It is usually assumed that individuals base their preferences for products or other items on the utility or value associated with the items. However, there is evidence that the attentional selection of an item alone already modulates the preference for that item. For instance, Janiszewski, Kuo, and Tavassoli (2013, Journal of Consumer Research) used unknown consumer products in a series of studies and found that, in a preference choice task, former target products in a visual-search task were (...) preferred to former distractor products. However, it remained unclear whether such effects can be observed when individuals have pre-existing attitudes towards products and whether attentional-selection can change the perceived value of products. Hence, the aim of the present research was to replicate the attentional-selection effect on choice with known products and examine whether selective attention affects the perceived value of products beyond choosing the items. In two experiments, we replicated the attentional-selection effect on item preference in a choice task. Items that had served as targets in the search task were preferred to previous distractors. Introducing a response deadline in the preference-choice task in Experiment 2 did not further increase this effect. However, the value of former targets was rated higher than that of former distractors. Hence, the present results indicate that attentional selection not only affects preference choices but can also increase the value of attended and selected items. (shrink)

In normative political theory, it is widely accepted that democracy cannot be reduced to voting alone, but that it requires deliberation. In formal social choice theory, by contrast, the study of democracy has focused primarily on the aggregation of individual opinions into collective decisions, typically through voting. While the literature on deliberation has an optimistic flavour, the literature on social choice is more mixed. It is centred around several paradoxes and impossibility results identifying conflicts between different intuitively plausible (...) desiderata. In recent years, there has been a growing dialogue between the two literatures. This paper discusses the connections between them. Important insights are that (i) deliberation can complement aggregation and open up an escape route from some of its negative results; and (ii) the formal models of social choice theory can shed light on some aspects of deliberation, such as the nature of deliberation-induced opinion change. (shrink)

Our values change. What we value, want, desire, prefer, and how much; for nearly everyone, these will be different at different times in their life. These changes can be gradual or abrupt; they can be long-lasting or short-lived; and they can be induced by forces outside yourself or they can come from within or they can have no specific catalyst at all. Such preference change raises a number of questions for our theorising about rational choice, (...) and these have been discussed at length. In §2 and §3, I’ll outline two of these questions along with some of the putative solutions that have been proposed. But preference change also raises questions for our theorising about autonomy, and these have hardly been considered at all. In §4, I’ll outline three problems for personal autonomy; and in §5, I’ll outline one problem for political autonomy. In §6, I conclude. (shrink)

Preference formation and choice are dynamic cognitive processes arising from interactions between decision-makers and their immediate choice environment. This thesis examines how preferences and decisions are played out in visual attention, captured by eye-movements, as well as in group contexts. Papers I-II make use of the Choice Blindness paradigm. Paper I compares participants’ eye movements and pupil dilation over the course of a trial when participants detect and fail to detect the false feedback concerning their choices. (...) Results indicate objective markers of detection with important implications for questions concerning possible demand effect or cognitive dissonance explanations of choice blindness. Paper II examines another aspect of the choice environment, namely, the social context. Choice blindness is demonstrated in small groups for the first time. It is shown that preferential change can be induced in dyads by manipulating the group’s beliefs about their choices, thus extending the preference change through choice effects beyond individuals for the first time. Paper III examines how visual attention differentially supports both decision and memory processes depending on the amount of task-relevant information available to participants. Participants’ performance and visual attention dynamics was found to vary depending on the amount of information available to them, and the results indicate that decision outcomes are heavily influenced by encoding prior to traditional choice phases used in decision research. Papers IV-VII concern decision-making in the moral domain. Paper IV investigates visual attention when participants choose between difficult moral dilemmas, showing asymmetries in how participants distribute their attention depending on making utilitarian or deontological choices. Paper V introduces a novel paradigm for influencing decision based manipulating the timing of decision by measuring the direction of gaze while the participant deliberates. Using this method participants’ moral decisions were biased without their knowledge to a randomly chosen alternative. This shows that moral decision and visual attention are highly coupled and that by simply knowing where someone is looking it is possible to influence their decision process. Papers VI&VII build on the links between gaze direction and moral choice and present the first computational decision models based on eye gaze applicable to the moral domain. Paper VI for choices between abstract principles and Paper VII for donations to charitable organizations. Together the papers advance novel methodological solutions to understanding preferences and decisions across a number of domains, both highlighting the important contributions of social and sensorimotor interactions to the content of our decisions as they develop over time, as well as demonstrating how decisions can be influenced by leveraging those interactions. (shrink)

How can collective decisions be made among individuals with conflicting preferences or judgments? Arrow’s impossibility theorem and other social-choice-theoretic results suggest that, for many collective decision problems, there are no attractive democratic solutions. In response, deliberative democrats argue that group deliberation makes collective decisions more tractable. How can deliberation accomplish this? In this paper, I explore the distinction between two different types of agreement and discuss how they can facilitate collective decision making. Deliberative democrats have traditionally defended the hypothesis (...) that group deliberation generates consensus on what decision option should be chosen: "substantive agreement". But substantive agreement is not only empirically unrealistic, but also logically unnecessary for meaningful collective decision making. An alternative, less demanding hypothesis is that, under certain conditions, group deliberation generates consensus on how a decision problem should be conceptualized: "meta-agreement". I assess the latter hypothesis, explain how it can be empirically tested, and cite some evidence consistent with it. My discussion addresses two contexts of democratic decision making: preference aggregation and judgment aggregation. (shrink)

