Violations and biases relative to normative principles of rationality tend to occur when the structure of task environments is novel or the decision goals are in conflict. The two blades of bounded rationality, the structure of task environments and the computational capacities of the actor, can sharpen the conceptual distinctions between the sources of the normative and descriptive gap.

Intentional change when viewed as making a risky or intertemporal choice with evolutionary relevance helps us understand its successes and its failures. To promote future-oriented ecological rationality requires establishing a linkage between nongenetic, cultural, and symbolic selections and genetic adaptations. Coupled with biophilic instinct, intentional conservation is more likely to prevail against evolved desires of environmental exploitation.

The smartness of simple heuristics depends upon their fit to the structure of task environments. Being fast and frugal becomes psychologically demanding when a decision goal is bounded by the risk distribution in a task environment. The lack of clear goals and prioritized cues in a decision problem may lead to the use of simple but irrational heuristics. Future research should focus more on how people use and integrate simple heuristics in the face of goal conflict under risk.

Campbell's target article is a stimulating attempt to extend our understanding of sex differences in risk-taking behaviors. However, Campbell does not succeed in demonstrating that her account adds explanatory power to those (e.g., Daly & Wilson 1994) previously proposed. In particular, little effort was made to explore the causal links between survival (staying alive) and reproduction.

We agree with Ainslie's general approach to intertemporal choices and self-control. However, we argue that a concept of “will” is superfluous in explaining tradeoffs between SS (smaller and sooner) and LL (larger and later) rewards in a framework of temporal goal setting and goal aggregation. We provide an alternative framework of reference point-dependent tradeoffs between SS and LL options.

Clicking the like button following a post on social media has become a common means of expressing and gathering social support online. Little is known about how liking expression is linked and regulated by personality traits and communication motives. Following a preliminary survey about the usage of the like function on WeChat, a Chinese social media platform, we conducted an online study to map the Big-Five personality traits and five communication motives to the frequency of liking expression. The results showed (...) that each user had, on average, 385 WeChat friends and spent 2.2 hours and used the liking function 1.1 times each day on WeChat. The personality trait conscientiousness was negatively related to the liking expression. In contrast, agreeableness promoted the expression of liking directly and indirectly via two communication motives, enjoyment and passing time. The liking expression may serve as a simple index for understanding dispositional underpinnings of social media networking. (shrink)

This article discusses the practice and development of organ donation by capital prisoners in China. It analyzes the issue of informed consent regarding organ donation from capital prisoners in light of Confucian ethics and expounds the point that under the influence of Confucianism, China is a country that attaches great importance to the role of the family in practicing informed consent in various areas, the area of organ donation from capital prisoners included. It argues that a proper form of organ (...) donation from capital prisoners can be justified within the Confucian moral context in which the proper interests of capital prisoners and their families, the benefit of organ receptors, and a rightful order of society should all be appropriately considered. From the Confucian perspective, the act of donating organs from a capital prisoner must be decided by both the prisoner and his/her family (i.e., each side should hold a veto power), whereas such donation, in the proper circumstance protected by a rightful procedure, should be appreciated as a morally praiseworthy act of the prisoner who is willing to make the final effort to repent and correct his/her evil conduct and to leave something good to the world. (shrink)

Recent research has begun to explore individual differences in statistical learning, and how those differences may be related to other cognitive abilities, particularly their effects on language learning. In this research, we explored a different type of relationship between language learning and statistical learning: the possibility that learning a new language may also influence statistical learning by changing the regularities to which learners are sensitive. We tested two groups of participants, Mandarin Learners and Naïve Controls, at two time points, 6 (...) months apart. At each time point, participants performed two different statistical learning tasks: an artificial tonal language statistical learning task and a visual statistical learning task. Only the Mandarin-learning group showed significant improvement on the linguistic task, whereas both groups improved equally on the visual task. These results support the view that there are multiple influences on statistical learning. Domain-relevant experiences may affect the regularities that learners can discover when presented with novel stimuli. (shrink)