How to Build Food Safety Resilience in Commercial Restaurants?

In this chapter, food safety is portrayed as an intrinsic component of food security and food systems. The objective is to discuss the ‘commercial restaurant’ system and the ‘kitchen worker’ subsystem from the perspective of building resilience in food safety. Relationship maps built for the system and subsystem guide the presentation and discussion of structural, organisational, social and symbolic aspects and elements. Resilience investigation is based on the references of the International Risk Governance Centre Resource Guide on Resilience and current and emerging topics related to food safety, such as risk perception of foodborne diseases, cognitive illusions, sociological aspects, social dimension of taste, humanisation and working conditions and precariousness of work in kitchens. In the final section, a list of recommendations for building resilience in commercial restaurants is presented to help researchers, decision-makers and practice agents apply this concept in their fields of expertise.

Why Does Rubin's Vase Differ Radically From Optical Illusions? Framing Effects Contra Cognitive Illusions

Many researchers use the term “context” loosely to denote diverse kinds of reference points. The issue is not about terminology but rather about the common conflation of one kind of reference points, such as rules of perception, which is responsible for optical illusions, with another kind, known as “context” or “frame,” as exemplified in Rubin's vase. Many researchers regard Rubin's vase as a special kind of optical illusions. This paper rather argues that the two phenomena are radically different. Optical illusions are occasional mistakes that people quickly recognize and eagerly correct, while the different figures of Rubin's vase are not mistakes but, rather, the outcomes of different perspectives that do not need correction. The competing figures in Rubin's vase can, at best, in light of more information, be more warranted or unwarranted. This paper discusses at length one ramification of the proposed distinction. The framing effects, such as loss/gain frame, are the products of contexts and, hence, resemble greatly the figures in Rubin's vase. In contrast, cognitive illusions generated occasionally by the rules of thumb (heuristics) are mistakes and, hence, resemble optical illusions. The proposed distinction carries other ramifications regarding, e.g., happiness studies, moral judgments, and the new philosophy of science.

Impact of Financial Literacy and Behavioural Biases on Investment Decision-making

Investors’ financial literacy entails making sound investment decisions and the behavioural biases or irrational behaviour in decision-making that are collectively formed by heuristic bias, framing effect, cognitive illusions and herd mentality factors. The present study examines the combined impact of financial literacy and behavioural biases on investment decisions. A questionnaire was developed using Likert scaling technique to elicit study variables and collected data was analysed using SEM technique. The results showed that heuristic bias had a significant positive association with the creation of behavioural bias in decision-making. However, the framing effect, cognitive illusions and herd mentality have negative associations in the formation of behavioural biases. Further, investors often practice and follow heuristic biases rather than other irrational techniques for making investment decisions. Therefore, the financial literacy of individual investors has a significant impact on affecting stock market investment decisions.

Jays are sensitive to cognitive illusions

Jays hide food caches, steal them from conspecifics and use tactics to minimize cache theft. Jays are sensitive to the content of their own caches, retrieving items depending on their preferences and the perishability of the cached item. Whether jays impose the same content sensitivity when they steal caches is less clear. We adapted the ‘cups-and-balls’ magic routine, creating a cognitive illusion to test whether jays are sensitive to the (i) content of hidden items and (ii) type of displacement. Subjects were presented with two conditions in which hidden food was consistent with their expectations; and two conditions in which food was manipulated to violate their expectations by switching their second preferred food for their preferred food (up-value) or vice versa (de-value). Subjects readily accepted food when it was consistent with their expectations but were more likely to re-inspect the baited cup and alternative cup when their expectations were violated. In the de-value condition, jays exhibited longer latencies to consume the food and often rejected it. Dominant subjects were more likely to reject the food, suggesting that social factors influence their responses to cognitive illusions. Using cognitive illusions offers innovative avenues for investigating the psychological constraints in diverse animal minds.

Tversky and Kahneman’s Cognitive Illusions: Who Can Solve Them, and Why?

In the present paper we empirically investigate the psychometric properties of some of the most famous statistical and logical cognitive illusions from the “heuristics and biases” research program by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who nearly 50 years ago introduced fascinating brain teasers such as the famous Linda problem, the Wason card selection task, and so-called Bayesian reasoning problems (e.g., the mammography task). In the meantime, a great number of articles has been published that empirically examine single cognitive illusions, theoretically explaining people’s faulty thinking, or proposing and experimentally implementing measures to foster insight and to make these problems accessible to the human mind. Yet these problems have thus far usually been empirically analyzed on an individual-item level only (e.g., by experimentally comparing participants’ performance on various versions of one of these problems). In this paper, by contrast, we examine these illusions as a group and look at the ability to solve them as a psychological construct. Based on an sample of N = 2,643 Luxembourgian school students of age 16–18 we investigate the internal psychometric structure of these illusions (i.e., Are they substantially correlated? Do they form a reflexive or a formative construct?), their connection to related constructs (e.g., Are they distinguishable from intelligence or mathematical competence in a confirmatory factor analysis?), and the question of which of a person’s abilities can predict the correct solution of these brain teasers (by means of a regression analysis).