Prior research has demonstrated that trust in robots and performance of robots are two important factors that influence human–autonomy teaming. However, other factors may influence users’ perceptions and use of autonomous systems, such as perceived intent of robots and decision authority of the robots. The current study experimentally examined participants’ trust in an autonomous security robot (ASR), perceived trustworthiness of the ASR, and desire to use an ASR that varied in levels of decision authority and benevolence. Participants (N = 340) (...) were recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk. Results revealed the participants had increased trust in the ASR when the robot was described as having benevolent intent compared to self-protective intent. There were several interactions between decision authority and intent when predicting the trust process, showing that intent may matter the most when the robot has discretion on executing that intent. Participants stated a desire to use the ASR in a military context compared to a public context. Implications for this research demonstrate that as robots become more prevalent in jobs paired with humans, factors such as transparency provided for the robot's intent and its decision authority will influence users’ trust and trustworthiness. (shrink)

Prior research has demonstrated that trust in robots and performance of robots are two important factors that influence human–autonomy teaming. However, other factors may influence users’ perceptions and use of autonomous systems, such as perceived intent of robots and decision authority of the robots. The current study experimentally examined participants’ trust in an autonomous security robot (ASR), perceived trustworthiness of the ASR, and desire to use an ASR that varied in levels of decision authority and benevolence. Participants (N = 340) (...) were recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk. Results revealed the participants had increased trust in the ASR when the robot was described as having benevolent intent compared to self-protective intent. There were several interactions between decision authority and intent when predicting the trust process, showing that intent may matter the most when the robot has discretion on executing that intent. Participants stated a desire to use the ASR in a military context compared to a public context. Implications for this research demonstrate that as robots become more prevalent in jobs paired with humans, factors such as transparency provided for the robot's intent and its decision authority will influence users’ trust and trustworthiness. (shrink)

Background and aim With the increasing interest in lifestyle, health and consequences of unhealthy lifestyles for the healthcare system, a new kind of solidarity is gaining importance: lifestyle solidarity. While it might not seem fair to let other people pay for the costs arising from an unhealthy lifestyle, it does not seem fair either to punish people for their lifestyle. However, it is not clear how solidarity is assessed by people, when considering disease risks or lifestyle risks. The aim of (...) this study was to investigate the degree of solidarity with lifestyle as well as with other factors that are related to health outcomes—for example, old age—and the relation between this degree of solidarity and various characteristics. Methods This cross-sectional study is part of the Dutch longitudinal SMILE study. Data on the degree of solidarity with different lifestyles and old age, and the relation between the degree of solidarity and various demographic and other variables were obtained in a questionnaire survey. Results Solidarity with smokers and overweight people was moderate, as was solidarity with older people. Respondents were ambivalent about athletes. Respondents who were younger, male and highly educated, and those with a healthy lifestyle, a small social network, high quality of life and an internal locus of control, showed low solidarity. Conclusions Solidarity with an unhealthy lifestyle and old age is moderate and the degree of solidarity varies among the different subgroups. (shrink)

Background In the ethical and clinical literature, cases of parents who want treatment for their child to be withdrawn against the views of the medical team have not received much attention. Yet resolution of such conflicts demands much effort of both the medical team and parents. Objective To discuss who can best protect a child9s interests, which often becomes a central issue, putting considerable pressure on mutual trust and partnership. Methods We describe the case of a 3-year-old boy with acquired (...) brain damage due to autoimmune-mediated encephalitis whose parents wanted to stop treatment. By comparing this case with relevant literature, we systematically explored the pros and cons of sharing end-of-life decisions with parents in cases where treatment is considered futile by parents and not (yet) by physicians. Conclusions Sharing end-of-life decisions with parents is a more important duty for physicians than protecting parents from guilt or doubt. Moreover, a request from parents on behalf of their child to discontinue treatment is, and should be, hard to over-rule in cases with significant prognostic uncertainty and/or in cases with divergent opinions within the medical team. (shrink)

Design research programs attempt to bring together the properties of available materials and the demands derived from intended applications. The logic of problem states and state transitions in such programs, including assessment criteria and heuristic principles, is described in settheoretic terms, starting with a naive model comprising an intended profile and the operational profile of a prototype. In a first concretization the useful distinction between structural and functional properties is built into the model. In two further concretizations the inclusion of (...) potential applications is motivated and described for the case of drug research as well as the inclusion of potential realizations for the case of complex products. Next, another line of concretization of the naive model, the incorporation of potentially relevant properties, is sketched. Then the partial analogy between product- and truth-approximation is indicated. We conclude with some remarks about the usefulness of our models for products reaching the market in comparison to the the so-called social construction of technology approach. (shrink)

