Category: Social-Technical
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Nested hierarchies in skills – importance of basic education
In many careers, a person must learn foundational skills before advancing deeper into their profession. Computer programmers need a solid foundation in basic mathematics; nurses must gain clinical experience and specialized training to become nurse practitioners; a negotiator’s ability to persuade depends on solid communication and active-listening skills. A recent paper published in Nature Human Behaviour mapped the dependency…
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7 communication reasons organizations do not change
“The seven communication reasons organizations do not change“ Results of this study point to the limitations of management and impersonal communication. Change is a messy business, and transformational change will not happen unless management is willing to tolerate the ambiguity and the sense that emerges in communication. Results also point to the importance of communication…
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Perfectionism – anxiety symptoms
“Personality organization and anxiety symptoms: Investigating the mediation of perfectionism“ Personality functioning has increasing significance in the assessment of mental health and mental disorders. Otto Kernberg’s model of personality organization is an extensively applied, theoretically grounded approach to categorizing the severity of personality impairment based on intrapsychic and interpersonal functioning. This study aimed to investigate…
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The Cognitive Life of Maps
The “mapness of maps”—how maps live in interaction with their users, and what this tells us about what they are and how they work.Available as PDF for download. In a sense, maps are temporarily alive for those who design, draw, and use them. They have, for the moment, a cognitive life. To grapple with what…
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Contextualizing predictive minds
“Contextualizing predictive minds” discusses how the structure of human memory seems to be optimized for efficient prediction, planning, and behavior. We propose that these capacities rely on a tripartite structure of memory that includes concepts, events, and contexts—three layers that constitute the mental world model. We suggest that the mechanism that critically increases adaptivity and…
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The primacy of doubt
“The Primacy of Doubt“, By Tim Palmer discusses topics from climate change to quantum physics, how the science of uncertainty can help predict and understand our chaotic world. Tim Palmer brings us his first foray into popular science writing with a carefully considered and often expert exposition on a vast range of subjects. The credo…
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Beyond the AHA!
“Going beyond the AHA! moment: insight discovery for transdisciplinary research and learning“ The concept of ‘insight discovery’ is developed as a key competence for transdisciplinary research and learning in this paper. To address complex societal and environmental problems facing the world today, a particular expertise that can identify new connections between diverse knowledge fields is…
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Team science expertise & reflective-reflexive design method
“A framework for developing team science expertise using a reflective-reflexive design method (R2DM)“ Effective integration and implementation of knowledge in research are dependent on team science expertise grounded in collaboration principles and techniques that advance individual and group scientific agendas. The Science of Team Science provides evidence-based research and best practices that strive to develop…
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Thinking more or thinking differently?
“Thinking more or thinking differently? Using drift-diffusion modeling to illuminate why accuracy prompts decrease misinformation sharing“ Recent experiments have found that prompting people to think about accuracy reduces misinformation sharing intentions. The process by which this effect operates, however, remains unclear. Do accuracy prompts cause people to “stop and think,” increasing deliberation? Or do they…
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Cognitive Biases in Fact-Checking and Their Countermeasures
“Cognitive Biases in Fact-Checking and Their Countermeasures: A Review“ Types of user tasks that may involve cognitive biases: Task Description Causal Attribution Tasks involving an assessment of causality. Decision Tasks involving the selection of one over several alternative options. Estimation Tasks where people are asked to assess the value of a quantity. Hypothesis Assessment Tasks…
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A History of Bodies, Brains, and Minds
We’re being spoiled by MIT Press Open Access. Not just did we just receive access to the great title “From Sensing to Sentience” , but also “A History of Bodies, Brains, and Minds: The Evolution of Life and Consciousness” became available for download. A panoramic view of the evolution of life on our planet, from…
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From Sensing to Sentience: How Feeling Emerges from the Brain
Open access book, download available @ MIT Press A new theory of Neurobiological Emergentism that explains how sentience emerges from the brain. Sentience is the feeling aspect of consciousness. In From Sensing to Sentience, Todd Feinberg develops a new theory called Neurobiological Emergentism (NBE) that integrates biological, neurobiological, evolutionary, and philosophical perspectives to explain how sentience naturally emerges from the brain. Emergent…
