Most research on risk aversion in behavioral science with human subjects has focused on a component of risk aversion that does not adapt itself to context. More recently, studies have explored risk aversion adaptation to changing circumstances in sequential decision-making tasks. It is an open question whether one can identify evidence, at the single subject level, for such risk aversion adaptation. We conducted a behavioral experiment on human subjects, using a sequential decision making task. We developed a model-based approach for (...) estimating the adaptation of risk-taking behavior with single-trial resolution by modelling a subject’s goals and internal representation of task contingencies. Using this model-based approach, we estimated the subject-specific adaptation of risk aversion depending on the current task context. We found striking inter-subject variations in the adaptation of risk-taking behavior. We show that these differences can be explained by differences in subjects’ internal representations of task contingencies and goals. We discuss that the proposed approach can be adapted to a wide range of experimental paradigms and be used to analyze behavioral measures other than risk aversion. (shrink)

One of the most significant contributions of archaeology to the studies of human-animal relations is the concept of the “domestication” of non-human animals. Domestication is often seen as a specific human-animal relation that explains the ways people and animals interact. However, I argue, that “domestication” does not explain anything but has to be explained or “reassembled” by focusing on the many historically specific ways human and animals live together. Thus, the paper tackles the emergence of a “herd”, an assembly of (...) animals, humans and things that appeared in the Neolithic, by following the ways the different agencies—human, animal, material and composite—are involved in the creation of new sociality. Living with animals is always already a material practice. It includes material culture, bodies, gestures, actions, habits, and body skills. It requires new practices and skills of flocking, herding, closing, observing, separating, amassing, and forming a queue; skills to be learned and employed by the participants. However, numerous resistances and translations are encountered and employed along the way, changing everybody in the process. In this way new bodies and persons—human and animal—are created, ultimately leading to the “herd”, a new way of association of animals, people, and things. From this perspective the agency and power is distributed and not confined to one species or group. There is no single locus of power and agency and no hegemony or “domination” but power and resistance that works from everywhere. Living with animals is not a matter of management, control or domination, but it is about making hybrid society work, a matter of politics, for all the parties involved. (shrink)

(1992). Community solidarity fees: A case study of Sabac national theatre. World Futures: Vol. 33, Culture and Development: European Experiences and Challenges A Special Research Report of the European Culture Impact Research Consortium (EUROCIRCON), pp. 61-66.

A Marxist analysis of the role of politics in liberal democracies and fascist and socialist states.

Unchosen transformative experiences—transformative experiences that are imposed upon an agent by external circumstances—present a fundamental problem for agency: how does one act intentionally in circumstances that transform oneself as an agent, and that disrupt one’s core projects, cares, or goals? Drawing from William James’s analysis of conversion and Matthew Ratcliffe’s account of grief, I give a phenomenological analysis of transformative experiences as involving the restructuring of systems of practical meaning. On this analysis, an agent’s experience of the world is structured (...) by practically significant possibilities that form organized systems on the basis of the agent’s projects and relationships. Transformative experiences involve shifts to systems of possibility, that is, changes to habitual meanings and to how an agent’s projects are situated in relation to one another. I employ the enactivist notion of sense-making to analyze how an agent rebuilds the meaning structures disrupted by a transformative experience. In an unchosen transformative experience, an agent adjusts to a significant disruption through a process of sense-making in precarious conditions. By establishing new patterns of bodily and social interaction with the world, one alters the practical meanings of one’s surroundings, and thereby reconstitutes oneself as an intentional agent. (shrink)

Unchosen transformative experiences—transformative experiences that are imposed upon an agent by external circumstances—present a fundamental problem for agency: how does one act intentionally in circumstances that transform oneself as an agent, and that disrupt one’s core projects, cares, or goals? Drawing from William James’s analysis of conversion and Matthew Ratcliffe’s account of grief, I give a phenomenological analysis of transformative experiences as involving the restructuring of systems of practical meaning. On this analysis, an agent’s experience of the world is structured (...) by practically significant possibilities that form organized systems on the basis of the agent’s projects and relationships. Transformative experiences involve shifts to systems of possibility, that is, changes to habitual meanings and to how an agent’s projects are situated in relation to one another. I employ the enactivist notion of sense-making to analyze how an agent rebuilds the meaning structures disrupted by a transformative experience. In an unchosen transformative experience, an agent adjusts to a significant disruption through a process of sense-making in precarious conditions. By establishing new patterns of bodily and social interaction with the world, one alters the practical meanings of one’s surroundings, and thereby reconstitutes oneself as an intentional agent. (shrink)

