This essay presents a point of view for looking at `free will', with the purpose of interpreting where exactly the freedom lies. For, freedom is what we mean by it. It compares the exercise of free will with the making of inferences, which usually is predominantly inductive in nature. The making of inference and the exercise of free will, both draw upon psychological resources that define our ‘selves’. I examine the constitution of the self of an individual, especially the involvement (...) of personal beliefs, personal memories, affects, emotions, and the hugely important psychological value-system, all of which distinguish the self of one individual from that of another. The foundational position that adopted in this essay is that all psychological processes are correlated with corresponding ones involving large scale neural aggregates in the brain, communicating with one another through wavelike modes of excitation and de-excitation. Of central relevance is the value-network around which the affect system is organized, the latter, in turn, being the axis around which is assembled the self, with all its emotional correlates. The self is a complex system. I include a brief outline of what complexity consists of. In reality all systems are complex, for complexity is ubiquitous, and certain parts of nature appear to us to be ‘simple’ only in certain specific contexts. It is in this background that the issue of determinism is viewed in this essay. Instead of looking at determinism as a grand principle entrenched in nature independent of our interpretation of it, I look at our ability to explain and to predict events and phenomena around us, which is made possible by the existence of causal links running in a complex course that set up correlations between diverse parts of nature, in this way putting the stamp of necessity on these events. However, the complexity of systems limits our ability to explain and to predict to within certain horizons defined by contexts. Our ability to explain and predict in matters relating to acts of free will is similarly limited by the operations of the self that remain hidden from our own awareness. The aspects of necessity and determinism appear to us in the form of reason and rationality that explain and predict only within a limited horizon, while the rest depends on the complex operation of self-linked psychological resources, where the latter appear as contingent in the context of the exercise of free will. The hallmark of complex systems is the existence of amplifying factors that operate as destabilizing ones, along with inhibiting or stabilizing factors as well that generally limit the destabilizing influences to local occurrences, while preserving the global integrity of a system. This complex interplay of destabilizing and stabilizing influences lead to the possibility of an enormous number of distinct modes of behavior that appear as emergent phenomena in complex systems. Looking at the particular case of the self of an individual that guide her actions and thoughts, it is the operation of our emotions, built around the psychological value-system, that provide for the amplifying and inhibiting factors mentioned above. The operation of these self-linked factors stamps our actions and thoughts as contingent ones that do not fit with our concepts of reason and rationality. And this is what provides the basis of our idea of free will. Free will is not ‘free’ in virtue of exemption from causal links running through all our self-based processes - ones that remain hidden from our awareness, but is free of what is perceived to be ‘reason and rationality’ based on knowledge and the common pool of beliefs and principles associated with a shared world-view. When we speak of the choice involved in an act of exercise of free will what we actually refer to is the commonly observed fact that various different individuals of a similar disposition respond differently when placed under similar circumstances. In other words, free will is ‘free’ precisely because it is not subject to constraints of a commonly accepted and shared set of principles, beliefs, and values. While it is possible that, in an exercise of free will, the self-linked psychological resources are brought into action when a number of alternatives are presented to the self by the operation of the ingredients of a commonly shared world-view, it seems likely that, that set of alternatives is not of primary relevance in the final response that the mind produces, since the latter is primarily a product of the operation of the self-based psychological resources. What is of greater relevance here is the operation of emotion-driven processes, guided by the psychological value-system based on the activity of the so-called reward-punishment network in the brain. These processes lead the individual to a response that appears to be free from the shackles of determinism precisely because their mechanisms, which are hidden from us, do not conform to commonly accepted and shared rules and principles. In contrast, inductive inference is a process that is based on the ‘cognitive face’ of self, where the self-based psychological resources play a supportive role to the commonly shared world-view of an individual. There is never any freedom from the all-pervading causal links representing correlations among all objects, entities, and events in nature. In the midst of all this, the closest thing to freedom that we can have in our life comes with self-examination and self-improvement. The possibility of self-examination appears in the form of specific conjunctions between our complex self-processes and the ceaseless changes of scenario in our external world. This actually makes the emergent phenomenon of self-examination a matter of chance, but one that keeps on appearing again and again in our life. Once realized, self examination creates possibilities that would not be there in the absence of it, and these possibilities include the enhancement of further self-enrichment and further diversity in the exercise of our free will. (shrink)