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AI tool helps people with opposing views find common ground
A large language model can help groups to reach a consensus by producing statements that are clearer and fairer than those written by humans. A chatbot-like tool powered by artificial intelligence (AI) can help people with differing views to find areas of agreement, an experiment with online discussion groups has shown. The model, developed by…
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The illusion of information adequacy
“The illusion of information adequacy““The science behind why people think they’re right when they’re actually wrong“ You don’t know what you don’t know. –Socrates How individuals navigate perspectives and attitudes that diverge from their own affects an array of interpersonal outcomes from the health of marriages to the unfolding of international conflicts. The finesse with…
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Narrative as active inference
“Narrative as active inference: an integrative account of cognitive and social functions in adaptation“:While the ubiquity and importance of narratives for human adaptation is widely recognized, there is no integrative framework for understanding the roles of narrative in human adaptation. Research has identified several cognitive and social functions of narratives that are conducive to well-being…
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Belief-Consistent Information Processing for a Set of Biases
“Toward Parsimony in Bias Research: A Proposed Common Framework of Belief-Consistent Information Processing for a Set of Biases“ The authors argue that many different biases, such as the bias blind spot, hostile media bias, egocentric/ethnocentric bias, and outcome bias, can be traced back to the combination of a fundamental prior belief and humans’ tendency toward…
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Learning by thinking
Learning by thinking in natural and artificial minds:Canonical cases of learning involve novel observations external to the mind, but learning can also occur through mental processes such as explaining to oneself, mental simulation, analogical comparison, and reasoning. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) reveal that such learning is not restricted to human minds: artificial minds…
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Better stories <equals> better solutions
Become a Better Problem Solver by Telling Better Stories is a great article from Arnaud Chevallier, Albrecht Enders, and Jean-Louis Barsoux on MIT SMR. One of the biggest obstacles to effective decision-making is failure to define the problem well. Invoking the power of narrative and a simple story structure can help ensure that teams are…
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Risk and Uncertainty
The core of this post comes from “How do smart people make smart decisions?” by Gerd Gigerenzer, delivered at TEDxNorrköping – available at https://youtube.com/watch?v=-Lg7G8TMe_A and a transcript available . However, there are more sources which lead to this insights, like e.g.: RISK VS UNCERTAINTY RISK: How should we make decisions when all relevant alternatives, consequences,…
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How Collaboration Breaks Down
Simon DeDeo and many other authors describe in this chapter how humans may be “super-cooperators,” but no collaboration lasts forever. This chapter summarizes the outcome of an interdisciplinary collaboration between political, social, economic, and cognitive scientists into the question of collaboration collapse. It locates the breakdown of collaboration downstream from the failure to align on…
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Resilience may have downsides…
Traditionally, resilience has been viewed as a general positive adaptation to stressors. However, the hallmark of resilience – returning to the previous state following a perturbation – may also have severe downsides, which are often overlooked. Specifically, it may be unrealistic to return to the previous state or resilience may cause a person to become…
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practical wisdom in complex system management
Leonie Hallo et al. published the research “Investigating practical wisdom in complex system management: What is it and how do we get more?“ Systems are now extremely complex with the continuous involvement of multiple stakeholders and rapidly advancing technology, and a new way of viewing high-performance system management and decision-making is needed.This paper considers the…
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How to do strategic foresight
“Foresight” is on the rise. What was a discipline restricted to a few people decades ago has become very popular. That’s good news – a wider use of foresight can have a number of benefits, as this guide explains. However, along with that popularity, the expectations about the scope of foresight have also grown. We…
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I Might As Well Be Happy
The Korean best-seller If I’m Going to Live to One Hundred, I Might As Well Be Happy, is a “comforting, insightful, and surprisingly hilarious collection of life lessons” from retired psychiatrist and essayist Rhee Kun Hoo (이근후 1935-). He offers the wisdom he’s learned along the way on everything from forgiveness and regret to perseverance, letting…
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