Using data from a randomized field experiment within a Deliberative Poll, this paper examines deliberation’s effects on both policy attitudes and the extent to which ordinal rankings of policy options approach single-peakedness (a help in avoiding cyclical majorities). The setting was New Haven, Connecticut, and its surrounding towns; the issues were airport expansion and revenue sharing – the former highly salient, the latter not at all. Half the participants deliberated revenue sharing, then the airport; the other half the reverse. This (...) split-half design helps distinguish the effects of the formal on-site deliberations from those of other aspects of the treatment. As expected, the highly salient airport issue saw only a slight effect, while much less salient revenue-sharing issue saw a much larger one. (shrink)

According to standard rational choice theory, as commonly used in political science and economics, an agent's fundamental preferences are exogenously fixed, and any preference change over decision options is due to Bayesian information learning. Although elegant and parsimonious, such a model fails to account for preference change driven by experiences or psychological changes distinct from information learning. We develop a model of non-informational preference change. Alternatives are modelled as points in some multidimensional space, (...) only some of whose dimensions play a role in shaping the agentís preferences. Any change in these "motivationally salient" dimensions can change the agent's preferences. How it does so is described by a new representation theorem. Our model not only captures a wide range of frequently observed phenomena, but also generalizes some standard representations of preferences in political science and economics. (shrink)

There is ample research on how metaphors of life vary both cross-culturally and within culture, with age emerging as possibly the most significant variable with regard to the latter dimension. However, no representative research has yet been carried on whether variation can also occur across time. Our paper attempts to fill this gap in the literature by exploring whether a major crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, can induce variation in how life is metaphorically conceptualized throughout society. By drawing on (...) the results of a nationwide, representative survey on the metaphorical preferences for life among Hungarian adults carried out during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, we hypothesized that the pandemic would induce a revolutionary change (in the sense of the change being swift, as opposed to gradual) in how Hungarian adults metaphorically conceptualize life, as compared to the metaphorical preferences of the pre-COVID-19 era. We expected this variation to manifest itself in the emergence of novel metaphorical source domains and a realignment in metaphorical preferences. Our results, however, indicate that novel conceptualizations emerged only as one-off metaphors; Hungarians mostly rely on a stock collection of life metaphors even in times of crises, with changes happening mostly in the form of shifts in metaphorical preferences. Our study also found that the choice of preference of the source domains showed less alterations among older adults – implying that the older we get, the more resistant to change our metaphorical conceptualizations become, even under extreme conditions such as COVID-19. (shrink)

To reveal the mechanisms of firms’ technological strategic choices between innovation and imitation, an evolutionary game model is proposed from the perspective of the behavioral biases. First, behavioral biases such as reference point dependence, loss aversion, and probability weighting can be defined and modeled based on the prospect theory. Second, according to the firm theory, a Cournot or Stackelberg game modeled with a technology spillover effect and intellectual property protection is applied to portray the interaction between firms. Third, an improved (...) evolutionary game model is provided by incorporating behavioral biases into the framework of the decision-making process. Finally, the simulation analysis of some important factors, such as intellectual property protection, patent fees, innovation risks, decision-making attitudes, and consumers’ price preference on firms’ technological strategic choices, is presented. The corresponding results show that innovation risk is an important factor affecting the technological strategic choices of firms, increasing the intellectual property protection and the patent fee for technology transfer can effectively control the spillover effect of technology, there is a partial U-shaped relationship between the consumers’ price preference and innovation, and the behavioral biases such as reference point dependence, loss aversion, and probability weighting will change the perception of payoff and risk and will eventually induce firms to adopt the innovation strategy. (shrink)

Majority cycling and related social choice paradoxes are often thought to threaten the meaningfulness of democracy. But deliberation can prevent majority cycles – not by inducing unanimity, which is unrealistic, but by bringing preferences closer to single-peakedness. We present the first empirical test of this hypothesis, using data from Deliberative Polls. Comparing preferences before and after deliberation, we find increases in proximity to single-peakedness. The increases are greater for lower versus higher salience issues and for individuals who seem to (...) have deliberated more versus less effectively. They are not merely a byproduct of increased substantive agreement. Our results both refine and support the idea that deliberation, by increasing proximity to single-peakedness, provides an escape from the problem of majority cycling. (shrink)

This article examines Becker's thesis that the hypothesis that choices maximize expected utility relative to fixed and universal tastes provides a general framework for the explanation of behaviour. Three different models of preference revision are presented and their scope evaluated. The first, the classical conditioning model, explains all changes in preferences in terms of changes in the information held by the agent, holding fundamental beliefs and desires fixed. The second, the Jeffrey conditioning model, explains them in terms of changes (...) in both the information held by the agent and changes in her prior beliefs, holding her fundamental desires fixed. The final model, that of generalized conditioning, allows for explanations in terms of changes in the values of all three variables. Key Words: preference change • decision theory • probability • desirability • attitude change. (shrink)

Most familiar approaches to social conflict moot reasonable ways of dealing with conflict, ways that aim to serve values such as legitimacy, justice, morality, fairness, fidelity to individual preferences, and so on. In this paper, I explore an alternative approach to social conflict that contrasts with the leading approaches of Rawlsians, perfectionists, and social choice theorists. The proposed approach takes intrinsic features of the conflict—what I call a conflict's evaluative ‘structure’—as grounds for a rational way of responding to that (...) conflict. Like conflict within a single person, social conflict can have a distinctive evaluative structure that supports certain rational responses over others. I suggest that one common structure in both intra- and interpersonal cases of conflict supports the rational response of ‘self-governance’. Self-governance in the case of social conflict involves a society's deliberating over the question, ‘What kind of society should we be?’ In liberal democracies, this rational response is also a reasonable one. (shrink)