Can an agent's intelligence level be negative? We extend the Legg-Hutter agent-environment framework to include punishments and argue for an affirmative answer to that question. We show that if the background encodings and Universal Turing Machine (UTM) admit certain Kolmogorov complexity symmetries, then the resulting Legg-Hutter intelligence measure is symmetric about the origin. In particular, this implies reward-ignoring agents have Legg-Hutter intelligence 0 according to such UTMs.

Low-carbon technological innovation is the main means to develop a low-carbon economy, and network knowledge sharing and collaborative innovation is an effective model for the development of low-carbon technologies. First of all, this article adopts a decision-making experiment and evaluation laboratory method and interpretation structure model, combines the two methods, extracts the advantages of the two, and discards the shortcomings of the two, thus constructing a new optimized and upgraded interpretation structure model. We give methods to explore the main (...) influencing factors of collaborative innovation of low-carbon technologies for online knowledge sharing. Based on the industrial network knowledge sharing and cooperation network environment, the network evolution game model of network knowledge sharing knowledge collaboration is constructed to study the rewards and punishments, the profit distribution rate, the knowledge potential difference, and the parameter pairing of the network knowledge sharing cooperation network structure in the process of network knowledge sharing and collaborative knowledge innovation. The influence of the network knowledge sharing cooperation strategy is obtained through simulation to change the size of the relevant parameters so that the network knowledge sharing cooperation agent chooses the network evolution game of the sharing strategy to realize the optimal evolutionary stable strategy. According to the simulation results, this article proposes suggestions from the following aspects, aiming to improve the overall knowledge synergy effect of the network knowledge sharing and cooperation network. (shrink)

The topics treated in The brain and emotion include the definition, nature, and functions of emotion (Ch. 3); the neural bases of emotion (Ch. 4); reward, punishment, and emotion in brain design (Ch. 10); a theory of consciousness and its application to understanding emotion and pleasure (Ch. 9); and neural networks and emotion-related learning (Appendix). The approach is that emotions can be considered as states elicited by reinforcers (rewards and punishers). This approach helps with understanding the functions of (...) emotion, with classifying different emotions, and in understanding what information-processing systems in the brain are involved in emotion, and how they are involved. The hypothesis is developed that brains are designed around reward-and punishment-evaluation systems, because this is the way that genes can build a complex system that will produce appropriate but flexible behavior to increase fitness (Ch. 10). By specifying goals rather than particular behavioral patterns of responses, genes leave much more open the possible behavioral strategies that might be required to increase fitness. The importance of reward and punishment systems in brain design also provides a basis for understanding the brain mechanisms of motivation, as described in Chapters 2 for appetite and feeding, 5 for brain-stimulation reward, 6 for addiction, 7 for thirst, and 8 for sexual behavior. Key Words: amygdala; brain evolution; consciousness; dopamine; emotion; hunger; orbitofrontal cortex; punishment; reward; taste. (shrink)

Reward and punishment sensitivity seem important traits in understanding behavior in general and psychopathology in particular. Though the definitions used for reward and punishment sensitivity differentiate between responsivity and motivation, the measures thus far used to assess these constructs do not. Further, specificity of the type of reward and punishment in questionnaires might result in measurement bias especially when examining the relationship with psychopathology. Therefore, we developed a stimulus-independent multidimensional questionnaire of reward and (...) punishment sensitivity that differentiates between responsivity and motivation. This study addresses the psychometric qualities of this newly developed reward and punishment responsivity and motivation questionnaire. On the basis of exploratory ordinal factor analysis that was used to examine the quality of the initial pool of 39 items, the number of items was reduced to 18. Confirmatory ordinal factor analysis on the remaining items in an independent sample supported a 18-item four-factor model, and showed acceptable to good internal reliability. The relationship between the subscales of the RPRM-Q and often used questionnaires was examined in the combined sample, which showed some first support for the ability of the new questionnaire to differentiate between responsivity and motivation to approach/avoid. The findings indicate that the RPRM-Q might be a helpful instrument to further test the relevance of punishment and reward sensitivity in psychopathology. (shrink)