In the past few decades, a growth in ethical consumerism has led brands to increasingly develop conscientiousness and depict ethical image at a corporate level. However, most of the research studying business ethics in the field of corporate brand management is either conceptual or has been empirically conducted in relation to goods/products contexts. This is surprising because corporate brands are more relevant in services contexts, because of the distinct nature of services and the key role that employees have in the (...) services sector. Accordingly, this article aims at empirically examining the effects of customer perceived ethicality in the context of corporate services brands. Based on data collected for eight service categories using a panel of 2179 customers, the hypothesized structural model is tested using path analysis. The results show that, in addition to a direct effect, customer perceived ethicality has a positive and indirect effect on customer loyalty, through the mediators of customer affective commitment and customer perceived quality. Further, employee empathy positively influences the impact of customer perceived ethicality on customer affective commitment, and customer loyalty positively impacts customer positive word-of-mouth. The first implication of these results is that corporate brand strategy needs to be aligned with human resources policies and practices if brands want to turn ethical strategies into employee behavior. Second, corporate brands should build more authentic communications grounded in their ethical beliefs and supported by evidence from actual employees. (shrink)

The present study aims to identify contextual and psychological factors of proneness to radicalization and violent extremism operationalized through the Militant Extremist Mindset scale consisting of three distinct aspects: Proviolence, Vile World beliefs, and trust in Divine Power. A community sample of 271 high school students from Belgrade and Sandžak regions in Serbia completed: a 24-item MEM scale; contextual measures including a 6-item scale of family dysfunction and a 4-item composite measure capturing exposure to a harsh school environment and peer (...) abuse ; psychological measures including the 9-item Right-Wing Authoritarianism scale, the 5-item Social Dominance Orientation scale, and the 20-item UCLA Loneliness scale. A path analysis was conducted with contextual factors on the first and psychological factors on the second level of the model predicting the three factors of MEM. LON was positively predicted by FDys and HSE, SDO by HSE only, while RWA was positively predicted by FDys only. Contextual and psychological factors accounted for 27% of the variance in PV, 15% of the variance in VW, and 31% of the variance in DP. Obtained findings reveal a complex interplay of contextual and psychological drivers in the prediction of different aspects of RVE and build upon existing knowledge on risk factors associated with RVE. (shrink)

Kids will discover the stories of people like Jeff Boyer, an Iowa farmer who was forced to evacuate his farm and leave behind his 3,500 pigs.

Business Ethics, the Environment &Responsibility, Volume 32, Issue 2, Page 415-418, April 2023.

The Standards' ecumenical implications are critically assessed in view of the risks which their cross-denominational or cross-faith cooperation implications on the one hand, and, on the other hand, their secular commitments to mutual learning, non-proselytizing, professionalism, and efficiency assessment might carry for chaplains' properly spiritual orientation. The problem posed by the ambiguity of language is raised as a warning that concepts like human dignity have a profoundly different meaning in secular and Christian contexts. Invoking such concepts can be seriously misleading.

This edited collection examines the multi-faceted phenomenon of transparency, especially in its relation to social movements, from a range of multi-disciplinary viewpoints. Over the past few decades, transparency has become an omnipresent catch phrase in public and scientific debates. The volume tracks developments of ideas and practices of transparency from the eighteenth century to the current day, as well as their semantic, cultural and social preconditions. It connects analyses of the ideological implications of transparency concepts and transparency claims with their (...) impact on the public sphere in general and on social movements in particular. In doing so, the book contributes to a better understanding of social conflicts and power relations in modern societies. The chapters are organized into four parts, covering the concept and ideology of transparency, historical and recent developments of the public sphere and media, the role of the state as an agent of surveillance, and conflicts over transparency and participation connected to social movements. (shrink)