Upon Brexit, the United Kingdom chose to follow the path of EU data protection and remain tied to the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It even enacted the GDPR into its domestic law. This Article evaluates five models relating to preference change, demonstrating how they identify different dimensions of Brexit while providing a rich explanation of why a legal system may or may not reject an established transnational legal order. While market forces and a “Brussels (...) Effect” played the most significant role in the decision of the UK government to accept the GDPR, important nonmarket factors were also present in this choice. This Article’s models of preference change are also useful in thinking about the likely extent of the UK’s future divergence from EU data protection. (shrink)

Change, Choice and Inference develops logical theories that are necessary both for the understanding of adaptable human reasoning and for the design of intelligent systems. The book shows that reasoning processes - the drawing on inferences and changing one's beliefs - can be viewed as belonging to the realm of practical reason by embedding logical theories into the broader context of the theory of rational choice. The book unifies lively and significant strands of research in logic, philosophy, (...) economics and artificial intelligence. It elaborates on the relevant theories and provides a mathematically precise foundation for the thesis that large parts of theoretical reason can be subsumed under practical reason. (shrink)

This article elaborates on foundational issues in the social sciences and their impact on the contemporary theory of belief revision. Recent work in the foundations of economics has focused on the role external social norms play in choice. Amartya Sen has argued in [Sen93] that the traditional rationalizability approach used in the theory of rational choice has serious problems accommodating the role of social norms. Sen's more recent work [Sen96, Sen97] proposes how one might represent social norms in (...) the theory of choice, and in a very recent article [BS07] Walter Bossert and Kotaro Suzumura develop Sen's proposal, offering an extension of the classical theory of choice that is capable of dealing with social norms. The first part of this article offers an alternative functional characterization of the extended notion of rationality employed by Bossert and Suzumura in [BS07]. This characterization, unlike the one offered in [BS07], represents a norm-sensitive notion of rationality in terms of a pure functional constraint unmediated by a notion of revealed preference (something that is crucial for the application developed in the second part of this article). This functional characterization is formulated for general domains (as is Bossert and Suzumura's characterization) and is therefore empirically more applicable than usual characterizations of rationality. Interestingly, the functional constraint we propose is a variant of a condition first entertained in [AGM85] by Carlos Alchourrón, Peter Gärdenfors and David Makinson in the area of belief change. The second part of this article applies the theory developed in the first part to the realm of belief change. We first point out that social norms can be invoked to concoct counterexamples against some postulates of belief change (like postulate (*7)) that are necessary for belief change to be relational. These examples constitute the epistemological counterpart of Sen's counterexamples against condition α in rational choice (as a matter of fact, Rott has showed in [Rot01] that condition and postulate (*7) are mutually mappable). These examples are variants of examples Rott has recently presented in [Rot04]. One of our main goals in this article consists in applying the theory developed in the first part to develop a theory of norm-inclusive belief change that circumvents the counterexamples. We offer a new axiomatization for belief change and we furnish correspondence results relating constraints of rational choice to postulates of belief change. (shrink)

Hardly any ontological result of modern science is more firmly established than the fact that infrared radiation differs from light only in wavelength; this is part of the modern conception of the continuous spectrum of electromagnetic radiation reaching from radio waves to gamma radiation. Yet, like many such evident truths, the light-infrared unity was an extremely difficult thing to establish. We examine the competing arguments in favour of the unified and pluralistic theories of radiation, as put forward in the first (...) half of the nineteenth century by three of the most important early pioneers of the study of radiation: Herschel, Melloni and Draper. In this part of the paper, we conclude that there were no compelling reasons of observational adequacy to prefer the unified theory to the pluralistic theory. Keywords: Macedonio Melloni; John William Draper; William Herschel; Infrared; Observation; Theory-choice. (shrink)

Economic models are founded in the idea of taking individuals' preferences as both known and given. This article explores the evolution of personal preferences, within a context of both entrepreneurial discovery and Objectivist philosophy. It begins by formalizing Ayn Rand's theory of Objectivism applied to human values, and continues by modeling preference changes similar to Schumpeter's theory of creative destruction—a process of self-discovery. Next the role of societal factors is examined in forming shared preference sets. Finally, the article (...) describes how the strength of human preferences is used to narrow choice sets in the presence of greater consumption options. (shrink)

Ethicists, regulators and researchers have struggled with the question of whether incidental findings in genomics studies should be disclosed to participants. In the ethical debate, a general consensus is that disclosed information should benefit participants. However, there is no agreement that genetic information will benefit participants, rather it may cause problems such as anxiety. One could get past this disagreement about disclosure of incidental findings by letting participants express their preferences in the consent form. We argue that this freedom of (...) choice is problematic. In transferring the decision to participants, it is assumed that participants will understand what they decide about and that they will express what they truly want. However, psychological findings about people's reaction to probabilities and risk have been shown to involve both cognitive and emotional challenges. People change their attitude to risk depending on what is at stake. Their mood affects judgments and choices, and they over- and underestimate probabilities depending on whether they are low or high. Moreover, different framing of the options can steer people to a specific choice. Although it seems attractive to let participants express their preferences to incidental findings in the consent form, it is uncertain if this choice enables people to express what they truly prefer. In order to better understand the participants' preferences, we argue that future empirical work needs to confront the participant with the complexity of the uncertainty and the trade-offs that are connected with the uncertain predictive value of genetic risk information. (shrink)