In A Treatise on Virtues and Rewards, Dragonetti advances a theory of action based on rewards for virtues. The idea of rewards, especially of awards, relies on the hypothesis that intrinsic motivations drive the actions of good or virtuous citizens. We apply this theory to virtuous entrepreneurs who voluntarily adopt ethical principles as promoted by a recent Italian law. These firms receive an ethical rating by the Italian Competition Authority and can access a set of economic and non-economic benefits. We (...) survey a sample of 152 private companies with an ER and examine their views on the economic and social motivations and benefits as well as the perceived usefulness of the ER for improving ethical behaviour. An exploratory factor analysis detects four categories of motivation and two categories of benefits, which we use in regression models to test Dragonetti’s theory. Overall, respondents see the ER as an effective tool, except in terms of improving economic performance. We also find that entrepreneurs with lower economic and higher responsiveness motivations attain higher ERs. However, in the respondents’ opinions, the ER is not producing any concrete benefits since we find no relationship between the ER and economic or competitive rewards. These findings have implications for the ICA as well as for private companies. (shrink)

The study seeks to determine the influence of economic reward on unethical behavior with the help of a Reward Punishment Model. The model postulates that ethical or unethical behavior depends on the relationship among three factors: economic reward or benefit that a businessperson receives from the unethical practice, the severity of punishment the society imposes for such wrong-doing, and the probability of receiving the punishment. A short survey, which contained a hypothetical ethical situation, was (...) administered to 251 respondents. The findings indicate that the probability of risk-taking decreases as the level of punishmentand the chance of being caught increases. (shrink)

This study investigates the ability of individuals with psychopathy to perform passive avoidance learning and whether this ability is modulated by level of reinforcement/punishment. Nineteen psychopathic and 21 comparison individuals, as defined by the Hare Psychopathy Checklist Revised (Hare, 1991), were given a passive avoidance task with a graded reinforcement schedule. Response to each rewarding number gained a point reward specific to that number (i.e., 1, 700, 1400 or 2000 points). Response to each punishing number lost a point (...) punishment specific to that number (i.e., the loss of 1, 700, 1400 or 2000 points). In line with predictions, individuals with psychopathy made more passive avoidance errors than the comparison individuals. In addition, while the performance of both groups was modulated by level of reward, only the performance of the comparison population was modulated by level of punishment. The results are interpreted with reference to a computational account of the emotional learning impairment in individuals with psychopathy. (shrink)

This article analyzes the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) decoupling and financial market outcomes. CSR decoupling refers to the gap between CSR disclosure and CSR performance. More specifically, we analyze the effect of CSR decoupling on analysts’ forecast errors, cost of capital, and access to finance. We also examine the moderating effect of forecast errors on relationships between CSR decoupling and cost of capital and access to finance. For a sample of U.S. firms consisting of 7,681 firm-year observations for (...) the period 2006–2015, our empirical evidence supports the idea that a wider gap results in higher analysts’ forecast errors, a greater cost of capital, and reduced access to finance. In addition, our results show that forecast errors enhance the effect of the CSR decoupling on cost of capital and access to financial resources. We also note that external monitoring, in the form of greater analysts’ coverage, reduces CSR decoupling. (shrink)