This paper argues that grieving a profound loss is a transformative experience, specifically an unchosen transformative experience, understood as an event‐based transformation not chosen by the agent. Grief transforms the self (i) cognitively, by forcing the agent to alter a large set of beliefs and desires, (ii) phenomenologically, by altering their experience in a diffuse or global manner, (iii) normatively, by requiring the agent to revise their practical identity, and (iv) existentially, by confronting the agent with a structuring condition of (...) their life. Grief is a disruption to one's identity that an agent addresses by making sense of the world after the loss, remaking the practical significance of various situations in their lives through their activity. Transformative grief is both an “activity” and a “revelation” (Callard, 2020): Some parts of the grieving process are active (the agent must actively work to become a new kind of person), while others are irreducibly passive (the agent passively undergoes them). (shrink)

In this paper we argue that predictive processing (PP) theory cannot account for the phenomenon of affect-biased attention prioritized attention to stimuli that are affectively salient because of their associations with reward or punishment. Specifically, the PP hypothesis that selective attention can be analyzed in terms of the optimization of precision expectations cannot accommodate affect-biased attention; affectively salient stimuli can capture our attention even when precision expectations are low. We review the prospects of three recent attempts to accommodate affect with (...) tools internal to PP theory: Miller and Clark’s (2018) embodied inference; Seth’s (2013) interoceptive inference; and Joffily and Coricelli’s (2013) rate of change of free energy. In each case we argue that the account does not resolve the challenge from affect-biased attention. For this reason, we conclude that prediction error minimization is not sufficient to explain all mental phenomena, contrary to the claim that the PP framework provides a unified theory of all mental phenomena or the brain ‘s cognitive functioning. Nevertheless, we suggest that empirical investigation of the interaction between affective salience and precision expectations should prove helpful in understanding the limits of PP theory, and may provide new directions for the application of a Bayesian perspective to perception. (shrink)

Doppelt argues that the democratic socialist conception of human freedom expressed in some recent works of mine lacks philosophical justification and fails to get to the roots of the socialist ideals of dignity, human worth, and self-respect. Doppelt claims to provide a new approach to the grounding of human freedom which allows him to avoid what he regards as the narrowness of my own conception. Not only does Doppelt fail to show that my own conception of freedom is confined to (...) self-management and cannot embrace the dimensions of social life his own paradigm is claimed to take care of, his article fails to raise or resolve the question of the conflict between the democratic socialist and the Rawlsian components that make up his 'new' paradigm. In this reply I discuss the issues Doppelt himself raises in connection with my own work: (1) how to ground human freedom; (2) whether my conception of freedom in democratic socialism is rationally preferable to the conception embodied in contemporary capitalist society; and (3) whether my idea of freedom does indeed exclude those dimensions of life to which Doppelt refers. (shrink)

In this paper, we present a method for introducing law students to the writing of legal documents. The method uses a machine-readable representation of the legal knowledge to support document assembly and to help the students to understand how the assembly is performed. The knowledge base consists of enacted legislation, document templates, and assembly instructions. We propose a system called LEDAS (LEgal Document Assembly System) for the interactive assembly of legal documents. It guides users through the assembly process and provides (...) explanations of the interconnection between input data and claims stated in the document. The system acts as a platform for practicing drafting skills and has great potential as an education tool. It allows teachers to configure the system for the assembly of some particular type of legal document and then enables students to draft the documents by investigating which information is relevant for these documents and how the input data shape the final document. The generated legal document is complemented by a graphical representation of legal arguments expressed in the document. The system is based on existing legal standards to facilitate its introduction in the legal domain. Applicability of the system in the education of future lawyers is positively evaluated by the group of law students and their TA. (shrink)

Marxism is often claimed to be incompatible with any kind of ethical theory, because of its assumptions of economic determinism, of the class character of morals, and of the subordination of morality to politics. But the author proposes that these assumptions can be interpreted in such a flexible way as not to rule out the freedom of choice and responsibility, die relative independence of morals from economic conditions and political ends, and concepts of universal human value and a specifically moral (...) ideal. A humanist philosophy, centered in Marx's analysis of alienation, provides a sufficiently rich theoretical basis for the solution of both ethical and meta-ethical' problems. (shrink)