Most familiar approaches to social conflict moot reasonable ways of dealing with conflict, ways that aim to serve values such as legitimacy, justice, morality, fairness, fidelity to individual preferences, and so on. In this paper, I explore an alternative approach to social conflict that contrasts with the leading approaches of Rawlsians, perfectionists, and social choice theorists. The proposed approach takes intrinsic features of the conflict— what I call a conflict’s evaluative ‘structure’—as grounds for a rational way of responding to (...) that conflict. Like conflict within a single person, social conflict can have a distinctive evaluative structure that supports certain rational responses over others. I suggest that one common structure in both intra- and interpersonal cases of conflict supports the rational response of ‘self-governance’. Self-governance in the case of social conflict involves a society’s deliberating over the question, ‘What kind of society should we be?’ In liberal democracies, this rational response is also a reasonable one. (shrink)

Nevin & Grace's primary argument against theory and research on behavioral momentum is that preference and resistance to change may not covary. The method for evaluating preference and resistance to change seems problematic. Moreover, the theory fails to account convincingly for effects of average overall time to primary reinforcement on choice and preference for unsegmented schedules.

In the last decade, a number of studies in the behavioural sciences, particularly in psychology and economics, have explored the complexity of individual risk behaviour and its underlying factors. Most previous studies have examined the influences of various socio-economic, cognitive, biological and psychological factors on human decision-making however, the relationship between the decision-makers’ risk preferences and occupational background has not received much empirical attention. Accordingly, in the current study, we investigated how occupational background, together with decision-making framing (e.g., variations in (...) decision domain, context, presentation of risk and utility ratios), influence participants’ risk preferences for decision options with equivalent expected utility. Our novel findings indicate that risk preferences may vary among individuals from different occupational backgrounds. As such, when the task was framed in gain terms, participants who mostly deal with health/safety-related risks on a day-to-day basis (high-risk occupations) were predominantly risk-averse (avoiding risky options), while participants who mostly deal with financial/social risks (white-collar occupations) were prone to risk-seeking behaviour (avoiding certain options). Specifically, in “high-risk” occupations, participants’ pattern of choices changed from risk-averse in gain scenarios to risk-seeking in loss scenarios. However, the opposite pattern of risk preferences was found in participants with “white-collar” occupations. Our findings indicate that decision-makers’ occupational backgrounds influence risk preferences under some circumstances. (shrink)

Grace's contextual-choice model can account for the results from many studies on choice under concurrent-chain schedules. However, other models, including one that I call the “hyperbolic value-added model,” can also account for these results. Preference and resistance to change may indeed be related, but the best model of preference remains to be determined.

According to evolutionary theory, emotions are psychological mechanisms that have evolved to enhance fitness in specific situations by motivating appropriate (adaptive) behavior. Taking this perspective, a previous study examined the relationship between mood and preference for natural environments. It reported that participants’ anxiety level was associated with a preference for landscapes offering what Appleton called "refuge," while participants’ anger and cheerfulness were both associated with a preference for landscapes offering what Appleton called "prospect." We attempted to replicate (...) these results and to improve on the study by experimentally manipulating mood. Using a between-subjects design, 80 participants were instructed to self-induce one of four moods: anger, sadness, anxiety, or joy. After the mood induction, they viewed fourteen landscape photographs and recorded the seven most preferred. It was hypothesized that subjects experiencing anger or joy would prefer landscapes rich in "prospect" features, whereas participants experiencing sadness or anxiety would prefer landscapes rich in "refuge" features. In contrast to the previous study, the predictions were not supported: artificially induced moods may not provide ecological validity as a test of the "mood as motivator" model; alternatively, the first study may have reported an alpha error. To see whether the model has practical value, we recommend a study of landscape preference using participants with clinically significant levels of mood dysphoria. (shrink)

Food choices are a key determinant of dietary intake, with brain regions, such as the mesolimbic and prefrontal cortex maturing at differential rates into adulthood. More needs to be understood about developmental changes in healthy and unhealthy food perceptions and preference. We investigated how food perceptions and preference vary as a function of age and how food attributes impact age-related changes. One hundred thirty-nine participants completed computerized tasks to rate high-calorie and low-calorie food cues for taste, health, and (...) liking, followed by 100 binary food choices based on each participant’s ratings. Dietary self-control was considered successful when the healthier food was chosen. Self-control success ratio was the proportion of success trials over total number of choices. Beta-weights for health and taste were calculated as each attribute’s influence on food preference. Adiposity measurements included BMI z-score and waist-to-height ratio. High-calorie foods were rated more tasty and less healthy with increasing age. Older participants liked high-calorie foods more, and β-taste was associated with age. Significant age-by-WHtR interactions were observed for health and taste ratings of high-calorie foods, β-taste, and marginally for preference of high-calorie foods. Stratifying by WHtR, we found age-related increases in taste and preference ratings of high-calorie foods in the high WHtR group alone. In contrast, age-related decreases in health ratings of high-calorie foods were significant in the low WHtR group alone. Age and β-taste were significantly associated in the high WHtR group and only marginally significant with low WHtR. Although participants rated low-calorie foods as less tasty and less healthy with increasing age, there was no association between age and preference for low-calorie foods. Participants made faster food choices with increasing age regardless of WHtR, with a significant age-by-WHtR interaction on reaction time. There were no age-related effects in self-control success ratio and β-health. These results suggest that individual differences in age and central adiposity play an important role in preference for high-calorie foods, and a higher importance of food tastiness in food choice may contribute to greater preference for high-calorie foods with increasing age. (shrink)