Ethics researchers advise managers of organizations to link rewards and punishments to ethical and unethical behavior, respectively. We build on prior research maintaining that organizations operate at Kohlbergs stages of moral reasoning, and explain how the over-reliance on rewards and punishments encourages employees to operate at Kohlbergs lowest stages of moral reasoning. We advocate designing organizations as ethical communities and relying on different assumptions about employees in order to foster ethical reasoning at higher levels. Characteristics associated with ethical communities are (...) identified and AES Corporation and Semco S/A serve as examples of corporations exhibiting the design characteristics and assumptions of ethical organizations. (shrink)

The vast majority of theologians accept true news, sound senses and healthy working mind as sources of knowledge. Due to the fact that the mind is counted among the sources of knowledge, reason-based evidence has been used in many subjects. It is known that Māturīdī was the first theologian who dealt with the mentioned sources of knowledge in his work. At the very beginning of his Kitāb al-Tawhīd, he determined the ways of acquiring knowledge as correct news, sound senses and (...) reason, and elaborated them in detail. Māturīdī mostly prefers the term inference to describe the use of reason. He has proven his views on theological issues with many types of inference as well as true news and sense knowledge. These include matters related to the hereafter, too. The visible over the invisible, which is a type of inference, was used as evidence by Māturīdī to prove almost every subject. Many definitions of the method of the method the visible as an evidence for the invisible have been made. However, it is possible to understand the structure on which it is built as follows: There are areas that human beings cannot comprehend and have will no definite knowledge about. These areas called as al-ghaib “the invisible” may be related to ontological differences or may be due to differences in time and space. The difference between humans and Allah is ontological difference, and Allah is an ontological invisible for humans. While events that have not yet happened are invisible in terms of time, happenings what beyond the mountain for example, are invisible in terms of spatial difference. It is not possible for human beings to fully understand (perceive) the attributes of Allah, who is ontologically invisible. For this reason, many theologians have used the method the visible as an evidence for the invisible especially in making the attributes of Allah understandable and have tried to explain the divine attributes with this method. Belief in the hereafter is also related to the realm of the unvisible. There are a lot of revelations (true knowledge) about the hereafter. However, because of the conditions of the hereafter are different from this world, it is necessary to make the revelations about that place comprehensible. Accordingly, it is interesting how Māturīdī uses the aforementioned method to understand the nature of reward and punishment in the hereafter, which is the area of the unvisible. Māturīdī sometimes understood the verses about reward and punishment in the hereafter with their real meanings, and sometimes attributed different meanings to these verses. In this context, while dealing with the verses about the afterlife, he listed the possibilities regarding what they might mean, and included interpretations based the method the visible as an evidence for the invisible. Thus, Māturīdī tried to make the hereafter, intelligible based on human being’s experiences in this world. According to Māturīdī, the mind also has a function in understanding the hereafter. The mind has the capacity to go beyond the senses and gives us information about that field. Our mind, based on what we can perceive and understand, can go beyond itself and make inferences about the issues that are incapable of understanding. Knowing the pleasures and tortures of the world in order to understand the reward and punishment that will be given to humans in the hereafter happens in a similary way. In addition, he makes inferences based on events, situations, characteristics, etc. (visible) that people know from worldly life in order to better understand the expressions in such verses, which is quite remarkable for our study. In this context, while interpreting many verses, Māturīdī bases on the aspects of the realm of the visible similar to the realm of the hereafter. He explains the similarities of the hereafter to the worldly life, mostly through human nature, the Arabs’ perception of reward and punishment, and people’s perception of color and direction. In addition to these, he takes our knowledge, which has increased to the knowledge of observation, as a basis even though we learn through news, and evaluates the divine narrations for the hereafter on these principles. For the hereafter can be understood through things known, visible, lived and experienced in the life of this world. Māturīdī emphasizes the similarity of the world and the hereafter as well as the different aspects of the hereafter and uses these differences as a basis for his inferences. Our study is aimed at understanding how Māturīdī brings evidence to what people know from worldly life while explaining the nature of reward and punishment in the hereafter. In this context, methods such as interpretation, comparison, concept analysis, and literature review were used, and the study was limited to the books of Kitāb al-Tawhīd and Ta’wīlāt of Māturīdī. (shrink)