The ancient Thracian megalithic and stone-hewn sacred places are full of symbols closely connected with the Thracian mythology and ancient cult practices which were typical for this area. Among them the most numerous are the huge stone-hewn human footprints, which in Bulgarian folklore were regarded as the footprints of the hero Krali Marko, who was thought of as the guardian of the people in Bulgaria. In the contemporary science studying Thrace he is believed to have been the folklore successor of (...) the Thracian Dionysus.Marking the sacred place with a stone-hewn footstep altar of the hero was authentic evidence for the believers in ancient times that the god had been there in primordial mythological times. In this way, through the contact with the divine, the monumental rock turns into sacred and the place turns into a sanctuary. The raw becomes boiled, Nature becomes culture. With the establishment of Christianity as the sole religion in the Roman Empire since the 4th century, some of the Thracian megalithic sanctuaries have been abandoned. Others have been Christianized. Later, others in the Middle Ages were converted into Islamic sacred places. In this way they became permanently sacred places on the Balkans. Part of the signs-symbols in them have a new meaning in the spirit of the new religions.Key words: anthropology; history of culture; religion; mythology; archaeology. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment &Responsibility, Volume 32, Issue 3, Page 877-881, July 2023.

Resumen: Los antiguos espacios sagrados tracios megaliticos y dolménicos están llenos de símbolos estrechamente conectados con la mitología de los tracios y las antiguas prácticas de culto, típicas de esta área. Las más numerosas son las grandes tallas en piedra de huellas que el folclore búlgaro considera las del heroe Krali Marko, considerado como el guardia de las personas en Bulgaria. En la ciencia contemporánea que estudia la Tracia se cree que él ha sido el sucesor del Dionisio tracio.Hacer un (...) lugar sagrado con una piedra tallada de su huella como altar del héroe, fue realmente una autentica prueba para los creyentes de la antiguedad, de que Dios habia estado allí en la primogenia época mitológica. En este sentido, mediante el contacto con lo divino, la roca monumental se convierte en sagrada y el lugar se convierte en un santuario. Lo crudo se convierte en cocido, la Naturaleza se convierte en cultura. Con el establecimiento de la Cristianidad como única religion en el Imperio Romano desde el siglo IV, algunos de los santuarios megalíticos de los Tracios fueron abandonados, aunque otros fueron cristianizados. Después, en la Edad Media, otros fueron apropiados como espacio sagrado Islámico. De esta manera, permanecen como espacios sagrados en los Balcanes. Parte de los signos-símbolos que hay en ellos han adquirido nuevos significados debido al espiritu de las nuevas religiones. Palabras claves: Antrología; historia de la cultura; religión; mitología; arqueología. (shrink)

At the basis of tireless efforts to explain the nature of law lies the question of how judges should decide cases. Therefrom arises a need for a theory that would clarify the role of the courts and, moreover, provide guidance to them on reaching judgments. The history of legal theory abounds with various attempts to offer a generally acceptable answer to the question raised. The fervor of debate and the perpetual dissatisfaction with offered solutions prompted the thought of untamable arbitrariness (...) of judges. In the contemporary debate the significance of argumentation is particularly emphasized as a link of the court procedure which provides reasonableness and therewith justification and persuasiveness of the decision. Before going into the matter, I will indicate in broad strokes which areas of legal theory do argumentation and interpretation belong to. The purpose of setting a conceptual framework is to prevent losing sight of the whole as well as to limit the scope of discourse to a certain section of legal issues. The second part deals with the concept of argumentation in general and some specific features of the argumentation in law. The third part examines the role of legal interpretation and draws a clear distinction between the interpretation as a process and the interpretation as a result. At the end of the discussion I shall put forward a thesis that the interpretation as a process is argumentation, while the interpretation as a result is an argument in the justification of judgment. nema. (shrink)