“I would prefer not”HERMAN MELVILLE, BARTLEBY THE SCRIVENER: A STORY OF WALL STREET (1853), reprinted in THE PIAZZA TALES 32, 48 (London, Sampson Low, Son & Co. 1856). Scholars have recently challenged the claim in classical deterrence theory that law influences behavior only through the expected sanction imposed. Some go further and argue that law may also “shape preferences,” changing people’s wants and values. In this Article, we analyze existing claims that criminal and civil law alter preferences and conclude that (...) none suggest that the law shapes preferences. We first clarify this preference-shaping claim by elaborating the structure of rational choice theory generally and “preference” in particular. We then investigate three mechanisms of legal influence suggested by the preference-shaping literature: (1) the “serious harm” mechanism; (2) the “social norm” mechanism; and (3) the “self-improvement” mechanism. We then show that each of these mechanisms operates by changing the agent’s beliefs about the attributes or consequences of her choice options rather than by changing her preferences. (shrink)

When discussing the general inertia in climate change mitigation, it is common to approach the analysis either in terms of epistemic obstacles (climate change is too scientifically complex to be fully understood by all in its dramatic nature and/or to find space in the media) and/or moral obstacles (the causal link between polluting actions and social damage is too loose, both geographically and temporally, to allow individuals to understand the consequences of their emissions). In this chapter I maintain (...) that both categories of obstacles now play a secondary role: many people have a clear understanding of the physical and social dynamics involved in climate change. The main reason why so few manage to reduce their ecological footprint is an ethical short-circuit that does not allow most people to reveal their “true” climate-related preferences in their daily choices. This short-circuit manifests itself in two phenomena that can be analysed through the lens of moral psychology. First, as the possibility of anticipated utility approaches, individuals further discount expected future utility and may even reverse their preferences (due to the so-called immediacy multiplier, in addition to the better known and discussed future utility discounting). Second, individuals struggle to order their preferences transitively when presented with the opportunity to obtain small net marginal utilities in the short run. The intertemporal and collective structure of the climate problem creates fertile ground for both phenomena, which means that even those who are sincerely convinced of the need to contribute to climate change mitigation end up trapped in loops of procrastination, both first and second level. If, however, we can understand the origin of these phenomena, then we will be able to devise counteracting solutions that will speed up individual mitigation efforts. I will therefore briefly propose three ethical/public strategies to break the procrastination loop: pre-commitment; increasing the costs of marginal postponements; reducing the disutility of action that is likely to be postponed. (shrink)

Rational choice theory analyzes how an agent can rationally act, given his or her preferences, but says little about where those preferences come from. Preferences are usually assumed to be fixed and exogenously given. Building on related work on reasons and rational choice, we describe a framework for conceptualizing preference formation and preference change. In our model, an agent's preferences are based on certain "motivationally salient" properties of the alternatives over which the preferences are held. (...) Preferences may change as new properties of the alternatives become salient or previously salient properties cease to be salient. Our approach captures endogenous preferences in various contexts and helps to illuminate the distinction between formal and substantive concepts of rationality, as well as the role of perception in rational choice. (shrink)

Future global food insecurity due to growing population as well as changing consumption demands and population growth is sometimes suggested to be met by increase in aquaculture production. This raises a range of ethical issues, seldom discussed together: fish welfare, food security, human health, climate change and environment, and public concern and legislation, which could preferably be seen as pieces in a puzzle, accepting their interdependency. A balanced decision in favour of or against aquaculture needs to take at least (...) these issues into consideration. It is further argued that in the parallel discussion on increased livestock production animal welfare is an inevitable element both in relation to current legislation in many countries but also in relation to our perception of moral, whereas awareness of fish welfare is low. Both EU legislation and labelling concerning fish is mainly limited to environmental aspects. It is argued that EU shows a split perception of fish, on the one hand acknowledging scientific evidence of fish capacities but on the other excludes fish from detailed legislation. Combining the claim of the Treaty of Lisbon to pay full regard to animal welfare and scientific evidence fish are sentient it is concluded that fish welfare need to be considered in any farming practice and any ethical consideration of increased aquaculture. This might be facilitated taking a basis in our own vulnerability and interdependence, combined with moral responsibility to show sentient beings a ‘loving kindness’—an extension of Cora Diamond’s argument regarding mammals. (shrink)

This research formed phase 1 of the Economic and Social Research Council project ‘Pupils’ Approaches to Subject Option Choices’ and is a near repeat of a project carried out in the mid-1980s, thus allowing for a comparison of approaches to subject choice a decade apart, comparing the situation pre- and post-National Curriculum implementation. The simple two-part questionnaire, completed by 1600 children in 11 schools, shows the differences across time and between-school differences in subject preference, but little instability in (...) perceptions of subject importance. Some useful additional data, giving student's reasons for liking subjects and finding subjects important, were obtained from interviews in four schools which formed phase 2 of the project. Comparisons are drawn with the data collected in 1984 on a similar basis. Issues of concern are highlighted with respect to particular subjects and to students’ stated reasons for liking subjects or finding them important, with regard to how this might relate to their subsequent subject choices and career development. (shrink)

Craig Callender attempts to overturn conventional wisdom within decision theory by contending that rational intertemporal choices need not always conform to an exponential discounting function. He argues that there are cases in which hyperbolic discounting is the height of rationality. This paper does not seek to undermine Callender’s conclusions, but instead raises two interrelated theoretical concerns with his way securing them. The first concern is with his dismissal of influential dual-system explanations of rationality. It is argued that Callender’s criticisms of (...) said explanations fail to assess them at anything like their full weight. It is then suggested that dual-systems approaches in cognitive science do have substantial theoretical problems, but that Callender fails to identify them. The second concern builds on the first and suggests that Callender’s arguments against consensus normative standards might motivate a more dramatically reimagined notion of rationality than the one he seems to embrace. (shrink)