Die Möglichkeit, Walter Benjamins Allegorie-Begriff in akademischen Untersuchungen mit der Prosa Jean Pauls in Verbindung zu bringen, wurde von Benjamin noch selbst abgewogen: in der Rezension einer frühen Abhandlung zu diesem Thema, die er für zu kurz gegriffen befand. Ein solches Vorhaben, das beste Chancen böte, dürfe sich nämlich nicht auf literaturwissenschaftliche und geistesgeschichtliche Perspektiven beschränken. Notwendig sei vielmehr, auch die Dimension der Alltagskultur einzubeziehen und Jean Pauls Hinabgreifen in Tiefen des Volkstums und der Tradition zu berücksichtigen. Diesem Hinweis Benjamins (...) folgt die vorliegende Untersuchung. Indem sie sich auf den Bereich der materiellen Kultur konzentriert, legt sie eine Geschichte der Theorie der Dingwelt offen. Jean Pauls ästhetische Überlegungen zur projektiven Belehnung der Dingwelt mit seelischen Regungen wurden von Aby Warburg aufgegriffen und für seine kulturwissenschaftliche Methode fruchtbar gemacht. Dabei erschliesst er unter anderem einen Traditionsstrang des Denkens von materieller Kultur im ästhetischen und kultur anthropologischen Kontext, der geprägt ist von aus der Antike herrührenden abergläubischen Vorstellungen über die Einflüsse der Planeten auf die menschliche Geistesverfassung wie etwa die Saturnfürchtigkeit. (shrink)

Next SectionEvidence based medicine is rightly at the core of current medicine. If patients and society put trust in medical professional competency, and on the basis of that competency delegate all kinds of responsibilities to the medical profession, medical professionals had better make sure their competency is state of the art medical science. What goes for the ethics of clinical trials goes for the ethics of medicine as a whole: anything that is scientifically doubtful is, other things being equal, ethically (...) unacceptable. This particularly applies to so called orphaned fields of medicine, those areas where medical research is weak and diverse, where financial incentives are lacking, and where the evidence regarding the aetiology and treatment of disease is much less clear than in laboratory and hospital based medicine. Examples of such orphaned fields are physiotherapy, psychotherapy, medical psychology, and occupational health, which investigate complex syndromes such as RSI, whiplash, chronic low back pain, and chronic fatigue syndrome. It appears that the primary ethical problem in this context is the lack of attention to the orphaned fields. Although we agree that this issue deserves more attention as a matter of potential injustice, we want to argue that, in order to do justice to the interplay of heterogeneous factors that is so typical of the orphaned fields, other ethical models than justice are required. We propose the coordination model as a window through which to view the important ethical issues which relate to the communication and interaction of scientists, health care workers, and patients. (shrink)

This article explores nation building as an organizational accomplishment and uses the concept of boundary object to explain how the groups that compose the nation cooperate. Specifically, the article examines the mechanisms devised to secure a flow of money from the Irish-American and Jewish-American diasporas to their respective homelands. To overcome problems associated with conventional philanthropy, Irish and Jewish nationalists issued bonds and sold them to their American compatriots as a hybrid of a gift and an investment. In the Irish (...) case, disagreements about the entitlement to the proceeds resulted in the termination of the bond project. In the Jewish case, the bond served as a boundary object allowing American and Israeli Jews to cooperate despite ongoing tensions. The Israeli bond provided Jewish-Americans with an additional way to invest themselves financially and emotionally in Israel. This bond is an example of a socio-technical mechanism used to create national attachments. (shrink)

This book argues that Protestant theological ethics not only reveals basic virtue ethical characteristics, but also contributes significantly to a viable contemporary virtue ethics. Pieter Vos demonstrates that post-Reformation theological ethics still understands the good in terms of the good life, takes virtues as necessary for living the good life and considers human nature as a source of moral knowledge. Vos approaches Protestant theology as an important bridge between pre-modern virtue ethics, shaped by Aristotle and transformed by Augustine of Hippo, (...) and late modern understandings of morality. The volume covers a range of topics, going from eudaimonism and Calvinist ethics to Reformed scholastic virtue ethics and character formation in the work of Søren Kierkegaard. The author shows how Protestantism has articulated other-centered virtues from a theology of grace, affirmed ordinary life and emphasized the need of transformation of this life and its orders. Engaging with philosophy of the art of living, Neo-Aristotelianism and exemplarist ethics, he develops constructive contributions to a contemporary virtue ethics. (shrink)

Byun et al. describe how deaf signers deal with communication problems in first encounters with signers of different languages. They show that the basic Conversation Analytic repair mechanisms for dealing with verbal troubles are largely reproduced in gesture and sign, including details of turn‐taking structure, timing and form. This underlines the role of repair as a basic resource for linguistic and interactional creativity across modalities.

Byun et al. describe how deaf signers deal with communication problems in first encounters with signers of different languages. They show that the basic Conversation Analytic repair mechanisms for dealing with verbal troubles are largely reproduced in gesture and sign, including details of turn‐taking structure, timing and form. This underlines the role of repair as a basic resource for linguistic and interactional creativity across modalities.