Following the recent wave of globalization, the possession of different types of knowledge became even more important for economic development than the possession of physical resources. The ability of a society to adopt existing and create new knowledge thus gained fundamental importance for its wellbeing. In this paper, we identify important aspects of the relationship between education, creation of knowledge, economic growth, as well as both material and immate?rial wellbeing of a society. We describe potential problems that prevent societies from (...) maximizing the benefit from the effort its members invest in acquiring knowledge. The problems of failure of the national markets for education as well as the global migrations which lead to drain of knowledge towards economically highly developed countries are especially analyzed. In the long run, they lead to a decline in both national competitiveness and different aspects of the immate?rial wellbeing. As the basis for solving these problems we propose a combination of economic theory and the concept of solidarity between more and less devel?oped countries, individuals and societies of their origin, respecting the free will of individuals. nema. (shrink)

We determined the prevailing ethical climate at three different schools of a single university, in order to explore possible differences in the ethical climate related to different research fields: the School of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Naval Architecture; the School of Humanities and Social Sciences; and the School of Medicine. We used the Ethical Climate Questionnaire to survey the staff at the three schools, and used the research integrity and organizational climate survey for early-stage researchers at the three schools. (...) The dominant ethical climate type perceived collectively at the three university schools was Laws and professional codes, which is associated with the cosmopolitan level of analysis and the ethical construct of principle. Individually, the same climate predominated at the schools for engineering and humanities, but the School of Medicine had the Self-interest ethical climate, which is associated with the individual level of analysis and the egoism ethical construct. In the RIOC survey, early-stage researchers from the three university schools did not differ in their perceptions of the organizational research integrity climate, or in their perceived individual, group or organizational pressures. Our study is the first, to the best of our knowledge, to show differences in perceived ethical climate at a medical school compared to other schools at a university. Further studies are needed to explore the reasons for these differences and how they translate to organizational outcomes, such as job satisfaction, commitment to the institution and dysfunctional behaviour, including research misconduct. (shrink)

In an ever more transparent, digitalized, and connected environment, customers are increasingly pressuring brands to embrace genuine corporate social responsibility practices and co-creation activities. While both CSR and co-creation are social and collaborative processes, there is still little research examining whether CSR can boost co-creation. In addition, while previous research has mainly related co-creation to emotional outcomes, limited empirical research has related it to rational and behavioral outcomes. To address these shortcomings in the literature, this paper examines the influence of (...) CSR on customer loyalty, considering the mediating roles of co-creation and customer trust. It also investigates the influence of co-creation on customer trust. The data were collected in Spain in late 2017 using an online survey, and the sample contained 1101 customers of health insurance services brands. Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypothesized relationships simultaneously. The results show that CSR influences customer loyalty both directly and indirectly through co-creation and customer trust. However, the indirect impact is the stronger of the two, implying that embracing co-creation activities and developing customer trust can make it easier for CSR practices to enhance customer loyalty. In addition, co-creation has a direct effect on customer trust. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment &Responsibility, Volume 31, Issue 3, Page 601-603, July 2022.

In order to be competitive in an era of ethical consumerism, brands are facing an ever-increasing pressure to integrate ethical values into their identities and to display their ethical commitment at a corporate level. Nevertheless, studies that relate business ethics to corporate brands are either theoretical or have predominantly been developed empirically in goods contexts. This is surprising, because corporate brands are more relevant in services settings, given the nature of services, and the fact that services settings comprise a greater (...) number of customer–brand interactions and touch points than goods contexts. Accordingly, the purpose of this article is to empirically examine the effects of customer perceived ethicality of corporate brands that operate in the services sector. Based on data collected for eight service categories using a panel of 2179 customers, the hypothesized structural model is tested using path analysis. The generalizability theory is applied to test for measurement equivalence between these categories. The results of the hypothesized model show that, in addition to a direct impact, customer perceived ethicality has a positive and indirect impact on brand equity, through the mediators of recognition benefits and brand image. Moreover, brand heritage negatively influences the impact of customer perceived ethicality on brand image. The main implication is that managers need to be aware of the need to reinforce brand image and recognition benefits, as this can facilitate the translation of customer perceived ethicality into brand equity. (shrink)

