a. Technology and Behavior
In this evolving research paradigm, explore aspects of how emerging technologies such as AI shape key aspects of human behavior including their intelligence and rationality alongside curiosity and attention.
b. Technology and Organizations
In this evolving research paradigm, explore aspects of how emerging technologies such as AI shape key aspects of organziation structure, design alongside various people related processes within organiztions.
a. Individual Differences in Rationality
One major challenge the empiricist view of how people make judgments and decisions is the phenomenon of individual differences. That there is a rich and often unaccounted intra and inter individual variation in both contrived as well as real world settings is a truism. However, none of the dominant empiricist paradigms such as the bounded rationality argument, the heuristics and biases program nor the ecological rationality approach account for such a variation.
In this work, I show how the heuristics and biases program lends to a paradox. The mental processes that enable people make judgments and decisions fail to explain any variation in them.
b. Directed Rationality
The notion that we humans are rational and uniquely so is a matter of intense debate. While the Neo-classical Economics makes a case for unbounded rationality, Behavioral Economics suggests that human rationality is bounded and biased. I argue that human rationality is neither unbounded nor bounded and biased, but directed.
Implicit in human behavior recapitulating the natural world is a sense of direction. In that, the individual either consciously or habitually produces a sequence of behaviors as a means to an end. Then rationality is more a question of how well an individual can meet an end from a selection of means than whether the individual possesses an all-permeating information processing capacity or a constrained and biased one.
Pure information processing models of rationality abound in literature have failed to account for variation in human rationality. Such a failure comes as no surprise since the human information processing capacity is a biological constant with few exceptions. Then what underlies the variation in a human being 's endeavor to meet an end is the intentional capacity that enables one-to direct one's behavior, to judge on whether the behavior is directed towards the end or away from it and to make affective sense of feedback upon such a judgment.
c. Nature of Intelligence
Intelligence as it applies to living beings is widely misunderstood term both in formal sciences as well as the popular media. Much of the discourse roughly qualifies it as the quality of information processing that living beings exhibit to varying extents. While we agree that intelligence qualifies cognitive functioning, we debate the variation attributed to this qualifier. Intelligence is the mental act of gathering and processing information, ubiquitous to all living beings endowed by our biology. Differences in behaviors that living beings engage are more a function of intentionality. Intentionality qualifies the purposes why someone engages in information search and processing.
a. Paradox of Experience
People make decisions all the time. Some such are important while others are not so. In other terms, some decisions are costly to reverse while others are easy to do so. Some such which are less likely to recur while others are more likely to be made again. Irrespective of the kinds of decisions, uncertainty is implicit to a set of alternatives and possible outcomes. People rely on information to overcome uncertainty and make reliable decisions.
Typically people depend on three sources of information: Experience of the self, experience of related others, and experience of unrelated others, ordered on the grounds of reliability and individual preference. However, the paradox of is that for the important decisions we make, the most preferred and reliable source of information i.e. experience of the self is either missing or non-representative.
b. Primacy of Experience
The notions of learning, memory, and experience, place humans uniquely in the scheme of life. Formal education is a social cultural invention aimed at improving these three mental processes. However, modern education emphasizes much on learning and memory, neglecting experience. From curriculum to pedagogy, the mechanics of formal education are oriented towards the goal of enhancing learning and memory.
This emphasis is misplaced, and stems from inaccurate understanding on how the three mental processes together make our minds work. Based on a rationalist account of how the mind works, we make a case for why education should shift the needle from learning and memory to experience. Such a shift would ensure that education meets the purpose it is set out to achieve-enable people lead a life of fulfillment.
c. Paradox of Desire
That we desire and act to try and realize what we want is a truism. Desires are a class of motivations that propel people's cognitive mechanisms to search and process information to produce actions that help them move towards fulfillment. However, desires come with heightened motivational energies that contract the information search and processing mechanisms. This narrowing in cognitive functioning thins the choice set from which an individual could choose to act, thereby effecting the likelihood of progressing towards realization of the desired outcomes. The wedge between target outcomes and actions that individual responds with lends to negative affective states such as anxiety which further fuel the arousal levels further narrowing the cognitive functioning-a phenomenon colloquially known as choking under pressure. Put together, desires lend to paradoxical effects on cognitive functioning-the more one desires particular outcomes, the more elusive they become. These paradoxical effects are more profuse in the condition where the contexts in which motivations are induced are novel to the individual.
a. Norm Perception
Perception is the fundamental sense making mechanism by which people make meaning of any information including those of norms, i.e., the unstated knowledge structures that govern people's behavioral regularities in a social context such as standing in a queue, defecating in the open among others. Norm perception leads to individual judgment on whether to conform to a particular behavioral regulatory or deviate from it.
Literature suggests that norm conformity is either entirely a function of personal attitudes or those of the referent social group. However, I argue that compliance is more a dynamic between personal and perceived societal attitudes. Perception of congruence or lack thereof determines the extent to which an individual conforms to a particular norm.
For instance, I am more likely to cut the queue when both my personal attitudes as well as perceived societal attitudes orient me to value my time than that of other's.
The dynamic between personal and perceived societal attitudes informs behavioral change interventions aimed at discontinuing behaviors disadvantageous to people or their social worlds.
a. Transference Games
People come in different sizes, shapes, and preferences. Particularly, their preferences towards fellow beings formally known as 'other-regarding preferences' come in three sizes: fairness, unfairness, and altruism. These three kinds of other-regarding preferences shape human social experience.
A preference for fairness usually translates to equitable interactions, while preference for unfairness and altruism lend to inequitable ones. Although, both lend to inequitable interactions, unfairness is usually associated with negative externalities while altruism is perceived to reap benefits for the interaction. Much of the work in empirical sciences has delved into how these preferences shape dyadic interactions i.e., interactions that are shaped by any two of the three preferences at a time. However, surprisingly not much is known of how the three kinds of preferences interact in tandem.
Transference games help us understand triadic interactions. A typical transference game requires three agents with similar resources to engage in cyclical interactions. While dyads involve mutual give and take i.e. a direct reciprocity, triadic interactions involve a via give and take mechanism i.e. indirect from of reciprocity. This indirect form of reciprocity is known as transference.
Initial set of simulations suggest that a transference interaction is Pareto optimal and Nash equilibrium only when all the three agents exhibit preference for unfairness. The interaction is in a disequilibrium for any other combination of preferences.