Commanding or being a simple intermediary: how does it affect moral behavior and related brain mechanisms?

History has shown that fractioning operations between several individuals along a hierarchical chain allows diffusing responsibility between components of the chain, which has the potential to disinhibit antisocial actions. Here, we present two studies, one using fMRI (Study 1) and one using EEG (Study 2), designed to help understand how commanding or being in an intermediary position impacts the sense of agency and empathy for pain. In the age of military drones, we also explored whether commanding a human or robot agent influences these measures. This was done within a single behavioral paradigm in which participants could freely decide whether or not to send painful shocks to another participant in exchange for money. In Study 1, fMRI reveals that activation in social cognition and empathy-related brain regions was equally low when witnessing a victim receive a painful shock while participants were either commander or simple intermediary transmitting an order, compared to being the agent directly delivering the shock. In Study 2, results indicated that the sense of agency did not differ between commanders and intermediary, no matter if the executing agent was a robot or a human. However, we observed that the neural response over P3 was higher when the executing agent was a robot compared to a human. Source reconstruction of the EEG signal revealed that this effect was mediated by areas including the insula and ACC. Results are discussed regarding the interplay between the sense of agency and empathy for pain for decision-making.

Adolescents With Cancer Need Trustworthy Information and Prefer to Receive It From a Human Source Rather Than From the Internet: A Qualitative Study

Background: In pediatric cancer, the legal obligation to provide information is usually toward the parents who are the authorized signatories of the informed consent form. It is now known that aside from providing information to the parents, it is also very important to provide information to the children and adolescents themselves. The question is how the adolescents relate to this. What information do they already possess and what would they like to know? Would they wish to hear the truth in all situations and at what stage? What are their preferred sources of information?Method: A quantitative study that included in-depth interviews with 19 adolescents with cancer, aged 8.5–18, who were receiving active treatments and had been diagnosed at least 1 month previously. The interviews were guided by 15 open-ended questions.Findings: The analysis of the interviews indicated that adolescents know quite a lot about the course of their disease and the information they lack is mainly etiological. The participants reported a lack of knowledge concerning sexuality and a sense of discomfort talking about it, leaving them with open questions. They all claimed that it is important to tell the truth: “Even if the truth is difficult, it is important to tell it.” The participants reported that information can be scary, so it must be structured and adapted to the age and emotional readiness of the individual. Most of the participants prefer not to use the internet as an information resource due to the profusion of stressful and non-adapted information.Conclusion: Adolescents with cancer need trustworthy information and prefer to receive it from a human source rather than from the internet. Not telling the truth can lead them to feel fear and loneliness. The medical staff must operate in sensitive and creative ways to provide adolescents with access to information on various subjects, including sexuality, which they are ashamed to talk about, leaving them with a sense of shame and a lack of knowledge in this area.

Algorithmic or Human Source? Examining Relative Hostile Media Effect With a Transformer-Based Framework

The relative hostile media effect suggests that partisans tend to perceive the bias of slanted news differently depending on whether the news is slanted in favor of or against their sides. To explore the effect of an algorithmic vs. human source on hostile media perceptions, this study conducts a 3 (author attribution: human, algorithm, or human-assisted algorithm) x 3 (news attitude: pro-issue, neutral, or anti-issue) mixed factorial design online experiment (<em>N</em> = 511). This study uses a transformer-based adversarial network to auto-generate comparable news headlines. The framework was trained with a dataset of 364,986 news stories from 22 mainstream media outlets. The results show that the relative hostile media effect occurs when people read news headlines attributed to all types of authors. News attributed to a sole human source is perceived as more credible than news attributed to two algorithm-related sources. For anti-Trump news headlines, there exists an interaction effect between author attribution and issue partisanship while controlling for people’s prior belief in machine heuristics. The difference of hostile media perceptions between the two partisan groups was relatively larger in anti-Trump news headlines compared with pro-Trump news headlines.

Elucidating The Genetic Factors Contributing Towards Susceptibility And Severity Of Covid 19

: COVID-19 or SARS-CoV-2 or 2019-nCov is a pandemic disease that occurred in December 2019 from Wuhan, Hubei Province of China. It was first transmitted from the animal host to a human source, after which it followed human-human transmission and spread exponentially worldwide. Various countries have fallen prey to this virus, but there are certain countries or populations, which have been more affected by this than others. Moreover, the demographics of transmission and affected individuals are also variable from country-country. The purpose of this article is to highlight the non-modifiable risk factors for COVID-19 and their analysis in various populations affecting their susceptibility. Besides age, gender, and blood group, two major genetic factors associated with this disease are discussed here including the potential of IL-6, in causing chronic disease conditions and the rs1800795 G/C-174 IL-6 polymorphism in the IL-6 gene and with the potential role of ACE-2 receptor in viral transmission and pathogenicity with its protective and disease-causing variants.

Kinerja Sumber Daya Manusia di Rumah Potong Hewan (Studi Kasus RPH Kategori I dan Kategori II)

This study aims to identify the characteristics of human resources in slaughterhouses category I andcategory II, as well as to analyze the performance and efficiency of human resources in slaughterhousescategory I and category II. Location samples and respondents were determined purposively. Thevariables observed were the characteristics of my human source, my human source performance, andthe efficiency of my human source performance in category I and category II slaughterhouses. Theresults showed that the characteristics of category I and category II employees had an average highschool education, 30-40 years of age and 10-20 years of work. The performance of my human resources(work results, skills, discipline and responsibility) of each slaughterhouse has a fairly good percentage,slaughterhouse for category I (77.66-80.95%) and slaughterhouse for category II (81.68-83.59%) . Theperformance efficiency figures for the employees of the slaughterhouse category I and category II aresimilarly close to number 1 indicating that the employees’ working time is used efficiently.