Purposes and duties in scientific modelling

More people than ever are paying attention to philosophical questions about epidemiological models, including their susceptibility to the influence of social and ethical values, sufficiency to inform policy decisions under certain conditions, and even their fundamental nature. One important question pertains to the purposes of epidemiological models, for example, are COVID-19 models for ‘prediction’ or ‘projection’? Are they adequate for making causal inferences? Is one of their goals, or virtues, to change individual responses to the pandemic? In this essay, we offer our perspective on these questions and place them in the context of other recent philosophical arguments about epidemiological models. We argue that clarifying the intended purpose of a model, and assessing its adequacy for that purpose, are moral-epistemic duties, responsibilities which pertain to knowledge but have moral significance nonetheless. This moral significance, we argue, stems from the inherent value-ladenness of models, along with the potential for models to be used in political decision making in ways that conflict with liberal values and which could lead to downstream harms. Increasing conversation about the moral significance of modelling, we argue, could help us to resist further eroding our standards of democratic scrutiny in the COVID-19 era.

“You’re changing the pattern”: cognitive analytic team formulation with learning disabilities care staff

Purpose This study aims to explore how care staff working with people with learning disabilities experienced psychologist-facilitated team formulation sessions in a cognitive analytic style (contextual reformulation). Design/methodology/approach Eleven participants attended at least one contextual reformulation session regarding a client their team referred because of challenging behaviour. Post-intervention semi-structured interviews were analysed using qualitative inductive thematic analysis. Findings Five themes were developed: multiple roles and functions of sessions and clinicians; challenging behaviour in relationship; making links – understanding can be enlightening, containing and practical; the process of developing a shared understanding and approach; and caught between two perspectives. Findings suggested contextual reformulation helped staff see challenging behaviour as relational, provided them with the space to reflect on their emotions and relate compassionately to themselves and others, and ultimately helped them to focus their interventions on understanding and relationally managing rather than acting to reduce behaviour. Research limitations/implications Qualitative methodology allows no causal inferences to be made. Ten of 11 participants were female. Originality/value This qualitative study adds to the limited research base on team formulation in learning disabilities settings and specifically that using a cognitive analytic approach.

Crossover Effects of Education on Health within Married Couples

Although empirical work has shown that personal and spousal education are both related to health, the nature of these associations has been harder to establish. People select into marriages on the basis of observed and hard-to-observe characteristics, complicating the job of the researcher who wishes to make causal inferences. In this article, we implement a within-sibling-pair design that exploits variation within pairs in spousal education to generate estimates of spousal crossover effects. Results—based on a long-term study of siblings and their spouses—suggest that spousal education is positively related to health, but to a greater degree for women than men. Sensitivity analyses show that these patterns are unlikely to derive from measured differences between individuals or unmeasured characteristics that sort them into unions. These results are consistent with network-based theories of social capital, which view education as a resource that can be mobilized by network ties to enhance health.

Does the Correspondence Bias Apply to Social Robots?: Dispositional and Situational Attributions of Human Versus Robot Behavior

Increasingly, people interact with embodied machine communicators and are challenged to understand their natures and behaviors. The Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE, sometimes referred to as the correspondence bias) is the tendency for individuals to over-emphasize personality-based or dispositional explanations for other people’s behavior while under-emphasizing situational explanations. This effect has been thoroughly examined with humans, but do people make the same causal inferences when interpreting the actions of a robot? As compared to people, social robots are less autonomous and agentic because their behavior is wholly determined by humans in the loop, programming, and design choices. Nonetheless, people do assign robots agency, intentionality, personality, and blame. Results of an experiment showed that participants made correspondent inferences when evaluating both human and robot speakers, attributing their behavior to underlying attitudes even when it was clearly coerced. However, they committed a stronger correspondence bias in the case of the robot–an effect driven by the greater dispositional culpability assigned to robots committing unpopular behavior–and they were more confident in their attitudinal judgments of robots than humans. Results demonstrated some differences in the global impressions of humans and robots based on behavior valence and choice. Judges formed more generous impressions of the robot agent when its unpopular behavior was coerced versus chosen; a tendency not displayed when forming impressions of the human agent. Implications of attributing robot behavior to disposition, or conflating robot actors with their actions, are addressed.

Servant Leadership and the Spirituality of Music in Crisis Management

The ways in which organizations manage crises can find significant analogies in the musician's process of improvisation, involving a continuous leader-follower interaction that displays the typical traits of servant leaders fueled by spirituality. The analogy with musical improvisation is the thread that runs through this chapter, which analyzes servant leadership in organizational orchestration with reference to current issues such as distributed work. The conditions that can enable the development of servant organizations are identified, modeling the different contextual dimensions with reference to organizational performance, also with respect to other leadership styles. These enabling factors are also declined with respect to agile management practices and the convergence between spiritual leadership and servant leadership. New research directions are identified: this transformative historical moment offers a unique opportunity to develop in-depth causal inferences about how servant leadership creates ethical and organizational value.

