In the present research, we examine the relation between leader mindfulness and employee performance through the lenses of organizational justice and leader-member relations. We hypothesize that employees of more mindful leaders view their relations as being of higher leader-member exchange quality. We further hypothesize two mediating mechanisms of this relation: increased interpersonal justice and reduced employee stress. In other words, we posit that employees of more mindful leaders feel treated with greater respect and experience less stress. Finally, we predict that (...) LMX quality serves as a mediator linking leader mindfulness to employee performance—defined in terms of both in-role and extra-role performance. Across two field studies of triadic leader-employee-peer data and dyadic leader–employee data, we find support for this sequential mediation model. We discuss implications for theorizing on leadership, organizational justice, business ethics, LMX, and mindfulness, as well as practical implications. (shrink)

Despite the rapid adoption of technology in human resource departments, there is little empirical work that examines the potential challenges of algorithmic decision-making in the recruitment process. In this paper, we take the perspective of job applicants and examine how they perceive the use of algorithms in selection and recruitment. Across four studies on Amazon Mechanical Turk, we show that people in the role of a job applicant perceive algorithm-driven recruitment processes as less fair compared to human only or algorithm-assisted (...) human processes. This effect persists regardless of whether the outcome is favorable to the applicant or not. A potential mechanism underlying algorithm resistance is the belief that algorithms will not be able to recognize their uniqueness as a candidate. Although the use of algorithms has several benefits for organizations such as improved efficiency and bias reduction, our results highlight a potential cost of using them to screen potential employees during recruitment. (shrink)

We examine whether mindfulness can neutralize the negative impact of COVID-19 stressors on employees’ sleep duration and work engagement. In Study 1, we conducted a field experiment in Wuhan, China during the lockdown between February 20, 2020, and March 2, 2020, in which we induced state mindfulness by randomly assigning participants to either a daily mindfulness practice or a daily mind-wandering practice. Results showed that the sleep duration of participants in the mindfulness condition, compared with the control condition, was less (...) impacted by COVID-19 stressors (i.e., the increase of infections in the community). In Study 2, in a 10-day daily diary study in the United Kingdom between June 8, 2020, and June 19, 2020, we replicate our results from Study 1 using a subjective measure of COVID-19 stressors and a daily measure of state mindfulness. In addition, we find that mindfulness buffers the negative effect of COVID-19 stressors on work engagement mediated by sleep duration. As the COVID-19 pandemic is ongoing and the number of reported cases continues to rise globally, our findings suggest that mindfulness is an evidence-based practice that can effectively neutralize the negative effect of COVID-19 stressors on sleep and work outcomes. The findings of the present study contribute to the employee stress and well-being literature as well as the emerging organizational research on mindfulness. (shrink)

We investigated the week-to-week effects of a mindfulness intervention on emotional exhaustion, work engagement, and job satisfaction in a field study involving 218 participants who participated and reported their weekly outcomes during the 8-week program. To examine how mindfulness impacted work outcomes, we used intraindividual modeling of the 8-week data. Mindfulness increased over time, and time also had indirect effects on emotional exhaustion, work engagement, and job satisfaction, through mindfulness. Supplementary growth curve analyses on the improvement of mindfulness over time (...) showed a slight decrease in the positive effect of time on mindfulness. (shrink)

Contributed research papers on various aspects of Hindu philoosphy.

It is frequently demanded that AI-based Decision Support Tools (AI-DSTs) ought to be both explainable to, and trusted by, those who use them. The joint pursuit of these two principles is ordinarily believed to be uncontroversial. In fact, a common view is that AI systems should be made explainable so that they can be trusted, and in turn, accepted by decision-makers. However, the moral scope of these two principles extends far beyond this particular instrumental connection. This paper argues that if (...) we were to account for the rich and diverse moral reasons that ground the call for explainable AI, and fully consider what it means to “trust” AI in a descriptively rich sense of the term, we would uncover a deep and persistent tension between the two principles. For explainable AI to usefully serve the pursuit of normatively desirable goals, decision-makers must carefully monitor and critically reflect on the content of an AI-DST’s explanation. This entails a deliberative attitude. Conversely, calls for trust in AI-DSTs imply the disposition to put questions about their reliability out of mind. This entails an unquestioning attitude. As such, the joint pursuit of explainable and trusted AI calls on decision-makers to simultaneously adopt incompatible attitudes towards their AI-DST, which leads to an intractable implementation gap. We analyze this gap and explore its broader implications: suggesting that we may need alternate theoretical conceptualizations of what explainability and trust entail, and/or alternate decision-making arrangements that separate the requirements for trust and deliberation to different parties. (shrink)

