The lie detector test has long been treated with suspicion by the law. Recently, several authors have called this suspicion into question. They argue that the lie detector test may have considerable forensic benefits, particularly if we move past the classic, false-positive prone, autonomic nervous system-based (ANS-based) control question test, to the more reliable, brain-based, concealed information test. These authors typically rely on a “comparative advantage” argument to make their case. According to this argument, we should not be (...) so suspicious of lie detection evidence if it has comparative advantages over the epistemic methods currently utilised by the legal system. In this article, I add to this growing support by making a novel comparative advantage argument in favour of brain-based lie detection evidence. The argument focuses on the P300 concealed information test (P300 CIT), which has several unique properties, and on the effect it may have on pre-trial bargaining in criminal cases rather than in-court evidence. The thesis is that P300 CIT could allow for innocent defendants to credibly signal their innocence to investigators and prosecutors during pre-trial bargaining more effectively than current proposed methods for doing the same thing. I defend this argument from a number of objections, and suggest that it opens up an interesting avenue in the ongoing debate about the merits of this technology. Although the argument is presented with the criminal law in mind, it could form part of a more general cumulative case in favour of this technology. (shrink)

The feedback concealed information test (fCIT) is a new variant of the CIT that added feedback about participants’ concealing performances in the classical CIT. The advantage of the fCIT is that the resulting feedback related event-related potentials (ERPs) can be used to detect concealed information. However, the detection efficiency of feedback-based ERPs varies across studies. The present experiment examined whether the extent participants believed the feedback influenced their detection efficiency. Specifically, participants did a mock crime and (...) were then tested in a fCIT. Following the fCIT, participants were asked to report how much they believed the feedback was accurate. Results showed that there were no significant correlations between the amplitude of the feedback related negativity (FRN), feedback P300, and participants’ self-report at the group level. However, individual analyses showed that the detection efficiency of both the FRN and feedback P300 were influenced by participants’ belief about the presented feedback. The detection efficiency of the FRN and the feedback P300 was higher among participants who believed the feedback. These findings suggest that the fCIT is dependent to some extent on the participants’ level of belief in the feedback. (shrink)

Concealing information requires that adolescents manage the information that they share, which requires cognitive skills, for example, theory of mind. This study explored motivations for concealment that early adolescents endorsed concealing or disclosing to friends and parents, in relation to their theory of mind. We found that adolescents broadly endorsed disclosure to both parents and friends, even when it might mean they would face consequences, be impolite, or face negative identity-related emotions. We found that ToM ability was associated (...) with a tendency to endorse being forthcoming and sharing information with both friends and parents. These findings provide new insight into how the relation between ToM and concealment may change with age, specifically how in early adolescence it may foster open communication rather than concealment as is the case in early and middle childhood. (shrink)

Nursing homes' ethics committees play a role in designing policies to assure ethical care. The administrative structure of nursing homes is not as large as that of hospitals. Nursing home staff and administration can respond to medical accidents in a way that treats family unethically and does serious harm to the facility. This paper describes incidents in which nursing homes attempted to conceal accidental deaths. It describes how such incidents are discovered, and the consequences of such efforts, and suggests ways (...) to prevent such incidents.This paper presents a retrospective review of a convenience sample of eight cases in which it was discovered that a nursing home attempted to conceal an accidental death. The effort to conceal an accidental death requires a coordinated effort to: [1] limit dissemination of information about the accident by staff and records, [2] decrease suspicion about the death, and [3] decrease the likelihood that an inquiry, if launched, will succeed. This effort begins as a reflexive, emotional and defensive response to the accident and consolidates as an institutional strategy to conceal both the accident and the concealment. The effort is coordinated by administrators who coerce cooperation from front line staff, alter medical records, and fail to follow reporting procedures. The attempt to conceal a lethal accident adversely affects the facility and the healthcare system. Ethics committees should work with professional organizations and administrator to assure proper management and disclosure of harmful accidents. (shrink)

