What Happens When Robots Punish? Evaluating Human Task Performance During Robot-Initiated Punishment

This article examines how people respond to robot-administered verbal and physical punishments. Human participants were tasked with sorting colored chips under time pressure and were punished by a robot when they made mistakes, such as inaccurate sorting or sorting too slowly. Participants were either punished verbally by being told to stop sorting for a fixed time, or physically, by restraining their ability to sort with an in-house crafted robotic exoskeleton. Either a human experimenter or the robot exoskeleton administered punishments, with participant task performance and subjective perceptions of their interaction with the robot recorded. The results indicate that participants made more mistakes on the task when under the threat of robot-administered punishment. Participants also tended to comply with robot-administered punishments at a lesser rate than human-administered punishments, which suggests that humans may not afford a robot the social authority to administer punishments. This study also contributes to our understanding of compliance with a robot and whether people accept a robot’s authority to punish. The results may influence the design of robots placed in authoritative roles and promote discussion of the ethical ramifications of robot-administered punishment.

A Non-Paternalistic Model of Research Ethics and Oversight

This chapter argues that prospective review of research before bodies of diverse representation should not be understood as a paternalistic interference in the private interactions between researchers and participants. Instead, it is a mechanism for resolving a set of coordination problems that threaten the integrity of research. Its proper role is to provide credible social assurance that the research enterprise constitutes a voluntary scheme of cooperation through which diverse stakeholders can contribute to the common good without being subject to the arbitrary exercise of social authority including antipathy, abuse, coercion, domination, exploitation, or other forms of harmful, unfair, or disrespectful treatment. The limitations of prospective review are discussed, including the need for mechanisms that better address incentives for a wider range of stakeholders whose decisions shape the research agenda.

Christian Interest Groups in A Religiously Changing United Kingdom: Issues, Strategies, Influence

Christianity is in long-term decline in the United Kingdom, with decreasing levels of affiliation, practice, belief, and social authority. At the same time, however, Britain's churches and the faith they represent remain deeply embedded within culture and society. This paper offers the most comprehensive analysis to date of how the “sector” of UK Christian interest groups—that is, organizations with a Christian character that seek to influence government policy—operates within this changing socio-religious context. Based on survey and interview data, it examines the extent of Christian interest group activity in the UK, before assessing their issue agendas, lobbying strategies, and influence. The results indicate that the activities of Christian interest groups have been affected by decline, but also by Christianity's continued strengths within society. These findings provide a basis for deeper investigation of Christianity's political influence in the UK, and will also have implications beyond this case.

Reactance to Social Authority in a Sugar Reduction Informational Video: Web-Based Randomized Controlled Trial of 4013 Participants

Background Short and animated story-based (SAS) videos can be an effective strategy for promoting health messages. However, health promotion strategies often motivate the rejection of health messages, a phenomenon known as reactance. In this study, we examine whether the child narrator of a SAS video (perceived as nonthreatening, with low social authority) minimizes reactance to a health message about the consumption of added sugars. Objective This study aims to determine whether our SAS intervention video attenuates reactance to the sugar message when compared with a content placebo video (a health message about sunscreen) and a placebo video (a nonhealth message about earthquakes) and determine if the child narrator is more effective at reducing reactance to the sugar message when compared with the mother narrator (equivalent social authority to target audience) or family physician narrator (high social authority) of the same SAS video. Methods This is a web-based randomized controlled trial comparing an intervention video about sugar reduction narrated by a child, the child’s mother, or the family physician with a content placebo video about sunscreen use and a placebo video about earthquakes. The primary end points are differences in the antecedents to reactance (proneness to reactance, threat level of the message), its components (anger and negative cognition), and outcomes (source appraisal and attitude). We performed analysis of variance on data collected (N=4013) from participants aged 18 to 59 years who speak English and reside in the United Kingdom. Results Between December 9 and December 11, 2020, we recruited 38.62% (1550/4013) men, 60.85% (2442/4013) women, and 0.52% (21/4013) others for our study. We found a strong causal relationship between the persuasiveness of the content promoted by the videos and the components of reactance. Compared with the placebo (mean 1.56, SD 0.63) and content placebo (mean 1.76, SD 0.69) videos, the intervention videos (mean 1.99, SD 0.83) aroused higher levels of reactance to the message content (P<.001). We found no evidence that the child narrator (mean 1.99, SD 0.87) attenuated reactance to the sugar reduction message when compared with the physician (mean 1.95, SD 0.79; P=.77) and mother (mean 2.03, SD 0.83; P=.93). In addition, the physician was perceived as more qualified, reliable, and having more expertise than the child (P<.001) and mother (P<.001) narrators. Conclusions Although children may be perceived as nonthreatening messengers, we found no evidence that a child narrator attenuated reactance to a SAS video about sugar consumption when compared with a physician. Furthermore, our intervention videos, with well-intended goals toward audience health awareness, aroused higher levels of reactance when compared with the placebo videos. Our results highlight the challenges in developing effective interventions to promote persuasive health messages. Trial Registration German Clinical Trials Registry DRKS00022340; https://tinyurl.com/mr8dfena International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID) RR2-10.2196/25343

Managing A Discursive Journey for Classroom Inquiry: Examination of a Teacher’s Discursive Moves