Individuals in depressed status respond abnormally to reward stimuli, but the neural processes involved remain unclear. Whether this neural response affects subsequent cognitive processing activities remains to be explored. In the current study, participants, screened as depressed status individuals and healthy individuals by Beck Depression Inventory and Hospital Anxiety Depression Scale, performed both a door task and a cognitive task. Specifically, in each trial, they selected one from two identical doors based on the expectations of rewards and punishments and (...) received the rewarded or punished feedback, and then they performed a cognitive task in which they judged the correctness of a math equation. The neural responses of their choice in the door task were recorded. The results showed that when the two groups received punished feedback, their accuracy was significantly higher than they received rewarded feedback. Compared with the healthy group, the depressed status group spent more time completing cognitive tasks. Analysis of electroencephalography data showed that the amplitude of RewP induced by rewarded feedback was larger than that induced by punished feedback, and the amplitude of RewP and fb-P3 induced by the depressed status group was smaller than that of the healthy group. The results of an order analysis showed that the main effects of group variable in fb-P3 and RewP appeared in the second half of the data, and the main effect of feedback type in RewP appeared in the first half of the data. The results showed that the neural response of individuals in depressed status to reward and punishment stimuli was weakened compared with healthy individuals and affected the subsequent cognitive processing to some extent. The effect of feedback appeared in the early stage and gradually decreased. The neural response of individuals in depressed status had a cumulative effect, and the differences appeared in the later stage. The results of this study support the emotional situation insensitive hypothesis, that is, individuals in depressed status are less sensitive to reward and punishment than healthy individuals. (shrink)

This study examined how sales managers react to ethical and unethical acts by their salespeople. Deontological considerations and, to a much lesser extent, teleological considerations predicted sales managers' ethical judgments. Sales managers' intentions to reward or discipline ethical or unethical sales force behavior were primarily determined by their ethical judgments. An organization's perceived ethical work climate was not a significant predictor of sales managers' intentions to intervene when ethical and unethical sales force behavior was encountered.

Game experiments designed to test the effectiveness of reward and/or punishment incentives in promoting cooperative behavior among their participants are quite common. Results from two such recent experiments conducted in Beijing, based on the Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) game and Public Goods Game respectively, are summarized here. The unexpected empirical outcomes for the repeated PD game, that cooperation actually decreased when the participants had the option of using a costly punishment strategy and that participants who used costly (...) class='Hi'>punishment in some round of the repeated game often did so in the first round, are discussed in terms of differences in attitudes toward reputation in Chinese culture compared to other locations (mostly in Western society) where similar experiments have been conducted. The second experiment models an institution providing incentives to increase contribution levels (i.e., cooperation) to the public good. The results show that combined institutional reward and punishment is the most effective means to increase cooperation, followed by a scheme using only punishment. It is shown how these empirical results are related to the theoretical predictions that assume players play rationally by optimizing their personal payoff given their opponents’ actions in these multi-player games. (shrink)

BackgroundThe current study set out to improve our understanding of the characteristics of individuals who are motivated to restrict their food intake yet who nevertheless fail to do so. We examined whether punishment sensitivity was related to restrained eating, and reward sensitivity to perceived dieting success. Additionally, it was examined whether executive control moderates the association between RS and perceived dieting success.MethodsFemale student participants completed questionnaires on restrained eating, perceived dieting success, RS and PS, and carried out a (...) behavioral task to index EC.ResultsPS was indeed positively related to restrained eating. RS was positively related to perceived dieting success, yet, EC did not moderate this association.ConclusionThe current study adds to the evidence that PS is related to individuals’ motivation to restrict their food intake. Furthermore, it shows support for the suggestion that RS may facilitate food restriction. (shrink)