The dominant approach in privacy theory defines information privacy as some form of control over personal information. In this essay, I argue that the control approach is mistaken, but for different reasons than those offered by its other critics. I claim that information privacy involves the drawing of epistemic boundaries—boundaries between what others should and shouldn’t know about us. While controlling what information others have about us is one strategy we use to draw such boundaries, it (...) is not the only one. We conceal information about ourselves and we reveal it. And since the meaning of information is not self-evident, we also work to shape how others contextualize and interpret the information about us that they have. Information privacy is thus about more than controlling information; it involves the constant work of producing and managing public identities, what I call “social self- authorship.” In the second part of the essay, I argue that thinking about information privacy in terms of social self- authorship helps us see ways that information technology threatens privacy, which the control approach misses. Namely, information technology makes social self- authorship invisible and unnecessary, by making it difficult for us to know when others are forming impressions about us, and by providing them with tools for making assumptions about who we are which obviate the need for our involvement in the process. (shrink)

Lavoie and Talwar examine the phenomenon of prosocial lie telling: lying with the intention to benefit others. They investigate how well children aged 4 to 11 are able to conceal information about a surprise gift from their parents based on these children’s responses to their parents’ questions. Lavoie and Talwar conclude that, as children’s theory of mind abilities and working memory improve, their ability to conceal information from others also develops.

This report reviews what quantum physics and information theory have to tell us about the age-old question, How come existence? No escape is evident from four conclusions: (1) The world cannot be a giant machine, ruled by any preestablished continuum physical law. (2) There is no such thing at the microscopic level as space or time or spacetime continuum. (3) The familiar probability function or functional, and wave equation or functional wave equation, of standard quantum theory provide mere continuum (...) idealizations and by reason of this circumstance conceal the information-theoretic source from which they derive. (4) No element in the description of physics shows itself as closer to primordial than the elementary quantum phenomenon, that is, the elementary device-intermediated act of posing a yes-no physical question and eliciting an answer or, in brief, the elementary act of observer-participancy. Otherwise stated, every physical quantity, every it, derives its ultimate significance from bits, binary yes-or-no indications, a conclusion which we epitomize in the phrase, it from bit. (shrink)

Dr Ward of Knox College obviously considers himself a sophisticated fellow. You can tell by the humorous yet statesmanlike tone of his article 'Psst … wanna hear a conspiracy theory?' (ODT 29/6/06). 'It is important', he thinks 'in dialoguing with conspiracy thinking, not just to refute it … but to ask why is it that people are believing this theory?' This apparently 'would create a much healthier dialogue than the shouting past each other that often seems to take place.' In (...) other words, in addition to refuting conspiracy theories (which he takes for granted can usually be done) we should offer diagnoses of the ideological obsessions underlying the conspiracy theorists' errors. I'm not so sure that this procedure would really promote the healthy dialogue that he desires (since conspiracy theorists might find it a little patronizing). But what is really wrong with his article is not his patronizing proposal but the bland assumption on which his article is based that of course conspiracy theories are false or foolish simply because they are conspiracy theories. So far from being the sophisticated view this is one of the most dangerous and idiotic ideas to disgrace our political culture. Strong words, these, so I had better back them up. Let's start with 'idiotic'. A conspiracy is a secret plan to influence events by partly covert action. Conspiracies are not necessarily wrong - there can be conspiracies in the public interest as when Stauffenberg and his associates conspired to murder Hitler or when leading civil servants conspired to leak information to Winston Churchill (then on the back benches) about the looming Nazi threat - but we generally talk of conspiracy when the secret plan in question seems morally questionable, at least to some people. (If nobody disapproved, there would be no need to keep the plan a secret!) A conspiracy theory is a theory which endeavours to explain some set of events by postulating a conspiracy, successful or otherwise.. (shrink)

What did it mean to keep a secret in early medieval England? It was a period during which the experience of secrecy was intensely bound to the belief that God knew all human secrets, yet the secrets of God remained unknowable to human beings. In Bonds of Secrecy, Benjamin A. Saltzman argues that this double-edged conception of secrecy and divinity profoundly affected the way believers acted and thought as subjects under the law, as the devout within monasteries, and as readers (...) before books. One crucial way it did so was by forming an ethical relationship between the self and the world that was fundamentally different from its modern reflex. Whereas today the bearers of secrets might be judged for the consequences of their reticence or disclosure, Saltzman observes, in the early Middle Ages a person attempting to conceal a secret was judged for believing he or she could conceal it from God. In other words, to attempt to hide from God was to become ensnared in a serious sin, but to hide from the world while deliberately and humbly submitting to God's constant observation was often a hallmark of spiritual virtue. Looking to law codes and religious architecture, hagiographies and riddles, Bonds of Secrecy shows how legal and monastic institutions harnessed the pervasive and complex belief in God's omniscience to produce an intense culture of scrutiny and a radical ethics of secrecy founded on the individual's belief that nothing could be hidden from God. According to Saltzman, this ethics of secrecy not only informed early medieval notions of mental activity and ideas about the mind but also profoundly shaped the practices of literary interpretation in ways that can inform our own contemporary approaches to reading texts from the past. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Educational Technology as Revealing and Concealing Ontological Assumptions Critical Themes for Education Work and Play Imagination.