Byun et al. describe how deaf signers deal with communication problems in first encounters with signers of different languages. They show that the basic Conversation Analytic repair mechanisms for dealing with verbal troubles are largely reproduced in gesture and sign, including details of turn‐taking structure, timing and form. This underlines the role of repair as a basic resource for linguistic and interactional creativity across modalities.

Our study examines how a company’s engagement in corporate social responsibility influences word of mouth about the company on Twitter, particularly during a service delay. We use the airline industry as the study context. On the popular social medium Twitter, people post tweets about airline services and raise concerns about service delays when flights are delayed, canceled, or diverted. Drawing on the literature on legitimacy and the halo effect, we argue that a company’s CSR engagement enhances its corporate image, which (...) in turn, influences WOM about the company on Twitter. We predict and find that airlines with better CSR engagement receive more positive word of mouth and less negative word of mouth on Twitter. We also find that service delays reduce PWOM and increase NWOM, with the additional finding that the positive relationship between service delays and NWOM is less strong for airlines with better CSR engagement. We conduct additional analyses to investigate the effects of environmental, social, and governance CSR on PWOM and NWOM. Our study has practical implications in informing companies about the benefits of CSR engagement in relation to public opinion during service delays. (shrink)

Research from behavioural sciences shows that people reach decisions in a much less rational and well-considered way than was often assumed. The doctrine of informed consent, which is an important ethical principle and legal requirement in medical practice, is being challenged by these insights into decision-making and real-world choice behaviour. This article discusses the implications of recent insights of research on decision-making behaviour for the informed consent doctrine. It concludes that there is a significant tension between the often non-rational choice (...) behaviour and the traditional theory of informed consent. Responsible ways of dealing with or solving these problems are considered. To this end, patient decisions aids are discussed as suitable interventions to support autonomous decision-making. However, current PDAs demand certain improvements in order to protect and promote autonomous decision-making. Based on a conception of autonomy, we will argue which type of improvements are needed. (shrink)

Although justice is a central principle in clinical ethics, work that centers social justice is often marginalized in clinical ethics. In addition to institutional barriers that may be preventing clinical ethicists from becoming the activists that Meyers argues we should be, we must also recognize the barriers embedded in the field of clinical ethics itself. As clinical ethicists, we have an opportunity to support anti‐racism work in particular by altering our own organizational structures to be more inclusive and reflective of (...) the Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color we serve, enhancing clinical ethics education and training by making critical theories foundational, and decolonizing our clinical ethics consultation tools and practices. (shrink)

Computer science advocates institutional frameworks as an effective tool for modelling policies and reasoning about their interplay. In practice, the rules or policies, of which the institutional framework consists, are often specified using a formal language, which allows for the full verification and validation of the framework (e.g. the consistency of policies) and the interplay between the policies and actors (e.g. violations). However, when modelling large-scale realistic systems, with numerous decision-making entities, scalability and complexity issues arise making it possible only (...) to verify certain portions of the problem without reducing the scale. In the social sciences, agent-based modelling is a popular tool for analysing how entities interact within a system and react to the system properties. Agent-based modelling allows the specification of complex decision-making entities and experimentation with large numbers of different parameter sets for these entities in order to explore their effects on overall system performance. In this paper we describe how to achieve the best of both worlds, namely verification of a formal specification combined with the testing of large-scale systems with numerous different actor configurations. Hence, we offer an approach that allows for reasoning about policies, policy making and their consequences on a more comprehensive level than has been possible to date. We present the institutional agent-based model methodology to combine institutional frameworks with agent-based simulations). We furthermore present J-InstAL, a prototypical implementation of this methodology using the InstAL institutional framework whose specifications can be translated into a computational model under the answer set semantics, and an agent-based simulation based on the jason tool. Using a simplified contract enforcement example, we demonstrate the functionalities of this prototype and show how it can help to assess an appropriate fine level in case of contract violations. (shrink)

The rise of genetic techniques presents a great promise as well as some difficult dilemma's about how genetics will affect the way we will be able to live our lives. For this reason, in many countries, public debates are organized to reflect upon the development of predictive medicine. In this essay we focus on economist A. Hirschman's work on “exit, voice and loyalty” to analyse and enrich these public debates. We first introduce Hirschman's triad of concepts and focus on the (...) concept of “voice,” which refers to an institution's ability to allow clients to give feedback about products or services, and its ability to listen to the feedback given. We argue that voice is particularly important for the health care system in which predictive medicine is developing. Voice is crucial because how predictive medicine will become institutionalised is now in the process of becoming determined. However, in public debates about predictive medicine, voice tends to be reduced to providing people with the option of making a choice whether to use genetic techniques or not. We argue that this reduction of voice to choice is not very informative about predictive medicine and suggest an amendment of Hirschman's concept of voice, which we call “hesitant voice.” Hesitant voice attempts to be informative about the uncertainty people experience in addressing predictive medicine and topicalises the gradual, the embodied, the tentative character of voice in developing situations like that of predictive medicine. (shrink)