Search engines are important contemporary sources of information and contribute to shaping our beliefs about the world. Each time they are consulted, various algorithms filter and order content to show us relevant results for the inputted search query. Because these search engines are frequently and widely consulted, it is necessary to have a clear understanding of the distinctively epistemic role that these algorithms play in the background of our online experiences. To aid in such understanding, this paper argues that search (...) engine algorithms are providers of “bent testimony”—that, within certain contexts of interactions, users act as if these algorithms provide us with testimony—and acquire or alter beliefs on that basis. Specifically, we treat search engine algorithms as if they were asserting as true the content ordered at the top of a search results page—which has interesting parallels with how we might treat an ordinary testifier. As such, existing discussions in the philosophy of testimony can help us better understand and, in turn, improve our interactions with search engines. By explicating the mechanisms by which we come to accept this “bent testimony,” our paper discusses methods to help us control our epistemic reliance on search engine algorithms and clarifies the normative expectations one ought to place on the search engines that deploy these algorithms. (shrink)

Unconscious thought theory (UTT) states that all information is taken into account and the attributes are weighted optimally resulting in better decisions in complex decision problems during unconscious thought. Very few studies have investigated the actual amount of information processed in the unconscious thought condition. We hypothesized that only a small subset of information might be considered during unconscious thought (like conscious thought). To test this possibility and to explore the way attribute information is selected and combined, we performed computer (...) simulations on the datasets used by previous researchers. The simulations showed that considering a small subset (3-4) of attributes, yields results comparable to previous studies. There is no need to posit infinite capacity in the unconscious thought condition. The results also suggest that weight information is used for attribute selection that could potentially explain the difficulties in replicating the deliberation-without-attention effect. (shrink)

25 years ago, when AI & Society was launched, the emphasis was, and still is, on dehumanisation and the effects of technology on human life, including reliance on technology. What we forgot to take into account was another very great danger to humans. The pervasiveness of computer technology, without appropriate security safeguards, dehumanises us by allowing criminals to steal not just our money but also our confidential and private data at will. Also, denial-of-service attacks prevent us from accessing the information (...) we need when we want it. We are being dehumanised not by the technology but by criminals who use the ubiquity of the technology and its lack of security to steal from us and prevent us from doing what we want. What is more interesting is that this malevolent use of the technology doesn’t come from monolithic corporate structures eager to control our lives but mainly from individuals keen to demonstrate their knowledge of the technology for social networking purposes. The aim of this paper is to turn the clock back 25 years and present an alternative perspective: the single, biggest threat of dehumanisation is not the pervasiveness and ubiquity of computers but the lack of ensuring that humans are provided with the basic security they need for using the technology safely and securely. Cyberspace is not a safe space to be. This was something that even far-sighted researcher colleagues in the 1970s and 1980s overlooked. The paper will explore where we went wrong 25 years ago in our predictions and concerns. We will also present a scenario that allows future generations to have a safer cyberworld. (shrink)

The September 2006 military coup against the Thaksin government in Thailand has had a profound impact on Thai politics. It has arrested the process of democratic consolidation that was set in motion in the country in the 1990s. Although many of Thaksin's policies lacked the spirit of democratic governance, he was democratically elected and was ousted from power unconstitutionally. The entire tenure of Thaksin has brought to the fore two deep cleavages in Thailand. The first of these is the deep (...) divide between the rural and urban electoral constituencies. The former provided a major vote bank with little bearing on the dispersion of power and resources that was effectively dominated by the latter. Thaksin and his populist policies effectively undermined the urban electorate and strengthened the rural constituency. The second and perhaps structurally more significant tension is that which has developed between the new business elite and the old establishment elite that comprise the monarchy, military, and the bureaucracy. This old elite has been at the forefront of displacing Thaksin through its fear of loss of control over the domestic political process. The drawn out confrontation that has spawned two social movements has significantly raised the country's political temperature and there is the real potential for the situation to deteriorate into violence. Despite these changes, a number of continuities unique to the Thai political situation continue to obtain as well. (shrink)