Historically as well as contemporarily, the relationship between religion and democratic pluralism in the Muslim world has been problematic. In the Muslim world, both governments and popular movements are using religious documents (the Qur'an and the hadith) to inspire political and social change. In the process, the fusion of religion and politics that characterizes revivalist Islam has impeded the development of both democracy and religious pluralism. An area of particular concern has been the reluctance of Muslim countries to implement international (...) standards of human rights as defined in the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Since the adoption of the UDHR in 1948, there has been disagreement in the Muslim world about the relevance of this document for Islamic countries. The reactions have ranged from an angry rejection of human rights as destructive to Islam to claims that Islamic law guarantees the same rights as those embodied in the United Nation's documents. The two most influential international Islamic statements on Human Rights (the Universal Islamic Declaration on Human Rights and the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights) attempt to reconcile Islamic law and modern norms of human rights. These documents claim that human rights are an inherent part of Islam. Such arguments are cause for concern because since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, documents proposing regional alternatives to international law almost always entail the weakening of international standards. The incorporation of the Cairo Declaration into the UN corpus means that what were once informal, regional obstacles to implementing the protections guaranteed by the UDHR have become formal, regional norms that legitimate Islamist restrictions on rights. (shrink)

The concepts of placebos and placebo effects refer to extremely diverse phenomena. I recommend dissolving the concepts of placebos and placebo effects into loosely related groups of specific mechanisms, including (potentially among others) expectation-fulfillment, classical conditioning, and attentional-somatic feedback loops. If this approach is on the right track, it has three main implications for the ethics of informed consent. First, because of the expectation-fulfillment mechanism, the process of informing cannot be considered independently from the potential effects of treatment. Obtaining informed (...) consent influences the effects of treatment. This provides support for the authorized concealment and authorized deception paradigms, and perhaps even for outright deceptive placebo use. Second, doctors may easily fail to consider the potential benefits of conditioning, leading them to misjudge the trade-off between beneficence and autonomy. Third, how attentional-somatic feedback loops play out depends not only on the content of the informing process but also on its framing. This suggests a role for libertarian paternalism in clinical practice. (shrink)

