility treatments in the developed world are clearly unjust within Catholic social teachings. I conclude this article by offering policy suggestions for moving closer to health care justice via doctor distribution. (shrink)

This article will examine current US health insurance policies for providing fertility services and Assisted Reproductive Technologies and analyze the open-ended policies of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. This state in particular will be discussed in depth, as there are virtually no limits on infertility provision or coverage. However, tightening up Massachusetts’s health insurance policies by putting parameters on provision and coverage of Assisted Reproductive Technologies will allow the infertile to continue to access paid-for treatment while ensuring that the goal of (...) health insurance coverage—which I understand to be the provision of paid coverage to address medical conditions—is maintained. (shrink)

Augustine’s legacy, particularly his view of marriage as being primarily procreative and the sin of mutually desired non-procreative sex, has had a lasting impact on sexual theology and ethics in the Catholic Church. Yet indulging in the Augustinian legacy without reflection and regarding children as the end goal of marriage has led to the unchallenged assumption that children are needed in every marriage. I will examine the problematic concept of matrimony as a necessary producer of children through a variety of (...) ethical lenses – the environmental, the feminist, and the bioethical – and provide an alternative to the procreative norm of sexual expression. By focusing on the unitive aspect of marital love instead of the procreative, partners are liberated to realize their union as fully mature, regardless of biological generation thus addressing ethical concerns and providing a theological alternative to the procreative marriage. (shrink)

Background In 1926, Fritz Jahr described bio-ethics (German: bio-ethik) as “the assumption of moral obligations not only towards humans, but towards all forms of life.” Jahr summarized his philosophy by declaring, “Respect every living being on principle as an end in itself and treat it, if possible, as such!.” Bioethics was thus originally an ethical system concerned with the “problems of interference with other living beings… and generally everything related to the balance of the ecosystem” according to the 1978 Encyclopedia (...) of Bioethics. This definition was predicated on the work of Fritz Jahr, Menico Torchio, and Van Rensselaer Potter. Methods In order to proceed with depthful analysis of the origin and major bioethical flare up, we will use critical analysis of existing literature, followed by a study trip to relevant bioethical localities (collecting photo and other documentations regarding Menico Torchio). Results While Jahr and Potter are typically given intellectual credit for developing the field of bioethics, the eco-ethical contributions of Menico Torchio have been forgotten.This article will first trace the origins of “bioethics” – now commonly bifurcated into “biomedical ethics” and “environmental bioethics.” The former was developed by Tom Beauchamp from the Philosophy Department and James Childress of the Religious Studies department at Georgetown University and is based on principlism, with a narrow focus on medical settings. The latter addresses the environmental impact of the medical industry and climate change health hazards. Second, we will present a panorama of Torchio’s significant intellectual contribution to bioethics. Menico Torchio’s concept of bioethics synthesized work of both Jahr and Potter, advocating “the need to expand our ethical obligations and embrace the most developed groups of animals, not only physically but also psychologically.” Third, we will reflect on the lasting legacy of “bioethics” on biomedical and environmental bioethics today. Thematic elements such as interconnectedness of planetary health and human health, dedication to living in harmony with nature, and emphasis on systems and symbiosis remain unchanged from the legacy of Tochio onward. Conclusion Our conclusion will underscore the necessity of understanding the connections between planetary, environmental, and human health. (shrink)

In the dialogue between Timothy F. Murphy and Cristina Richie about queer bioethics and queer reproduction in this journal, significant points of the emergent and extremely important discussions on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer bioethics are raised. Richie specifies correctly that queer bioethics can either complement or contradict LGBT bioethics and the queer standpoint against heteroconformity and heterofuturity is decisive here. As the field of queer bioethics is such a recent and essential part of consideration for (...) bioethics and as it is still evolving, the objective of this intervention is to provide both an overview of important milestones of queer bioethics and to highlight that queer bioethics is not mono-logic and monolithic. To exemplify queer bioethic's ‘many-headed monsters’, queer reproduction is revisited and complemented by a European viewpoint. It is central to my argument and here I disagree with Richie that to be against heterofuturity does not necessarily mean to be against queer reproduction. However, I also argue that there are other reasons why queer reproduction should not be pursued at all costs. Finally, I discuss the most recent debates on race, class and citizenship, for example, queer necropolitics. These points still need to be addressed in queer bioethical agendas. (shrink)

The thesis of mental fragmentation has recently attracted increased attention as a way of explaining facts about mind and language. This volume provides an accessible introduction and essays on foundations and applications of fragmentation.