Blinding in tDCS Studies: Correct End-of-Study Guess Does Not Moderate the Effects on Associative and Working Memory

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has become a valuable tool in cognitive neuroscience research as it enables causal inferences about neural underpinnings of cognition. However, studies using tDCS to modulate cognitive functions often yield inconsistent findings. Hence, there is an increasing interest in factors that may moderate the effects, one of which is the participants’ beliefs of the tDCS condition (i.e., real or sham) they received. Namely, whether participants’ correct guessing of sham condition may lead to false-positive tDCS effects. In this study, we aimed to explore if participants’ beliefs about received stimulation type (i.e., the success of blinding) impacted their task performance in tDCS experiments on associative (AM) and working memory (WM). We analyzed data from four within-subject, sham-controlled tDCS memory experiments (N = 83) to check if the correct end-of-study guess of sham condition moderated tDCS effects. We found no evidence that sham guessing moderated post-tDCS memory performance in experiments in which tDCS effects were observed as well as in experiments that showed null effects of tDCS. The results suggest that the correct sham guessing (i.e., placebo-like effect) is unlikely to influence the results in tDCS memory experiments. We discuss the results in light of the growing debate about the relevance and effectiveness of blinding in brain stimulation research.

Association between aerobic fitness and the functional connectome in patients with schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is accompanied by widespread alterations in static functional connectivity associated with symptom severity and cognitive deficits. Improvements in aerobic fitness have been demonstrated to ameliorate symptomatology and cognition in people with schizophrenia, but the intermediary role of macroscale connectivity patterns remains unknown. Therefore, we aim to explore the relation between aerobic fitness and the functional connectome in individuals with schizophrenia. Further, we investigate clinical and cognitive relevance of the identified fitness-connectivity links. 58 patients with schizophrenia were included in the resting-state fMRI analysis. Multilevel Bayesian partial correlations between aerobic fitness and functional connections across the whole brain as well as between static functional connectivity patterns and clinical and cognitive outcome were performed. Preliminary causal inferences were enabled based on a mediation analysis. Static functional connectivity between the subcortical nuclei and the cerebellum as well as between temporal seeds mediated the attenuating impact of aerobic fitness on total symptom severity. Functional connections between cerebellar seeds affected the positive link between aerobic fitness and global cognition, while the functional interplay between central and limbic seeds drove the beneficial relation between aerobic fitness and emotion recognition. The current study provides first insights into the interactions between aerobic fitness, the functional connectome and clinical and cognitive outcome in people with schizophrenia, but results have to be interpreted carefully. Further interventional aerobic exercise studies are needed in order to replicate the current findings and to enable conclusive causal inferences.

Constructing a graphical model of the relationship between physical activity and cognitive function based on a systematic review of prospective evidence

Elucidating the factors that contribute to healthy ageing is an important research goal. Physical activity (PA) has been associated with benefits for cognitive function (CF). However, most of this evidence comes from longitudinal cohort studies which, in the absence of experimental design, have limited scope to make causal inferences regarding observed relationships. This review aimed to utilise recent methodological developments allowing researchers to formulate and answer stronger causal questions using observational data, by following a best-practice method for synthesising evidence to produce a graphical causal model known as a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Following a search of 3 databases (EMBASE, MEDLINE and PsycINFO), 21 observational studies on the PA-CF relationship were reviewed and their methodological quality, characteristics, and key findings were summarised. The outcomes of interest were the covariates and modelling practices employed in each study. The reported covariates were synthesised against a set of criteria to determine their role in the DAG as confounders or mediators of the PA-CF relationship. Every included study had some areas of methodological weakness. The resulting DAG included a wide range of biopsychosocial covariates spanning the entire life-course and indicated potential intermediate pathways between PA and CF via structural brain health. Strengths, limitations and implications of this review for modelling decisions are discussed, prior to the model being taken forward to inform an empirical analysis using data from the UK Biobank cohort, separate from this review.

The valuation effects of hotel mergers

This study aims to evaluate the merger effect of hotel mergers between 1981 and 2019 and assess which theoretical framework mergers in the lodging industry would conform. Previously, no work has been done about the nature of hotel mergers using the combined return, while this lack of thoroughness in assessing the motivation of those mergers has triggered different interpretations. The design of this study follows the traditional framework of an event study by assessing various types of cumulative abnormal returns around the announcement date. The key finding of this study suggests that the nature of hotel mergers strongly supports the synergy hypothesis. In order to explore the causal inferences of this result by bidder and target, an additional analysis was conducted by regressing the cumulative abnormal returns on accounting measures as well as merger- and hotel industry–specific variables. This panel data analysis showed that in a merger where both the bidder and target are affected, the amount of total debt, being engaged in the casino business, and whether the merger was involving a stock swap sent out positive signals to the market, whereby longer duration and higher deal value lifted the undervalued target. JEL Classifications: G34 (Mergers; Restructuring; Corporate Governance)

Component 2 (Meso): Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA)

This chapter contains the meso component (Qualitative Comparative Analysis, QCA). It discusses the QCA research model, the QCA methodology, and the analysis of the QCA results.QCA is used to analyse both quantitative and qualitative data, thus enabling causal inferences. However, QCA is not a statistical technique that focuses on the likelihood of the relations among variables. Instead, it is a method based on Boolean logic, rooted in set theory, and founded on the notions of sufficiency, the necessity of conditions, and conjunctural causation.QCA results indicate, among others, that for high competitiveness, high EPI suffices if Concordats with the Vatican are low and if the Roman Catholic and Orthodox population is low. No State Religion positively affects competitiveness. Having Concordats with the Vatican negatively influences competitiveness. Additionally, factors like German, English, and Scandinavian legal origin help to increase competitiveness.Oppositely, QCA results for high corruption indicate that Concordats in combination with Roman Catholic religion adherence increase corruption. Orthodox religion has a similar negative effect. Most countries with high corruption are of French legal origin and have high Concordats. This trend is robust.Colombia and Switzerland (the two extreme cases) exhibited several consistent QCA results. The other two cases (Cuba and Uruguay) only revealed one or two consistent outcomes.