Present, as Manuel Castells (1996) notes, we live in the information age. Knowledge and the way it is acquired and processed are the driving forces of the economy, and information processing systems are the strength of economies. The aim of this article is to identify the key role of the information supply phenomenon in contemporary socio-economic processes. The initial part of the article will define such concepts as: information, infodemia, information market, in the further part (...) examples of the use of information in the process of forming social behaviour in the market context will be presented. For this purpose, three major economic crises from the turn of the 20th and 21st century will be used cross-sectionally. The first will be described as the dot-com crisis, i.e. the first global Internet players, which led to the collapse or loss of value of many global Internet platforms through the creation and bursting of a speculative bubble. The second crisis described below was related to the collapse of Lehman Brothers, a leading US bank, and the US housing crisis. In the above case, both supply and concealment of information in the public sphere could be observed. The last crisis described is the crisis related to the SARS-COV2 pandemic, in which dis- and mis- information activities proved to be crucial. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Chinese Gleams of Sufī Light: Wang Tai-yü's Great Learning of the Pure and Real and Liu Chih's Displaying the Concealment of the Real Realm, with a New Translation of Jāmī's Lawā'iḥ from the Persian by William C. ChittickE. N. AndersonChinese Gleams of Sufī Light: Wang Tai-yü's Great Learning of the Pure and Real and Liu Chih's Displaying the Concealment of the Real Realm, with a New Translation of (...) Jāmī's Lawā'iḥ from the Persian by William C. Chittick. By Sachiko Murata, with a foreword by Tu Weiming. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Pp. xiv + 264.Contacts between China and the Near East are at least as old as civilization but have been relatively little studied. This has led to a lack of attention to Chinese Islam. Yet, Islam has been a profoundly influential force in China for centuries. In Chinese Gleams of Sufī Light, Sachiko Murata has stepped forward to bring a wider awareness to the interactions between Chinese Islam and native Chinese philosophic traditions. (Murata is also the author of The Tao of Islam [1992] and, with Islamicist William Chittick, The Vision of Islam [1994]). [End Page 257]The present book adds greatly to our understanding. It includes a translation of The Great Learning of the Pure and Real, by Wang Tai-yü (ca. 1590-ca. 1658) and facing-page versions of William Chittick's English translation of the fifteenth-century Gleams (Lawā'iḥ) by 'Abd al-Rahman Jāmī and Murata's English translation of Liu Chih's (ca. 1662-ca. 1730) Chinese version of the same work. (Here, incidentally, I follow the book in using the Wade-Giles system.) One can see, comparing the translations, howLiu recast Jāmī's work in Chinese philosophic language, paraphrased some difficult passages, summarized others, and added his own commentaries.Interestingly, Liu eliminated Jāmī's Persian poetry. Murata thinks this is because Liu wanted to focus on the hard ideas; I suspect that it was because Liu realized that Persian prosody and imagery were too far from Chinese poetry to please his audience.Both Wang and Liu belonged to what must have been a rather loose but some-how connected circle of Chinese Islamic scholars. Both, also, almost necessarily used language fairly widespread in Chinese philosophy. Terms such as "emptiness" and "transformation" had many Chinese resonances, some most un-Islamic (Neo Confucian and Buddhist, for instance).Neither Chittick nor Murata give any glosses for key philosophical terms in either source language. Their philosophical and religious provenance, Chinese or Muslim, is correspondingly unclear.What is clear is that Neo-Confucianism had a strong influence on these scholars. Haqiqa "reality" is often translated as li "principle." Pen-jan "root nature" is used for the Arabic compound "essence and attributes." These examples are discussed in the introduction (p. 19). "Annihilation" becomes "conquering" (pp. 148-149). This is strange, because "Annihilation" (fana') is a technical term in Sufism for the disappearance of the self in God; it is an Arabic term, and literally means something like. "passing away." It signifies the forgetting or loss of self, such that only contemplation of the Divine remains. It is as close to the Divine as humans can get since, in Islam, humans cannot be absorbed into Allah (as, in Buddhism, they can be absorbed into Nirvāṇa or the Buddha-nature). "Conquering" seems a rather strange way to express this in Chinese. Perhaps Chinese Muslim readers of the time had developed this specialized sense for it.There are, of course, debatable translations here to contend with (both from Persian and Arabic to Chinese and from Persian and Chinese into English), but it appears that real incommensurability is involved. It was very difficult to use the language of Chinese philosophy in the seventeenth century, influenced as it was by centuries of Neo-Confucian thought, to talk about a radically different religion characterized by an infinitely powerful and wise God, aware of all futures, close to the believer and yet cut off.The inevitable result is to wedge the Arabic and Persian philosophy, so heavily informed by Neoplatonic essentialism and other... (shrink)

This article analyzes the moral reasoning implied in a very commonly used expression, namely, "What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve over", or "What you don't know won't hurt you." It especially deals with situations in which it is used for trying to justify acts that are, in themselves, reprehensible. For instance, when a cheating husband tries to justify his adultery by appealing to the alleged fact that he does not tell his wife about it and thus she (...) is not harmed by it: "If you are not informed, you are not hurt" (NINH). The components of NINH reasoning are unfolded, as well as its grounds, starting from a consequentialistic, deontological, or virtue ethics perspective. Two special characteristics of NINH reasoning are discussed, namely, that it tries to bridge deontological and consequentialistic approaches of morality in a commonsense way and that it contains a special type of paternalism. Finally, some ethical implications are discussed. (shrink)