As courts become increasingly technologically sophisticated, it can be expected that the use of the latest visualisation techniques will also increase to make the most of this technology. In particular, the use of computer-generated animations can be expected to become more dominant. There is, however, very little research into the effects of animated evidence on jurors and other members of the judicial process. This paper investigates whether there is a difference in the quality and robustness of memories formed by either (...) hearing an oral testimony or seeing an animated version of it. Also, the paper investigates whether different opinions and attitudes are produced when testimony is presented as an animation as opposed to being verbally presented. Preliminary results reported here indicate that there is indeed a difference in attitude (and therefore potential bias) when animations are used instead of verbal testimony, but that this difference is only apparent in the long term (four weeks or more after the presentation of the animated evidence). The results point to the need for improved knowledge structures for mapping verbal testimony into animations, where issues of implicit knowledge and potential bias are explicitly referenced in the knowledge structure. The paper argues that, until and unless such issues are addressed, it is not safe to use animations in court except to present purely factual information. (shrink)

Study on the philosophy of Sanskrit grammar in Vākyapadīya of Bhartr̥hari.

The notion of epistemic injustice has become an important topic of inquiry in recent times. It refers to the injustice committed to a person when her claim to knowledge is not given due consideration. This article argues that there are two major sources of epistemic injustice: One is the dominating tendencies present in us, and the other is susceptibility to cognitive biases and distortions. When societies become more complex, injustice increases and one can see countless instances of epistemic injustice in (...) everyday life. To reduce epistemic injustice, one has to tackle both sources. Increasing cooperative behaviour is the key in this regard which, in turn, may require revisiting the way the self is automatically understood. (shrink)

This article argues that there is no performative self-contradiction involved in reports of selfless consciousness, at least in the non-pathological sense of the term. This is because what is central to the experience of selfless consciousness is a different kind of relation of the self with the rest of the world and, therefore, it is not a case of dissolution or decimation of the self. Such an understanding of selflessness can easily distinguish spiritual selflessness from pathological forms such as depersonalisation. (...) This article seeks to provide an explanation for why reports are made of there being no self or subjectivity by appealing to the notion of attentional saliency. (shrink)

The paper seeks to argue that the feeling of being part of a larger whole, considered to be a major feature of spiritual experience in some traditions, amounts to a change in the way the self is pre-reflectively understood. Further, the paper argues that some recent developments in the study of cognition support the case for such a revision in self-conception, and this can be used to build up a secular understanding of spirituality. The paper proceeds by making use of (...) Abraham Maslow's account of peak experience along with some accounts of both ancient and contemporary forms of spirituality to argue that the feeling of being part of a larger whole amounts to a significant shift from the separative self-conception implicit in everyday behavior. Subsequently, it is argued that some extant theories on cognition point at the illusory nature of separative self-conception. (shrink)

This article starts with a case outlining ethical challenges encountered in participatory action research (PAR) on vaccine hesitancy in rural India during Covid-19. Community researchers were recruited by a not-for-profit organisation, with the aim of both discovering the reasons for vaccine hesitancy and encouraging take-up. This raised issues about the roles and responsibilities of local researchers in their own communities, where they might be blamed for adverse reactions to vaccination. They and their mentor struggled with balancing societal protection against individual (...) rights to make choices. These themes are explored in two commentaries discussing the difficulties in balancing ethics in public health (prioritising societal benefits), social research (protecting participants from harm and respecting their rights not to be involved) and participatory research practices (maximising democratic participation and decision-making). As discussed in the first commentary, often these cohere, but tensions can arise. The second commentary also raises the issue of epistemic justice, questioning the extent to which the villagers could have a say in the design, implementation and interpretation of the research, and the dangers of not hearing the voices and arguments of people who reject vaccination. The case and commentaries highlight the complexities of PAR and additional challenges in a public health context. (shrink)