Economists are used to associate the rationality of individual choice behaviour with simple and unchanging individual preference patterns, typically predicting unique behavioural outcomes in a choice situation − leaving little room for probing apparent inconsistencies (except in situations of game-theoretic stratagems used by the choosers), and no provision for analysing genuine dilemmas. The paper comments on the (in this respect) richer contents of two recent extensions of the concept of rational choice: the first involved in Sen’s (...) theory of meta-ranking, and the second implied in Scitovsky’s distinction between “pleasure” and “comfort” as the two constituents of the state of individual welfare. The paper then proceeds to suggest a somewhat similar extension of rationality implied, it is argued, in the idea of “development” or “becoming” as part of a chosen, distinct, and articulated process involved, specifically, in education, or more vaguely, in “modernisation”. The emerging concept of rationality which permits of changes in individual preference patterns consistently, in steps, and in a direction initiated and chosen by the individual himself, is claimed in the paper to be more appropriate for the analysis of choice situations likely to be encountered by rational individuals in a complex developing society. The consistency conditions for individual behaviour permitted by such rich, “directional”, rationality have, however, yet to be specified. (shrink)

This article deals with choice-inducing algorithms––algorithms that are explicitly designed to affect people’s choices. Based on an ethnographic account of three Israeli data analytics companies, I explore how algorithms are being designed to drive people into choice-making and examine their co-constitution by an assemblage of specifically positioned human and nonhuman agents. I show that the functioning, logic, and even ethics of choice-inducing algorithms are deeply influenced by the epistemologies, meaning systems, and practices of the individuals who devise (...) and use them and that such algorithms are similarly affected by interorganizational relationships, various nonhuman agents, and changing geopolitical contexts. I conclude by discussing the flexibility of choice-inducing algorithms and by arguing that such algorithms are not programmed to induce specific choices but to more generally convert people into choosers, and thus, to algorithmically create the modern need to choose. This article contributes to the growing literature on algorithms and culture and to our understanding of choice-making in contemporary life. At the same time, it provides a new vocabulary that offers to critically engage with algorithms and their power without losing sight of the often very specific contexts from which they arise. (shrink)

This paper reorganizes and further develops the theory of partial meet contraction which was introduced in a classic paper by Alchourron, Gardenfors, and Makinson. Our purpose is threefold. First, we put the theory in a broader perspective by decomposing it into two layers which can respectively be treated by the general theory of choice and preference and elementary model theory. Second, we reprove the two main representation theorems of AGM and present two more representation results for the finite (...) case that "lie between" the former, thereby partially answering an open question of AGM. Our method of proof is uniform insofar as it uses only one form of "revealed preference", and it explains where and why the finiteness assumption is needed. Third, as an application, we explore the logic characterizing theory contractions in the finite case which are governed by the structure of simple and prioritized belief bases. (shrink)

In this paper I provide a critique of a set of assumptions relating to agency, choice and the legitimacy of actions impacting health that can be seen in some approaches to health promotion. After a brief discussion about the definition of health promotion, I outline two contrasting approaches to this area of health care practice. The first is focused on the provision of information and the second is concerned with seeking to change people’s preferences in a particular way. (...) It has been argued by a number of critics of health promotion that only the first approach is ethical, as it is for individuals to make their own lifestyle choices and adopt their own conception of the good life. I argue against this ‘information’ approach to health promotion on two grounds. First, I suggest that given the aims of health promotion, the provision of information is, as a matter of fact, of limited effectiveness in achieving these aims. Second, I argue that we have good reasons to question the appropriateness of respecting many of the preferences that individuals happen to have, given the origins and quality of such preferences. I then go on to argue, that by contrast we have good reasons to focus on changing at least some of the preferences that people have related to their lifestyle choices. This involves a commitment to both paternalism and a defence of a certain conception of the good life, but both can be defended. I use the example of potential responses to the growing problem of obesity to illustrate my argument, arguing that only policy that, at least sometimes, aims at preference change will be both effective and ethical. (shrink)

We study how the optimal contract in team production is a¤ected when employees are averse to inequity in the sense described by Fehr and Schmidt (1999). By designing a reward scheme that creates inequity o¤ the desired equilibrium, the employer can induce employees to perform e¤ort at a lower total wage cost than when they are not inequity averse. We also show that the optimal output choice might change when employees are inequity averse. Finally, we show that an (...) employer can gain, and never lose, by designing a contract that accounts for inequity aversion, even if employees have standard preferences. (shrink)

Álvarez J.F. (2016) Conflicts, Bounded Rationality and Collective Wisdom in a Networked Society. In: Scarafile G., Gruenpeter Gold L. (eds) Paradoxes of Conflicts. Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning (Interdisciplinary Perspectives from the Humanities and Social Sciences), vol 12. Springer, Cham -/- The adoption of an individualistic perspective on reasoning, choice and decision is a spring of paradoxes of conflicts. Usually the agents immerse in conflicts are drawn or modelled as rational individuals with targets well defined and full capabilities to access (...) to information, without both temporal limitations and perfect reasoning abilities to obtain their preferences are taken account. -/- However, other models of agent, in the bounded rationality perspective, could help to understand better the interrelationships. I adopt embedded argumentative reasoning processes as satisfying criteria to analyze the expert function in a new socio technical environment that has changed deeply the mechanism and tools to access and to aggregate information. The open access to information and institutional arrangements addressed towards team knowledge could offer other kind of tools to affront the conflict, even its possible benefits. -/- The “crowd expertise” is emerging as an actual possibility and it must be incorporated to affront with conflicts. The very possibility of obtaining knowledge generated by “many minds”, collective wisdoms, brings up a real challenge to the conservative or elitist conception of the masses, because masses now emerge as a smart collective user, with new mechanisms to select and produce quality knowledge. These new collective actions differ deeply from the traditional modes of social organization. A new mass society is emerging now as a hybrid one that breaks some conceptual traditional models, such as Ortega y Gasset’s ones, and induces a structured way of flourishing both new practices and new knowledge with transforming capabilities. (shrink)

