Measuring the Welfare Effects of Shame and Pride

Public recognition is frequently used to motivate desirable behavior, yet its welfare effects—such as costs of shame or gains from pride— are rarely measured. We develop a portable empirical methodology for measuring and monetizing social image utility, and we deploy it in experiments on exercise and charitable behavior. In all experiments, public recognition motivates desirable behavior but creates highly unequal image payoffs. High-performing individuals enjoy significant utility gains, while low-performing individuals incur significant utility losses. We estimate structural models of social signaling, and we use the models to explore the social efficiency of public recognition policies. (JEL C93, D64, D82, D91)

Student Teachers’ Sustainable Behavior

This study contributes to the understanding of student teachers’ sustainable behaviors. (Future) teachers are perceived as models of social learning as they model desirable behavior, attitudes, values, and emotions while living and demonstrating a pro-sustainable lifestyle. Therefore, it is essential to understand which personal variables, aptitudes, and psychological benefits predispose them towards a pro-sustainable lifestyle. This study’s intent was to consider components that can affect sustainable actions such as psychological tendencies (e.g., attitudes, motives, beliefs, values, norms) and consequences (e.g., well-being or happiness) associated with sustainable actions. This study’s main objective was to test the sustainable behavior model on a sample of student teachers. A total of 496 student teachers participated in the study. The results analyzed by SEM indicate that student teachers’ sustainable behavior is directly predicted by their intention to act, which is both positively and significantly influenced by indignation and affinity towards diversity. Additionally, sustainable behaviors slightly (but statistically significantly) predict the self-assessment of happiness. These findings contribute to a better general understanding of sustainable behaviors’ antecedents and repercussion variables, especially within a student teacher population.

Motivated by default - How nudges facilitate people to act in line with their motivation

Nudges are defined as small adjustments in the choice architecture that help people perform desirable behavior. How nudges interact with individuals’ motivation has not been studied empirically. We conducted three studies with different types of defaults in three different behavioral domains and investigated how defaults and different types of motivation affect choice outcomes. In Study 1, we investigated the effectiveness of a default to stimulate healthy eating choices implemented in a hypothetical online supermarket setting. In Study 2, we used a scenario in which participants could choose from a list of green amenities (either preselected or not). In Study 3, we asked participants if they wanted to participate in a basic or longer version of our questionnaire, with the longer version option set as the default in the nudge condition. Across three studies we show that defaults are effective in promoting desirable behavior, and that goal strivings and autonomous motivation have additional positive main effects. We did not find evidence that controlled motivation did affect behavioral outcomes. Exploratory analyses revealed that amotivation negatively affected behavior, but the measure had poor reliability. No significant interaction effects were observed. Together, these studies imply that both defaults and motivation have main effects on behavior, such that the default sets the anchor from which people can adjust according to the type and strength of their motivation. Implications for the practice and ethics of nudging are discussed.

COVID Infodemic is turning public into Covidiots: What can be done?

An unprecedented pandemic of Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID 19) has overwhelmed the health systems of countries across the world. The government and other scientific bodies are providing authentic information to educate the public and promote desirable behavior to prevent new infections and reduce deaths. COVID-19 pandemic is the first in human history in which social media and new digital technologies are being used as key tools to inform the public. However, there is a lot of misinformation also being spread through these channels. Misinformation is false, inaccurate, or misleading information that is communicated regardless of an intention to deceive. Access to social media has improved substantially, which has contributed to spread of misinformation. Today, anybody can write anything on social media such as Twitter, WhatsApp, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube etc without any evidence or falsely attribute the wrong information to well-known experts or renowned institutions. They may be doing it to support their own biases or malign the government purposefully or innocently without checking authenticity. The number of mentions in media for Ebola were 11.1 million, for MERS, 23.2 million, HIV, 40 million, SARS, 56.2 million and COVID19 it has crossed 1.1 billion.3. A google search for COVID 19 on 08 June 2021 gave 5340 million hits compared to 216 million for a much older disease HIV/AIDS. This editorial is an attempt to help spot the false information and deal with it.

The Value of Fathering for Incarcerated Offenders: Implementing the “Parents as Teachers” Curriculum in Greene County, Missouri

Research literature demonstrates the positive contributions of a nurturing father in the lives of young people as well as the reduction of recidivism for active fathers. The current study provides support for this model by highlighting the need for programming that enhances the relationship between incarcerated fathers and their children during their period of absence and while transitioning back into society and their family roles. The authors observed a parenting education program for incarcerated fathers twice weekly for a period of twelve weeks. The research noted three promising themes in the programming which could be expanded and implemented in other facilities. Fathers sought to improve their capacity to engage in “intentional conversations,” where they learned about modeling desirable behavior, being honest, and avoiding giving children mixed messages. Fathers also began the uncomfortable process of unpacking their own childhoods and overcoming poor parental models as they realized that “parenting makes a difference.” Through the program, fathers were encouraged to develop a “toolkit” of more positive parenting responsibilities and responses. Finally, fathers were introduced to the idea of “healthy relationships,” including creating strong boundaries and new types of relationship knowledge.