There is widespread disagreement about whether epistemic akrasia is possible. This paper argues that the possibility of epistemic akrasia follows from a traditional rationalist conception of epistemic critical reasoning, together with considerations about the fallibility of our capacities for reasoning. In addition to defending the view that epistemic akrasia is possible, we aim to shed light on why it is possible. By focusing on critical epistemic reasoning, we show how traditional rationalist assumptions about our core cognitive capacities help to explain (...) the possibility of epistemic akrasia. (shrink)

Griefbots are chatbots designed to assist individuals in coping with the loss of a loved one by offering a digital replica of the departed. Navigating grief is a deeply transformative and vulnerable journey intricately tied to one's well-being. Do griefbots aid in the grieving process, or do they complicate it? To address these questions, this article blends insights from philosophy and neuroscience to explore the nature of grief as a means to clarify the ethical dimensions surrounding the use of griefbots.

As it emerged from philosophical analyses and cognitive research, most concepts exhibit typicality effects, and resist to the efforts of defining them in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. This holds also in the case of many medical concepts. This is a problem for the design of computer science ontologies, since knowledge representation formalisms commonly adopted in this field (such as, in the first place, the Web Ontology Language - OWL) do not allow for the representation of concepts in terms (...) of typical traits. The need of representing concepts in terms of typical traits concerns almost every domain of real world knowledge, including medical domains. In particular, in this article we take into account the domain of mental disorders, starting from the DSM-5 descriptions of some specific disorders. We favour a hybrid approach to concept representation, in which ontology oriented formalisms are combined to a geometric representation of knowledge based on conceptual space. As a preliminary step to apply our proposal to mental disorder concepts, we started to develop an OWL ontology of the schizophrenia spectrum, which is as close as possible to the DSM-5 descriptions. (shrink)

InA Theory of Justice, Rawls claims that “to each according to his threat advantage is not a conception of justice.” Although it may indeed seem intuitively plausible that a principle based on “threat advantage” cannot count as a principle of justice, it is an altogether different matter to explain why this is so. The question is especially pressing if one bears in mind that such a principle of bargaining in fact underlies many institutionally regulated interactions. Moreover, to the extent that (...) morality is thought of as a mechanism for guaranteeing mutual advantage in the resolution of conflicts, it may indeed seem necessary that it reflect the bargaining power of the parties (in order to make sure that it is indeed advantageous for all of them). In fact, there is a prominent tradition of social-contract theories (from Hobbes to Gauthier) that work under this assumption and claim to provide an answer to what justice requires as much as Rawls's theory does. So seen, the burden of proof seems to fall rather on the shoulders of those committed to claim both that morality is a mechanism that works to the advantage of all and that it nevertheless requires neutralizing all differences in bargaining power. (shrink)

InA Theory of Justice, Rawls claims that “to each according to his threat advantage is not a conception of justice.” Although it may indeed seem intuitively plausible that a principle based on “threat advantage” cannot count as a principle of justice, it is an altogether different matter to explain why this is so. The question is especially pressing if one bears in mind that such a principle of bargaining in fact underlies many institutionally regulated interactions. Moreover, to the extent that (...) morality is thought of as a mechanism for guaranteeing mutual advantage in the resolution of conflicts, it may indeed seem necessary that it reflect the bargaining power of the parties (in order to make sure that it is indeed advantageous for all of them). In fact, there is a prominent tradition of social-contract theories (from Hobbes to Gauthier) that work under this assumption and claim to provide an answer to what justice requires as much as Rawls's theory does. So seen, the burden of proof seems to fall rather on the shoulders of those committed to claim both that morality is a mechanism that works to the advantage of all and that it nevertheless requires neutralizing all differences in bargaining power. (shrink)

Our lives are commonly involved with fictionality, an activity that adults share with children. After providing a brief reconstruction of the most important cognitive theories on pretence, we will argue that pretence has to do with metarepresentations, albeit in a rather weakened sense. In our view, pretending entails being aware that a certain representation does not fit in the very same representational model as another representation. This is a minimal metarepresentationalism, for normally metarepresentationalism on pretense claims that pretending is or (...) entails representing a representation qua representation, i.e. as conceptualised as a representation, in its very content. In the final section we will try to draw some consequences of our view as to the debate in cognitive science on mindreading. Given this minimal metarepresentationalism, the two main positions on mindreading, the ‘theory theory’ and the ‘simulation theory’, turn out to be closer than one would have originally supposed. (shrink)

L.A. Paul calls “deep” the kind of essentialism according to which the essential properties of objects are determined independently of the context. Deep essentialism opposes “shallow essentialism”, of which David Lewis is said to be a prominent advocate. Paul argues that standard forms of deep essentialism face a range of issues (mainly based on an interpretation of Quinean skepticism) that shallow essentialism does not. However, Paul claims, shallow essentialism eliminates the very heart of what motivates essentialism, so it is better (...) to be deep than shallow. Accordingly, she proposes a very sharp novel account of essentialism, which, while attempting to preserve some of the advantages of shallow essentialism over the classical forms of deep essentialism, can be deemed to be deep. In this paper, I compare Paul’s proposal for a kind of deep essentialism with Lewis’s account, as it is presented by Paul. My aim is to show that the differences between the two approaches are not as significant as Paul takes them to be, and that Paul’s account can be taken to be deeper than Lewis’s only at the cost of sacrificing the very idea at the bottom of deep essentialism. This might be taken to suggest that, if Paul is correct in asserting that shallow essentialism is better equipped to address some skeptical challenges, but it is generally preferable to be deep than shallow, then Lewis’s account should be re-evaluated, since, as shallow as it can be, it might be deeper than it looks. (shrink)