Informal coercive tactics play an important role in maintaining political and social order in authoritarian regimes today, a fact variously attributed to the state’s incapacity to monopolize coercive force and to the strategic concealment of repression from international society. Studying the coercive tactics used by the Chinese government, this article directs attention to how state institutions and strategies create incentives for state agents to delegate coercion to third parties. In particular, this article recognizes the importance of Chinese leaders’ traditional preference (...) to rely on third parties rather than formal state force for social control, and also the impressive improvements in the institutionalization of state coercion after the start of extensive legal reforms in the late 1970s. More important, however, is the multilayered and decentralized state structure that creates tight constraints on local officials and therefore motivates them to use informal coercion. The state structure in China is conducive to informal coercion in two ways. First, when local officials pursue local or private interests that diverge from central interests, informal coercion helps them overcome procedural barriers and avoid scrutiny from above. Second, although central and other upper authorities tend to restrict local officials’ use of force, they often exert considerable pressure on local authorities to fulfill various tasks that require strong coercion. Such conflicting or unfunded mandates have frequently prompted the use of informal coercive tactics. This study highlights the difficulty of holding local government officials accountable with formal institutions in China. (shrink)

Background Based on the principle of informed consent, doctors are required to fully inform patients and respect their medical decisions. In China, however, family members usually play a special role in the patient’s informed consent, which creates a unique “doctor-family-patient” model of the physician-patient relationship. Our study targets young doctors to investigate the ethical dilemmas they may encounter in such a model, as well as their attitudes to the family roles in informed consent. Methods A questionnaire was developed including general (...) demographic characteristics, the fulfillment of the obligation to fully inform, who will be informed, and the ethical dilemmas in decision-making. We recruited a total of 421 doctors to complete this questionnaire, of which 368 met the age requirements for this study. Cross tabulation and Pearson’s chi-squared test were used to analyze the differences between types of patients for categorical variables, and a p-value < 0.05 was considered statistically significant. Results Our data shows that only 20 doctors (5.40%) stated “informing the patient alone is sufficient” when it comes to informing patients of their serious conditions. The rest of the participants would ensure that the family was informed. When facing elderly patients with decision-making capacity, the data was statistically different (3.8%; P < 0.001) The primary reason for ensuring that family members be informed differs among the participants. In addition, when family members asked doctors to conceal the patient’s medical condition for the best interests of patients, 270 doctors (73.4%) would agree and cooperate with the family. A similar proportion (79.6%) would do so when it comes to elderly patients. Conclusions (1) Chinese doctors pay extra attention to informing the patient’s family, which may not be in the patient’s best interests. (2) Chinese doctors treat adult (but not elderly) patients and elderly patients differently when it comes to informing family members. (3) When family members request that doctors withhold information from patients “in the best interest of the patient,” the majority choose to comply with the request, although this may cause them distress. (shrink)

Aim This study is a systematic review that aims to assess how healthcare professionals manage ethical challenges regarding information within the clinical context.Method and Materials We carried out searches in PubMed, Google Scholar and Embase, using two search strings; searches generated 665 hits. After screening, 47 articles relevant to the study aim were selected for review. Seven articles were identified through snowballing, and 18 others were included following a system update in PubMed, bringing the total number of articles reviewed (...) to 72. We used a Q-sort technique for the analysis of identified articles.Findings This study reveals that healthcare professionals around the world generally employ (to varying degrees) four broad strategies to manage different types of challenges regarding information, which can be categorized as challenges related to confidentiality, communication, professional duty, and decision-making. The strategies employed for managing these challenges include resolution, consultation, stalling, and disclosure/concealment.Conclusion There are a variety of strategies which health professionals can adopt to address challenges regarding information management within the clinical context. This insight complements current efforts aimed at enhancing health professional-patient communication. Very few studies have researched the results of employing these various strategies. Future empirical studies are required to address this. (shrink)

Numerous laws have passed to move away from criminalising youth who trade sex. Specialised courts have also been established to support youth. Despite proponents' contention that specialised, trauma-informed courts are less punitive than typical interventions, research is limited. This article explores one specialised dependency court's efforts to assist youth ‘at risk’. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic observations, I argue that laws and trauma-informed court interventions intensify the supervision of youth and families while inadvertently concealing the gendered-racialised effects of child welfare (...) system involvement. Ethnographic findings contribute to sociolegal and anti-carceral feminist research on carceral control beyond the criminal legal system. This work also explores the ethics of carceral-trauma entanglements that accompany decriminalisation’s afterlife. (shrink)

This paper presents a multimodal analysis of the design of an online fashion shop. Departing from systemic-functional genre theory, it analyses the functionality of the site, bringing out how it designs what sellers do to and for consumers and what the site does and does not enable consumers to do. Drawing on Joos’ analysis of formality in language and Hall’s proxemics, the paper then analyses how the site conceals the power of its functional design by simulating informality and solidarity in (...) a way that ultimately remains one-way and cannot be reciprocated. It finally argues that designs of consumer behaviour similar to that of the analysed site increasingly stand as a model for the digitization of other domains of practice, including education and research, so extending what Fairclough called the ‘marketization of discourse’ into these other domains. (shrink)