The adoption of an individualistic perspective on reasoning, choice and decision is a spring of paradoxes of conflicts. Usually the agents immerse in conflicts are drawn or modelled as rational individuals with targets well defined and full capabilities to access to information, without both temporal limitations and perfect reasoning abilities to obtain their preferences are taken account.However, other models of agent, in the bounded rationality perspective, could help to understand better the interrelationships. I adopt embedded argumentative reasoning processes as (...) satisfying criteria to analyze the expert function in a new socio technical environment that has changed deeply the mechanism and tools to access and to aggregate information. The open access to information and institutional arrangements addressed towards team knowledge could offer other kind of tools to affront the conflict, even its possible benefits.The “crowd expertise” is emerging as an actual possibility and it must be incorporated to affront with conflicts. The very possibility of obtaining knowledge generated by “many minds”, collective wisdoms, brings up a real challenge to the conservative or elitist conception of the masses, because masses now emerge as a smart collective user, with new mechanisms to select and produce quality knowledge. These new collective actions differ deeply from the traditional modes of social organization. A new mass society is emerging now as a hybrid one that breaks some conceptual traditional models, such as Ortega y Gasset’s ones, and induces a structured way of flourishing both new practices and new knowledge with transforming capabilities. (shrink)

This paper reports the results of an experiment designed to uncover the stochastic structure of individual preferences over lotteries. Unlike previous experiments, which have presented subjects with pair-wise choices between lotteries, our design allowed subjects to choose between two lotteries or (virtually) any convex combination of the two lotteries. We interpret the mixtures of lotteries chosen by subjects as a measure of the stochastic structure of choice. We test between two alternative interpretations of stochastic choice: the random utility (...) interpretation and the deterministic preferences interpretation. The main findings of the experiment are that the typical subject prefers mixtures of lotteries rather than the extremes of a linear lottery choice set. The distribution of choices does not change between a first and second asking of the same question. We argue that this provides support for the deterministic preferences interpretation over the random utility interpretation of stochastic choice. As a subsidiary result, we find a small proportion of subjects make choices that violate transitivity, but the level of intransitive choice falls significantly over time. (shrink)

The two most influential traditions of contemporary theorizing about democracy, social choice theory and deliberative democracy, are generally thought to be at loggerheads, in that the former demonstrates the impossibility, instability or meaninglessness of the rational collective outcomes sought by the latter. We argue that the two traditions can be reconciled. After expounding the central Arrow and Gibbard-Satterthwaite impossibility results, we reassess their implications, identifying the conditions under which meaningful democratic decision making is possible. We argue that deliberation can (...) promote these conditions, and hence that social choice theory suggests not that democratic decision making is impossible, but rather that democracy must have a deliberative aspect. (shrink)

This chapter discusses three main forces of economic oppression: oppressive economic systems, direct forces of economic oppression, and indirect forces of economic oppression. It is argued that while capitalism and socialism are not intrinsically oppressive, both systems lend themselves to oppression in characteristic ways, and therefore each sort of system must take certain steps to guard against their respective characteristic oppressions. Direct forces of economic oppression are restrictions on opportunities that are applied from the outside on the oppressed, including enslavement, (...) segregation, employment discrimination, group-based harassment, opportunity inequality, neocolonialism, and governmental corruption. Direct forces may not always be clearly visible, either because they happen far from the reach of legal authorities or from the view of consumers, or because they are diffused in a large society, and only apparent from a statistical analysis and comparison among social groups. In indirect forces, or oppression by choice, the oppressed are co-opted into making individual choices that add to their own oppression. When this force is at work the oppressed are faced with options that rationally induce them to choose against the collective good of their social group, and in the long run, against their own good as well. But choosing otherwise requires choosing against their own immediate interests, and changing their beliefs or preferences in ways that they may resent. (shrink)

An adaptive preference is a preference that is regimented in response to an agent’s set of feasible options. The fabled fox in the sour grapes story undergoes an adaptive preference change. I consider adaptive preferences more broadly, to include adaptive preference formation as well. I argue that many adaptive preferences that other philosophers have cast out as irrational sour-grapes-like preferences are actually fully rational preferences worthy of pursuit. I offer a means of distinguishing rational and (...) worthy adaptive preferences from irrational and unworthy ones. The distinction is based on the agent’s own appraisal of the adaptive preference. (shrink)

Nudges are small changes in the presentation of options that make a predictable impact on people's decisions. Proponents of nudges often claim that they are justified as paternalistic interventions that respect autonomy: they lead people to make better choices, while still letting them choose for themselves. However, existing work on nudges ignores the possibility of “hard choices”: cases where a person prefers one option in some respects, and another in other respects, but has no all‐things‐considered preference between the two. (...) In this paper, I argue that many significant medical decisions are hard choices that provide patients with an opportunity to exercise a distinctive sort of “formative autonomy” by settling their preferences and committing themselves to weigh their values in a particular way. Since nudges risk infringing formative autonomy by depriving patients of this opportunity, their use in medical contexts should be sensitive to this risk. (shrink)