The Hindu ethic of cow protectionism is legislatively interpreted in many Indian states through the criminalisation of cow slaughter, and beef consumption, obscuring dairying’s direct role in the butchery of spent female and unproductive male bovines. Cow milk, however, is celebrated as sacred in scriptural and ritual Hinduism, and mobilised by commercial dairying, as well as by right-wing Hindu groups to advance the idea of a Hindu Indian nation. In order to fully protect cows from the harms of human exploitation, (...) it is vital to problematise milk as a benign, rightful product for humans to consume, including its use in Hindu beliefs, rituals and identity. The paper applies feminist vegan critiques to two Hindu legends commonly invoked to promote milk consumption: the boy-god Krishna’s great love for butter and the mythology of the gods and demons churning the Ocean of Milk to attain ambrosia. These critiques unsettle the core relationship of the Hindu to the cow as a lactating mother and provoke the idea that the original sacred milk in Hinduism in fact is plant-based and vegan. (shrink)

Humans tend to seek their identity as entities existing over a period of time by making narratives. The paper argues that seeking diachronic self-identity through narratives or stories results in the self-experience being one of separation or alienation from the real world. This happens because language is primarily a form of secondary representation, and the means by which we attempt to find identity often appear in the form of narratives. The dominance of the metaphor of life as a journey shows (...) this. The remedy is to reduce the hold of narrativity by making self-experience fundamentally episodic. (shrink)

The role of holistic or parts-based processing in face identification has been explored mostly with neutral faces. In the current study, we investigated the nature of processing (holistic vs. parts) in recognition memory for faces with emotional expressions. There were two phases in this experiment: learning phase and test phase. In the learning phase participants learned face–name associations of happy, neutral, and sad faces. The test phase consisted of a two-choice recognition test (whole face, eyes, or mouth) given either immediately (...) or after a 24-hour delay. Results indicate that emotional faces were remembered better than neutral faces and performance was better with whole faces as compared to isolated parts. The performance in immediate and delayed recognition interacted with emotional information. Sad eyes and happy mouth were remembered better in the delayed recognition condition. These results suggest that in addition to holistic processing, specific parts–emotion combinations play a critical role in delayed recognition memory. (shrink)

Perceptual load plays a critical role in identification and awareness of stimuli. Given the differences in emotion–attention interactions, we investigated the perception of distractor emotional faces in two different load conditions under divided attention with a task based on the inattentional blindness paradigm. Participants performed a low- or high-load task with a string of letters presented against a happy, sad or neutral face (in a circular form) as the background. Participants were asked to identify the face that appeared in the (...) critical trial. Results indicate an interaction between emotion and load. First, identification of faces with happy expression was better than chance and unaffected by load. Second, performance was worse than chance for faces with sad expression in the high-load condition, indicating inhibition of unattended sad distractor faces in the critical trial. This indicates that inhibitory processes during a difficult attentional task under divided attention influence subsequent perception of distractor stimuli especially sad faces. The results have implications for the theories of selective attention as well as the role of emotions in conscious perception. (shrink)

This article aims to highlight the importance of organizational climate with both destructive and constructive deviance behaviour in different cultural setting with workplace as a common ground. First, we discuss the need for research in workplace deviance especially destructive and constructive deviance behaviour with the review of previous studies from deviance literature. Next, we present the importance of climate and culture with both destructive and constructive deviance by proposing relationship among them with the help of a framework. The presented theoretical (...) framework can be useful for conducting future empirical research. Finally, we present the conclusion and future research in conducting cross-national research with respect to deviance. (shrink)

This article presents a computational model of the learning of diagnostic knowledge, based on observations of human operators engaged in real-world troubleshooting tasks. We present a model of problem solving and learning in which the reasoner introspects about its own performance on the problem-solving task, identifies what it needs to learn to improve its performance, formulates learning goals to acquire the required knowledge, and pursues its learning goals using multiple learning strategies. The model is implemented in a computer system which (...) provides a case study based on observations of troubleshooting operators and protocol analysis of the data gathered in the test area of an operational electronics manufacturing plant. The model not only addresses issues in human learning, but, in addition, is computationally justified as a uniform, extensible framework for multistrategy learning. (shrink)

Study of the Nyāyasāra, aphoristic work on Hindu logic and epistemology by Bhāsarvajña, 10th century Kashmiri scholar.