This article argues that Georg Simmel's ideas on secrecy can shed new light on current debates around the relevance or otherwise of privacy as a protection against surveillance interventions. It suggests an interactional approach to privacy, and considers it as a dynamic process which redefines the boundary between what information should be disclosed and what information should be concealed in every social interaction. Simmel argues that this "natural" process relies on the identification of the interlocutor: her psychological/emotional (...) involvement in the relationship, her social position in society and the representation of her expectations. Recent empirical examples show that this interactional perspective may have the potential to reconcile differing privacy accounts, by linking theoretically different levels that are factually distinct: privacy as a collective fact, as a contextual integrity, and as an individual fact. (shrink)

The purpose of the Chinese Environmental Information Disclosure System is to protect the environment through public participation and public opinion. This paper uses data from listed Chinese companies in heavily polluted industries from 2008 to 2013 to examine the influence that corporate political connection has on corporate environmental information disclosure level. The results show that firstly, while environmental disclosure level has improved over time, negative information that reflects the real status of environmental management has also been (...) class='Hi'>concealed. Secondly, although corporate political connection can influence companies to more actively disclose environmental information, it can also mask political rent-seeking in the guise of protecting the environment. This is especially prevalent in state-owned enterprises where political connection has a significant positive impact on CEID in the eastern and western parts of China. If political connections influence CEID, it will be difficult to improve the quality of environmental disclosure and provide useful information for decision makers. There is an urgent need to standardize and strictly regulate listed companies’ system for environmental information disclosure. (shrink)

DNA sequence variation is abundant in wild populations. While molecular biologists use genetically homogeneous strains of model organisms to avoid this variation, evolutionary biologists embrace genetic variation as the material of evolution since heritable differences in fitness drive evolutionary change. Yet, the relationship between the phenotypic variation affecting fitness and the genotypic variation producing it is complex. Genetic buffering mechanisms modify this relationship by concealing the effects of genetic and environmental variation on phenotype. Genetic buffering allows the build-up and storage (...) of genetic variation in phenotypically normal populations. When buffering breaks down, thresholds governing the expression of previously silent variation are crossed. At these thresholds, phenotypic differences suddenly appear and are available for selection. Thus, buffering mechanisms modulate evolution and regulate a balance between evolutionary stasis and change. Recent work provides a glimpse of the molecular details governing some types of genetic buffering. BioEssays 22:1095–1105, 2000. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

This paper discusses internal dynamics of the firm that contribute to the failure of knowledge conditions, using the Enron scandal as a case study. Ability of the board to effectively monitor conduct at operational levels includes various dynamics: senior management being isolated from those at operational levels; individuals pursuing subgoals that are contrary to overall corporate goals; information flow along a narrow linear channel that effectively forecloses adverse information from getting to senior management; a corporate culture of intimidation, (...) discouraging open expressions of doubt or skepticism, resulting in reluctance to challenge senior officials, and pushing the limits of ethics and the law.Elements of information blockage in the corporation include: the "law of diminishing control"; deliberate concealment of information by officers; motivation to report to the boss what one perceives the boss wants to hear; theory of "bounded rationality" that explains surprising role of irrationality in decisionmaking – unconscious emotions and motivations. Discussion of behavioralist studies of cognitive dissonance, belief perseverance, confirmatory bias, entity effect, motivated reasoning, group cohesion or "groupthink," and the false consensus effect. Problem of overoptimism – tendency of many people to overrate their own abilities, contributions and talents – and tendency toward puffery and dismissal of risks in formulating disclosures and press releases. (shrink)

The concepts of placebos and placebo effects refer to extremely diverse phenomena. I recommend dissolving the concepts of placebos and placebo effects into loosely related groups of specific mechanisms, including (potentially among others) expectation-fulfillment, classical conditioning, and attentional-somatic feedback loops. If this approach is on the right track, it has three main implications for the ethics of informed consent. First, because of the expectation-fulfillment mechanism, the process of informing cannot be considered independently from the potential effects of treatment. Obtaining informed (...) consent influences the effects of treatment. This provides support for the authorized concealment and authorized deception paradigms, and perhaps even for outright deceptive placebo use. Second, doctors may easily fail to consider the potential benefits of conditioning, leading them to misjudge the trade-off between beneficence and autonomy. Third, how attentional-somatic feedback loops play out depends not only on the content of the informing process but also on its framing. This suggests a role for libertarian paternalism in clinical practice. (shrink)