People who habituate to stress show a repetition-induced response attenuation—neuroendocrine, cardiovascular, neuroenergetic, and emotional—when exposed to a threatening environment. But the exact dynamics underlying stress habituation remain obscure. The free energy principle offers a unifying account of self-organising systems such as the human brain. In this paper, we elaborate on how stress habituation can be explained and modelled using the free energy principle. We introduce habituation priors that encode the agent’s tendency for stress habituation and incorporate them in the (...) agent’s decision-making process. Using differently shaped goal priors—that encode the agent’s goal preferences—we illustrate, in two examples, the optimising behaviour of agents. We show that habituation minimises free energy by reducing the precision of goal preferences. Reducing the precision of goal priors means that the agent accepts adverse states. Acceptance or tolerance of adverse outcomes may explain why habituation causes people to exhibit an attenuation of the stress response. Given that stress habituation occurs in brain regions where goal priors are encoded, i.e., in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and that these priors are encoded as sufficient statistics of probability distributions, our approach seems plausible from an anatomical-functional and neuro-statistical point of view. The ensuing formal and generalisable account—based on the free energy principle—further motivate our novel treatment of stress habituation. Our analysis suggests that stress habituation has far-reaching consequences, protecting against the harmful effects of toxic stress, but on the other hand making the acceptability of precarious living conditions and the development of the obese type 2 diabetes mellitus phenotype more likely. (shrink)

Probably the main purpose of reproductive technologies is to enable people who choose to do so to avoid the birth of a baby with a disabling condition. However the conditions women want information about and the ‘price’ they are willing to pay for obtaining that information vary enormously. Individual women have to arrive at their own prenatal testing choices by ‘trading off’ means and ends in order to resolve the dilemmas facing them. We know very little about how individuals make (...) these trade-offs, so it is difficult to predict how new technologies will affect their choices and preferences. Uptake decisions can be expected to change, especially in the group of women who now are put off by some aspect of the current screening approach, where the avoidance of miscarriage risk may have provided a kind of ‘psychological shelter’, protecting a lot of people from having to make other decisions. Technologies such as Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis may remove a second ‘psychological shelter’ because they offer the means of avoiding the birth of an affected child without terminating a pregnancy. Even if new technologies will make some decisions easier in terms of their cognitive demands, they will also create new dilemmas and decision making will not necessarily become less stressful in emotional terms. Key challenges concern information and decision-making. (shrink)

What we value, like, endorse, want, and prefer changes over the course of our lives. Richard Pettigrew presents a theory of rational decision making for agents who recognise that their values will change over time and whose decisions will affect those future times.

To the normal reasons that we think can justify one in preferring something, x (namely, that x has objectively preferable properties, or has properties that one prefers things to have, or that x's obtaining would advance one's preferences), I argue that it can be a justifying reason to prefer x that one's very preferring of x would advance one's preferences. Here, one prefers x not because of the properties of x, but because of the properties of one's having the (...) class='Hi'>preference for x. So-revising one's preferences is rational in paradoxical choice situations like Kavka's Deterrence Paradox. I then try to meet the following objections: that this is stoicist, incoherent, bad faith; that it conflates instrumental and intrinsic value, gives wrong solutions to the problems presented by paradoxical choice situations, entails vicious regresses of value justification, falsifies value realism, makes valuing x unresponsive to x's properties, causes value conflict, conflicts with other standards of rationality, violates decision theory, counsels immorality, makes moral paradox, treats value change as voluntary, conflates first- and second-order values, is psychologically unrealistic, and wrongly presumes that paradoxical choice situations can even occur. (shrink)

When subject to the choice-blindness effect, an agent gives reasons for making choice B, moments after making the alternative choice A. Choice blindness has been studied in a variety of contexts, from consumer choice and aesthetic judgement to moral and political attitudes. The pervasiveness and robustness of the effect is regarded as powerful evidence of self-ignorance. Here we compare two interpretations of choice blindness. On the choice error interpretation, when the agent gives reasons (...) she is in fact wrong about what her choice is. On the choice change interpretation, when the agent gives reasons she is right about what her choice is, but she does not realise that her choice has changed. In this paper, we spell out the implications of the two interpretations of the choice-blindness effect for self-ignorance claims and offer some reasons to prefer choice change to choice error. (shrink)

This paper refutes the widespread view that disjunctions of imperatives invariably grant free choice between the actions named by their disjuncts. Like other disjunctions they can also express a correlation with some factual distinction, but as with modalized declaratives used for non-assertive speech acts this needs to be indicated explicitly. A compositional analysis of one such indicator, depending on, constitutes the point of departure for a uniform analysis of disjunctions across clause types. Disjunctions are analyzed as sets of propositional (...) alternatives that correlate with a partition that the speaker may or may not be able to indicate explicitly. Free choice arises as the specific case where the partition is induced by the preferences of the addressee. (shrink)

Recent debates over climate change policy have made it clear that the choice of a social discount rate has enormous consequences for the amount of mitigation that will be recommended. The social discount rate determines how future costs are to be compared to present costs. Philosophers, however, have been almost unanimous in endorsing the view that the only acceptable social rate of time preference is zero, a view that, taken literally, has either absurd or extremely radical implications. (...) The first goal of this paper is to show that the standard arguments against temporal preference are much less persuasive than they are usually taken to be. The second goal is to explore two different avenues of argument that could be adopted, in order to show that temporal discounting of welfare may be permissible. The first involves simply an application of the method of reflective equilibrium, while the second involves consideration of the way that our abstract moral commitments are institutionalized. (shrink)