Gender roles are anti-dichotomous and malleable social constructs that should theoretically be constructed independently from biological sex. However, it is unclear whether and how the factor of sex is related to neural mechanisms involved in social constructions of gender roles. Thus, the present study aimed to investigate sex specificity in gender role constructions and the corresponding underlying neural mechanisms. We measured gender role orientation using the Bem Sex-Role Inventory, used a voxel-based global brain connectivity method based on resting-state functional magnetic (...) resonance imaging to characterize the within-network connectivity in the brain reward network, and analyzed how the integration of the reward network is related to gender role scores between sex groups. An omnibus analysis of voxel-wise global brain connectivity values within a two-level linear mixed model revealed that in female participants, femininity scores were positively associated with integration in the posterior orbitofrontal cortex and subcallosal cortex, whereas masculinity scores were positively associated with integration in the frontal pole. By contrast, in male participants, masculinity was negatively correlated with integration in the nucleus accumbens and subcallosal cortex. For the first time, the present study revealed the sex-specific neural mechanisms underlying distinct gender roles, which elucidates the process of gender construction from the perspective of the interaction between reward sensitivity and social reinforcement. (shrink)

Xunzi is a Confucian scholar well known for his theory that no human nature is innately good. However, because it is in human nature to be greedy, it is possible to train the people through promise of reward and punishment. Xunzi has long been considered to have taught Han Feizi who has a similar notion of human nature and uses it as basis for his Legalist theories. In this paper, I compare the two philosophers based on their system (...) of reward and punishment in order to analyze the difference and the similarities between the two. Although the two philosophers share an understanding of human nature, and a system of reward and punishment based on such theories, whereas Xunzi has a belief in the possibility of edification through good influence, Han Feizi does not. Xunzi asserts that mercy is more efficient than punishment in case of petty thefts among the poor, and also that even the severest punishment cannot push a soldier to risk one’s life in battle. This goes directly against Han Feizi’s strong belief in the absoluteness of the rule of law, where no mercy is possible even for the poor, and a rigid system of punishment and reward is seen as sufficient to push the people toward risking their lives for their king. On the other hand, although Han Feizi is often criticized for his lack of regard for the people’s lives in pursuit of power for the absolute monarch, it may be seen that such unforgiving application of the law results in an orderly society which benefits the people in the long run. Therefore, it may be argued that both Xunzi and Han Feizi’s long term goal for the legal system is to bring order to society. A comparison between the two scholars proves that no one-dimensional analysis is valid, and renders it possible to understand their philosophies in a much more colorful light. (shrink)

In his new book Propelled: How Boredom, Frustration, and Anticipation Lead Us to the Good Life, Elpidorou oversimplifies the behavioral data on unexpected outcomes, and, as a result, has a more expansive view of “frustration” than should be allowed. I argue that in order to understand the basis of human motivation, we need to distinguish between non-rewards and punishments. Humans are highly motivated by what they perceive as an unexpected non-reward, but they are not by what they experience as (...) an aversive punishment. And it is aversive punishments that we find frustrating; in contrast, we find unexpected non-rewards invigorating. (shrink)

The concept of distributed moral responsibility (DMR) has a long history. When it is understood as being entirely reducible to the sum of (some) human, individual and already morally loaded actions, then the allocation of DMR, and hence of praise and reward or blame and punishment, may be pragmatically difficult, but not conceptually problematic. However, in distributed environments, it is increasingly possible that a network of agents, some human, some artificial (e.g. a program) and some hybrid (e.g. (...) a group of people working as a team thanks to a software platform), may cause distributed moral actions (DMAs). These are morally good or evil (i.e. morally loaded) actions caused by local interactions that are in themselves neither good nor evil (morally neutral). In this article, I analyse DMRs that are due to DMAs, and argue in favour of the allocation, by default and overridably, of full moral responsibility (faultless responsibility) to all the nodes/agents in the network causally relevant for bringing about the DMA in question, independently of intentionality. The mechanism proposed is inspired by, and adapts, three concepts: back propagation from network theory, strict liability from jurisprudence and common knowledge from epistemic logic. (shrink)