Electronic health records are likely to improve health care but in the U.S. they will also enable health insurers to be more selective in deciding to whom to deny coverage or whose premiums to increase. In a Rawlsian social contract (1971) the veil of ignorance does not conceal general scientific information from the hypothetical contracting parties. Nonetheless, this paper shows that social contract considerations rule out risk selection as morally impermissible. Since modern health care must in effect be paid (...) for by public or private insurance, and doing so is efficient, this is a basic part of health care justice. But for information ethics this argument does not extend beyond cases in which provision of information serves to deny a social primary good to members of society. (shrink)

For millennia physicians were admonished to obscure the details of patients’ illnesses and poor prognoses. The Hippocratic ethic precludes physicians from including patients in medical decisionmaking. That ethic demanded of doctors that they “[p]erform [their duties] calmly and adroitly, concealing most things from the patient … revealing nothing of the patient's future or present condition.”.

This article offers a reading of Eriugena’s thought that is inspired by Heidegger’s claim according to which being is constituted in a dialectical interplay of revelation and concealment. Beginning with an analysis of how “causality as concealing revelation” works on the level of God’s inner-Trinitarian life, the piece moves on to a consideration of the way in which the human soul reveals itself in successive stages of exteriorization that culminate in the creation of the body, its “image.” The body, however, (...) conceals as much as it reveals true human nature. Moreover, it is shown that for Eriugena all of reality, as theophany, possesses this character of concealing its fundamental truth. These insights lead Eriugena to a recognition of radical human finitude, as genuine wisdom requires an acknowledgement of our fundamental ignorance. (shrink)

Geven, Ben‐Shakhar, Kindt and Verschuere point out that research on deception detection usually employs instructed cheating. They experimentally demonstrate that participants show slower reaction times for concealed information than for other information, regardless of whether they are explicitly instructed to cheat or whether they can freely choose to cheat or not. Finding this ‘cognitive signature of lying’ with self‐initiated cheating too is argued by the authors to strengthen the external validity of deception detection research. [75].

Autocracies draw their political power from cronyism and organized repression. The opacity of business information protects these regimes and their crony firms from any opposition. However, autocracies might also desire to eliminate cronyism because it dampens economic growth. Autocracies survive through repression that engenders tensions, as evident in the Spanish newspaper industry during the Francoist dictatorship. State control over this industry was important because the press disseminated news to the public. From 1939 to 1957, the autocracy institutionalized both cronyism (...) and the opacity of circulation figures to sustain the political powers of Franco and the single party state. Opacity concealed the economic performance of newspapers owned by sole legal party and any distribution of resources in its favor. Franco authorized voluntary disclosure of reliable circulation figures in 1964, after eliminating cronyism in favor of a freer market. Repression guaranteed support for this industry until Franco's death. (shrink)

The Editors express their gratitude and appreciation to the indi-viduals listed below who served as referees for Informal Logic for Volumes 31 (2011) and 32 (2012).

We want to keep hackers in the dark about our passwords and our credit card numbers. We want to keep potential eavesdroppers in the dark about our private communications with friends and business associates. This need for secrecy raises important questions in epistemology (how do we do it?) and in ethics (should we do it?). In order to answer these questions, it would be useful to have a good understanding of the concept of keeping someone in the dark. Several philosophers (...) (e.g., Bok, 1983; Carson, 2010; Mahon, 2009; Scheppele, 1988) have analyzed this concept (or, equivalently, the concept of keeping secrets) in terms of concealing and/or withholding information. However, their analyses incorrectly exclude clear instances of keeping someone in the dark. And more important, they incorrectly focus on possible means of keeping someone in the dark rather than on what it is to keep someone in the dark. In this paper, I argue that you keep X in the dark about a proposition P if and only if you intentionally cause X not to have a true belief that P. In addition, I show how this analysis of keeping someone in the dark can be extended from a categorical belief model of epistemic states to a credence (or degree of belief) model. (shrink)