A Practice-Oriented Bifurcation Analysis for Pulse Energy Converters. Part 5: A View Towards the Future

The paper concludes the series of the research works on the interdisciplinary analytical approach (the so-called bifurcation-fractal analytics) to forecast the dynamics of pulse systems on the basis of modified bifurcation diagrams. These diagrams are intended to integrate incompatible-in-traditional-spaces images (mainly transients from the phase space and evolution pictures from the parametric space) in order to analyze whether the running transient converges towards the domain of a desirable behavior taking into account its qualitative and quantitative characteristics. The interdisciplinary context of the analytics appears because the novel mathematical images need physical meaning and further this research should be continued for proposing the expedient engineering decision. Here, the advantages to forecast the evolutionary tendencies in different scales of the modified bifurcation diagrams are illustrated by computer-based simulations. Translations of the mathematical images into their physical implementations follow the principle of the bifurcation poker and the principle of the spatial nonuniformity. The experimental results to verify these principles are presented. Variants of engineering proposals are commented in comparison with traditional abilities of the small-signal design. The results systematized in the paper confirm that fundamental obstacles to forecast abnormal evolutionary changes in the dynamics of pulse energy converters are absent. Prospects of the outcome from the experience accumulated in engineering to similar problem statements independently of a pulse system nature are finally discussed. And the regulatory hypothesis on local climate dynamics is considered in this connection. This discussion is quite suitable here because a local climate system can be described as a converter of the solar energy under a specific pulse control realized by the astronomic forcing and there are circumstances, in which electrotechnical simulations can remain a unique way to accelerate the research on prerequisites and sequels of the forthcoming climate changes. Then the bifurcation-fractal analytics provides an initial theoretical foundation to this research.

Extortion, intuition, and the dark side of reciprocity

Extortion occurs when one person uses some combination of threats and promises to extract an unfair share of benefits from another. Although extortion is a pervasive feature of human interaction, it has received relatively little attention in psychological research. To this end, we begin by observing that extortion is structured quite similarly to far better-studied “reciprocal” social behaviors, such as conditional cooperation and retributive punishment. All of these strategies are designed to elicit some desirable behavior from a social partner, and do so by constructing conditional incentives; the main difference is that the desired behavioral response is an unfair or unjust allocation of resources during extortion, whereas it is often a fair or just distribution of resources for reciprocal cooperation and punishment. Thus, we conjecture, a common set of psychological mechanisms may render these strategies successful. We know from prior work that prosocial forms of reciprocity often work best when implemented inflexibly and intuitively, rather than deliberatively. This both affords long-term commitment to the reciprocal strategy, and also signals this commitment to social partners. We argue that, for the same reasons, extortion is likely to depend largely upon inflexible, intuitive psychological processes. Several existing lines of circumstantial evidence support this conjecture.

Reinforcement Learning in Sparse-Reward Environments with Hindsight Policy Gradients

A reinforcement learning agent that needs to pursue different goals across episodes requires a goal-conditional policy. In addition to their potential to generalize desirable behavior to unseen goals, such policies may also enable higher-level planning based on subgoals. In sparse-reward environments, the capacity to exploit information about the degree to which an arbitrary goal has been achieved while another goal was intended appears crucial to enabling sample efficient learning. However, reinforcement learning agents have only recently been endowed with such capacity for hindsight. In this letter, we demonstrate how hindsight can be introduced to policy gradient methods, generalizing this idea to a broad class of successful algorithms. Our experiments on a diverse selection of sparse-reward environments show that hindsight leads to a remarkable in-crease in sample efficiency.

Rewarding behavior with a sweet food strengthens its valuation

Sweet foods are commonly used as rewards for desirable behavior, specifically among children. This study examines whether such practice may contribute to reinforce the valuation of these foods. Two experiments were conducted, one with children, the other with rats. The first study, conducted with first graders (n = 214), shows that children who receive a food reward for performing a cognitive task subsequently value the food more compared to a control group who received the same food without performing any task. The second study, conducted on rats (n = 64), shows that rewarding with food also translates into higher calorie intake over a 24-hour period. These results suggest that the common practice of rewarding children with calorie-dense sweet foods is a plausible contributing factor to obesity and might therefore be ill advised.

HIV Infection as a Bio-Psycho-Social Phenomenon: Constraints and Opportunities for an Effective Response to the Epidemic

The article analyzes modern approaches to combatting the HIV epidemic including the potential and shortcomings of the nosocentric model, as well as the basic tools that encourage desirable behavior for the prevention and treatment of disease. Study of pre-contact prevention of HIV and COVID-19 infection among patients already infected with HIV shows that there is no direct relationship between awareness and patterns of preventive behavior. Potential ways to update the information available about the disease by making individuals aware of the risk of infection due to communication are examined. The author points out a lack of differentiation in communication strategies and underemphas is on informing people. The ideas of specialists about a direct relationship between information and the formation of desirable behavior are analyzed with regard to HIV infection. The opportunity to correct these ideas in the process of training specialists is explored, and the potential for attracting specialists by applying technologies that prevent emotional burnout is shown. The feasibility of an interdisciplinary patient-centered approach to providing medical care for HIV infection is confirmed. Factors that prevent the introduction of communication-based technologies in actual clinical practice are analyzed as are the trend toward a simplified guardianship approach to solving problems in the prevention of infection and the predominant use of monologue-based directive forms of communication. The formation of desirable behavior for prevention of HIV infection, commitment to maintaining health, and compliance with a dispensary’s regime for observation and treatment of HIV infection are considered as a two-way process of interaction in a system that embraces both the specialist and the patient.