In Norms in the Wild, distinguished philosopher Cristina Bicchieri argues that when it comes to human behavior, social scientists place too much stress on rational deliberation. In fact, she says, many choices occur without much deliberation at all. Two people passing in a corridor automatically negotiate their shared space; cars at an intersection obey traffic signals; we choose clothing based on our instincts for what is considered appropriate. Bicchieri's theory of social norms accounts for these automatic components of coordination, (...) where individuals react automatically to cues that focus their attention on what the norm is in that situation. Social norms thus act as rules for making choices in a social world where people expect others -- often unconsciously -- to follow the same rule. Some norms enable seamless social co-operation, while others are less beneficial to human flourishing.Bicchieri is famous for her interdisciplinary work on game theory and most recently her work on social norms, and Norms in the Wild represents her latest challenge to many of the fundamental assumptions of the social sciences. Bicchieri's work has broad implications not only for understanding human behavior, but for changing it for better outcomes. People have a strongly conditioned preference for following social norms, but that also means that manipulating their expectations can cause major behavioral changes. Bicchieri has been working recently with UNICEF and other NGO's to explore the applicability of her views to issues of human rights around the world. Is it possible to change social expectations around forced marriage, genital mutilations, and public health practices like vaccinations and sanitation? If so, how? What tools might we use? This short book explores how social norms work, and how changing them - changing preferences, beliefs, and especially social expectations - can potentially improve lives all around the world. It will appeal to an unusually broad range of readers including philosophers, psychologists and others in behavioral sciences, and anyone involved in public policy or at NGOs. (shrink)

In The Grammar of Society, first published in 2006, Cristina Bicchieri examines social norms, such as fairness, cooperation, and reciprocity, in an effort to understand their nature and dynamics, the expectations that they generate, and how they evolve and change. Drawing on several intellectual traditions and methods, including those of social psychology, experimental economics and evolutionary game theory, Bicchieri provides an integrated account of how social norms emerge, why and when we follow them, and the situations where we are (...) most likely to focus on relevant norms. Examining the existence and survival of inefficient norms, she demonstrates how norms evolve in ways that depend upon the psychological dispositions of the individual and how such dispositions may impair social efficiency. By contrast, she also shows how certain psychological propensities may naturally lead individuals to evolve fairness norms that closely resemble those we follow in most modern societies. (shrink)

It is largely acknowledged that natural languages emerge not just from human brains but also from rich communities of interacting human brains (Senghas, ). Yet the precise role of such communities and such interaction in the emergence of core properties of language has largely gone uninvestigated in naturally emerging systems, leaving the few existing computational investigations of this issue at an artificial setting. Here, we take a step toward investigating the precise role of community structure in the emergence of linguistic (...) conventions with both naturalistic empirical data and computational modeling. We first show conventionalization of lexicons in two different classes of naturally emerging signed systems: (a) protolinguistic “homesigns” invented by linguistically isolated Deaf individuals, and (b) a natural sign language emerging in a recently formed rich Deaf community. We find that the latter conventionalized faster than the former. Second, we model conventionalization as a population of interacting individuals who adjust their probability of sign use in response to other individuals' actual sign use, following an independently motivated model of language learning (Yang, , ). Simulations suggest that a richer social network, like that of natural (signed) languages, conventionalizes faster than a sparser social network, like that of homesign systems. We discuss our behavioral and computational results in light of other work on language emergence, and other work of behavior on complex networks. (shrink)

Similarity is one of the most important relations humans perceive, arguably subserving category learning and categorization, generalization and discrimination, judgment and decision making, and other cognitive functions. Researchers have proposed a wide range of representations and metrics that could be at play in similarity judgment, yet have not comprehensively compared the power of these representations and metrics for predicting similarity within and across different semantic categories. We performed such a comparison by pairing nine prominent vector semantic representations with seven established (...) similarity metrics that could operate on these representations, as well as supervised methods for dimensional weighting in the similarity function. This approach yields a factorial model structure with 126 distinct representation‐metric pairs, which we tested on a novel dataset of similarity judgments between pairs of cohyponymic words in eight categories. We found that cosine similarity and Pearson correlation were the overall best performing unweighted similarity functions, and that word vectors derived from free association norms often outperformed word vectors derived from text (including those specialized for similarity). Importantly, models that used human similarity judgments to learn category‐specific weights on dimensions yielded substantially better predictions than all unweighted approaches across all types of similarity functions and representations, although dimension weights did not generalize well across semantic categories, suggesting strong category context effects in similarity judgment. We discuss implications of these results for cognitive modeling and natural language processing, as well as for theories of the representations and metrics involved in similarity. (shrink)