This study presents an analysis of teacher discursive moves (TDMs) that aid students in altering their thinking and talking systems. The participants were a science who handled the immersion inquiry activities. The primary data source was the video recorded in the classroom. This video-based data was analyzed through systematic observation in two phases comprising coding and counting to reveal the mechanics of the discursive journey. Three assertions were made for the dynamics of the discursive journey. First, the teacher enacted a wide range of TDMs incorporating dialogically/monologically oriented, simplified (observe-compare-predict), and rather sophisticated moves (challenging). The challenging moves were the most featured among all analytical TDMs. Second, once higher-order categories were composed by collapsing subcategories of the displayed TDMs, the communicating-framing moves were the most prominent performed moves. Lastly, the teacher created an argumentative atmosphere in which the students had the right to evaluate and judge their classmates and teacher's utterances that modified the epistemic and social authority of the discursive journey. Finally, educational recommendations are offered in the context of teachers noticing the mechanics and dynamics of the discourse journey.

From Medicine to Health: The Proliferation and Diversification of Cultural Authority

In his account of the medical profession’s ascent, Paul Starr drew a distinction between the social authority of physicians and the cultural authority of medicine—between doctors’ capacity to direct others’ behavior and the ability of medical institutions and discourses to shape meanings of illness, health, wellness, and treatment. Subsequently, scholars have reflected on the social-structural transformations challenging physicians’ social authority but neglected shifts in cultural authority. Focusing on the United States, we find a proliferation and diversification of cultural authority, reflecting a partial movement from the domain of medicine into new terrains of health. This shift is apparent in the resurgence of alternative healing, the advent of new forms of self-care and self-monitoring, the rise of health social movements, and the spread of health information online. We advance a research agenda to understand how the mechanisms and dynamics of cultural authority shape contests to speak in the name of health.

Collection, space and display: a case-study in the symbolic materiality of print and manuscript cultures in seventeenth-century Ireland

On the basis of a case-study centred on the experience of Sir John Perceval (d.1686) of north Cork, it is argued that books and their spatial location constituted elements within a broader decorative ensemble expressive of cultural hegemony. Moreover, Perceval’s intellectually-diverse world of print is contrasted with the marginalised and geographically-adjacent sphere of Gaelic script as embodied by the poet and scribe Eoghan Ó Caoimh (d.1726). Notwithstanding the dynamic ideological significance of a text such as Keating’s Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, its first appearance in print in a 1723 English translation, is emblematic of the cultural and social authority of early modern print in a colonial milieu. Reference is made to the library of James Butler (d.1688), first duke of Ormond, and the Parisian book purchases of Francis FitzMaurice (d.1818) and his wife Anastasia (d.1799), third earl and countess of Kerry, by way of illustration of print’s uncontested dominance among elite Irish readers and patrons of the trade in books.

Challenging religious hegemony

This work applies the theoretical framework of the religious marketplace to examine the religious landscape of Lithuania as a hegemonic field where the dominant Catholicism is regarded as an integral part of the national identity. The research interest aims at exploring the Ethno-Pagan movement Romuva and its strategies to counteract the social authority of the Catholic Church and build legitimacy through maximization of cultural capital. I advance the hypothesis that the ritualized form of the celebration of the spring holiday Jorė could be regarded as an attempt to construct an alternative, counterhegemonic narrative of identity, which portrays a worldview where the ethnical, cultural, natural and political aspects of Lithuanian reality come together to form a comprehensive unity under the guidance of the Ethno-Pagan religion.

The Great Demarcation Between Public and Private

One of the major consequences of the Revolution was a clarification of the demarcation between private and public. In the ancien régime of the colonial period, the distinction between private and public had often been blurred. Social authority seemed to be a prerequisite to political authority, which enabled private individuals to conduct public affairs as if they were their own private business. The state was weak and used its legal authority to entice or compel private individuals to undertake things on behalf of the public. This was seen most clearly in the use of the corporation. All this was changed by the Revolution. Within a few years following the Declaration of Independence, the relation between state and society, pubic and private, including the nature of the corporation, had been transformed.

Developing an Expert Community and Defining its Role in the Politics and Decision-Making of a World Heritage City: The Experience of Bamberg

This article investigates the role of expertise and the expert community through local politics and decision-making in a World Heritage City. The expert public community and its inclusion in decision-making are important factors influencing the successful coordination of public interests. The authors demonstrate how developing forms of public governance change the local expert community and transform its structure and core principles, leading to more open and democratic expertise. Using the case study of local urban politics, the authors illustrate that the social authority of expert knowledge and its influence on decision-making is increasingly dependent on public opinion and the diversification of the structures of expert communities. The latter implies, in particular, the inclusion of citizens who do not have formal expert status but who have sufficient experience and authority to influence urban policy. Using the example of the World Heritage City, the authors consider cases where the harmonization of the interests of the participants of urban policies requires an unusual approach from the public administration, taking into account its obligation to follow formal procedures and regulations and its need to ensure greater involvement of citizens in the decision-making process. Our research showed that, in some situations, these recommendations were more authoritative and earned a higher degree of trust from the citizens than recommendations from people with formal expert status. This trend is in line with larger changes in public administration, which is becoming more adaptive, complex, polycentric, and oriented towards productive cooperation. Expert communities are becoming more fragmentary due to the active involvement of actors who, by their socio-professional status, are not formal experts but have significant experience and social influence, especially in the local community.