In the current socioeconomic environment, brands increasingly need to portray societal and ethical commitments at a corporate level, in order to remain competitive and improve their reputation. However, studies that relate business ethics to corporate brands are either purely conceptual or have been empirically conducted in relation to the field of products/goods. This is surprising because corporate brands are even more relevant in the services sector, due to the different nature of services, and the subsequent need to provide a consistent (...) high-quality customer experience across all the brand–customer interactions and touch-points. Thus, the purpose of this article is to study, at a corporate brand level and in the field of services, the effect of customer perceived ethicality of a brand on brand equity. The model is tested by structural equations, using data collected for eight service categories by means of a panel composed of 2179 customers. The test of measurement equivalence between these categories is conducted using generalizability theory. Confirmatory factor analysis marker technique is applied in order to check for common method variance. The results of the hypothesized model indicate that customer perceived ethicality has a positive, indirect impact on brand equity, through the mediators of brand affect and perceived quality. However, there is no empirical evidence for a direct effect of customer perceived ethicality on brand equity. (shrink)

The comparison between biological and social macroevolution is a very important (though insufficiently studied) subject whose analysis renders new significant possibilities to comprehend the processes, trends, mechanisms, and peculiarities of each of the two types of macroevolution. Of course, there are a few rather important (and very understandable) differences between them; however, it appears possible to identify a number of fundamental similarities. One may single out at least three fundamental sets of factors determining those similarities. First of all, those similarities (...) stem from the fact that in both cases we are dealing with very complex non-equilibrium (but rather stable) systems whose principles of functioning and evolution are described by the General Systems' Theory, as well as by a number of cybernetic principles and laws. -/- Secondly, in both cases we do not deal with isolated systems; in both cases we deal with a complex interaction between systems of organic systems and external environment, whereas the reaction of systems to external challenges can be described in terms of certain general principles (that, however, express themselves rather differently within the biological reality, on the one hand, and within the social reality, on the other). -/- Thirdly, it is necessary to mention a direct ‘genetic’ link between the two types of macroevolution and their mutual influence. -/- It is important to emphasize that the very similarity of the principles and regularities of the two types of macroevolution does not imply their identity. Rather significant similarities are frequently accompanied by enormous differences. For example, genomes of the chimpanzees and the humans are very similar – with differences constituting just a few per cent; however, there are enormous differences with respect to intellectual and social differences of the chimpanzees and the humans hidden behind the apparently ‘insignificant’ difference between the two genomes. Thus, in certain respects it appears reasonable to consider the biological and social macroevolution as a single macroevolutionary process. This implies the necessity to comprehend the general laws and regularities that describe this process, though their manifestations may display significant variations depending on properties of a concrete evolving entity (biological, or social one). An important notion that may contribute to the improvement of the operationalization level as regards the comparison between the two types of macroevolution is the one that we suggested some time ago – the social aromorphosis (that was developed as a counterpart to the notion of biological aromorphosis well established within Russian evolutionary biology). We regard social aromorphosis as a rare qualitative macrochange that increases in a very significant way complexity, adaptability, and mutual influence of the social systems, that opens new possibilities for social macrodevelopment. In our paper we discuss a number of regularities that describe biological and social macroevolution and that employ the notions of social and biological aromorphosis such as ones of the module evolution (or the evolutionary ‘block assemblage’), ‘payment for arogenic progress’ etc. (shrink)

Emotionally arousing events reach awareness more easily and evoke greater visual cortex activation than more mundane events. Recent studies have shown that they are also perceived more vividly and that emotionally enhanced perceptual vividness predicts memory vividness. We propose that affect-biased attention (ABA) – selective attention to emotionally salient events – is an endogenous attentional system tuned by an individual's history of reward and punishment. We present the Biased Attention via Norepinephrine (BANE) model, which unifies genetic, neuromodulatory, neural and behavioural (...) evidence to account for ABA. We review evidence supporting BANE's proposal that a key mechanism of ABA is locus coeruleus–norepinephrine (LC–NE) activity, which interacts with activity in hubs of affective salience networks to modulate visual cortex activation and heighten the subjective vividness of emotionally salient stimuli. We further review literature on biased competition and look at initial evidence for its potential as a neural mechanism behind ABA. We also review evidence supporting the role of the LC–NE system as a driving force of ABA. Finally, we review individual differences in ABA and memory including differences in sensitivity to stimulus category and valence. We focus on differences arising from a variant of the ADRA2b gene, which codes for the alpha2b adrenoreceptor as a way of investigating influences of NE availability on ABA in humans. (shrink)