Study of the Nyāyasāra, aphoristic work on Hindu logic and epistemology by Bhāsarvajña, 10th century Kashmiri scholar; includes complete Sanskrit text with Padabhañjikā commentary of Vāsudevasūri.

Description: The soundness of any system of philosophy depends on the logical foundations over which it is built. As such epistemology plays a crucial role in the course of its development. This book is an attempt at presenting the epistemology of the Visistadvaita Vedanta based on the thirteenth century classical text, Nyayaparisuddhi composed by the eminent poet philosopher Vedanta Desika. It deals with the Pramanas as accepted by the system. After a brief introduction, the second chapter discusses the concept of (...) knowledge. The following three chapters closely follow the text in their treatment of the Pramanas. The sixth chapter analyses the desirability of other Pramanas as independent source of knowledge and concludes by showing how these can be subsumed in the three main Pramanas . The book represents an attempt at delving into an area that has not received much attention earlier. (shrink)

Epistemic injustice is a matter of not doing justice to the knowledge claims of a person, and it is pervasive in our everyday interactions. It can be traced to the susceptibility of the human mind to cognitive biases and distortions. The paper discusses some ways proposed to mitigate epistemic injustice and suggests that this endeavor requires efforts in more dimensions. The paper tries to demonstrate that the existing efforts to combat epistemic injustice need to be complemented by looking into the (...) very manner in which the self is automatically conceptualized. A shift from the remembering or narrative mode of understanding oneself to the experiential or episodic one will help contain misleading biases and reduce epistemic injustice. Practices such as mindfulness can help enormously in this task. (shrink)

Rapid changes of state in central nervous systems (CNS), as required following stimuli that must arouse the CNS from a quiescent state in order to activate a behavioral response, constitute a particularly appropriate application of non‐linear dynamics. Chaotic dynamics would provide tremendous amplification of neuronal activity needed for CNS arousal, sensitively dependent on the initial state of the CNS. This theoretical approach is attractive because it supposes dynamics that are deterministic and it links the elegant mathematics of chaos to the (...) conception of a fundamental property of the CNS. However, a living system must be able to exit from chaotic dynamics in order to avoid widely divergent, biologically impossible outcomes. We hypothesize that, analogous to phase transitions in a liquid crystal, CNS arousal systems, having ‘woken up the brain’ to activate behavior, go through a phase transition and emerge under the control of orderly movement control systems. BioEssays 29:803–810, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

The way we represent and perceive time has crucial implications for studying temporality in conscious experience. Contrasting positions posit that temporal information is separately abstracted out like any other perceptual property through specialized mechanisms or that time is represented through the temporality of experiences themselves. To add to this debate, we investigate alterations in felt time in conditions where only conscious visual experience is altered through perceptual switches while a bistable figure remains physically unchanged. We predicted that if perceived time (...) is a function of temporally evolving conscious content, then a break in it (here via a perceptual switch) would also lead to a break in felt time. In three experiments, we showed participants a Necker cube that was manipulated to induce a perceptual switch (experiments 1(a) and 1(b)) or left to switch on its own (experiment 2). We asked participants to report both perceptual switches and felt durations (experiments 1(a) and 2) or only estimate time (experiment 1(b)). Over these three experiments, we find evidence of contraction of felt time in trials with a perceptual switch, consistent with the idea that perceived time is a function of temporally evolving conscious experience. Additionally, we present a phenomenological demonstration to support our empirical data. Overall, the study provides evidence for temporal mirroring and isomorphism in visual experience, arguing for a link between the timing of experience and time perception. (shrink)