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Influence of cognitive biases on the demand in the private housing sector
No full textThere are many problems in the housing market. To address the need for housing, it is important to know what factors influence home buyers. It is therefore important to look into the decision-making process of homebuyers and how it can influence and perhaps put pressure on housing demand. This thesis focuses on behavioural economic aspects, namely three cognitive biases, anchoring bias, framing bias and herd behaviour, and their effect on housing preferences. A survey was prepared to collect the necessary data. To analyse this effect, a quantitative approach is used with and without demographic and social-economic characteristics as control variables. The results show that only anchoring bias has an increasing effect on housing preferences, and hence demand in the private housing sector. However, this effect is significant only with the addition of the control variables. This contradicts previous behavioural economic theories that speak of a uniform and constant effect of cognitive biases
Implementation of ‘self-organization’ in Scrum teams: easier said than done
No full textScrum may seem simple and practical at first, but when it comes to actually working in a self-organizing way, it often proves easier said than done. This research explores how self-organization is being implemented in Scrum teams at a large financial organization in the Netherlands. Since literature on this topic is still quite limited, an exploratory case study was done. In total, eleven employees from the department Schade & Inkomen of Nationale Nederlanden were interviewed. Sensitizing concepts were used to guide the data collection, based on different literature streams related to self-organization, structure in large organizations, and organizational change.
The findings show that introducing Scrum roles and routines alone was not enough to fully enable self-organizing behavior within the teams. Teams were still influenced by traditional ways of working, and conditions like limited coaching, unclear leadership involvement, and low psychological safety made it harder to develop autonomy. At the same time, teams showed small signs of adaptation. Some teams blocked time for retrospectives or made their own agreements with other teams or managers. These kinds of local efforts reflect a deeper wish for self-organization. This informal way of shaping the work environment connects to the idea of implicit self-design, where team members try to create space for self-organization even when the wider organization does not fully support it.
This study gives insight into what helps or hinders self-organization in Scrum teams in practice and shows that change can happen on a small scale, even when the broader organizational context stays more or less the same
‘En Zijn blik schoot door mijn ziel’: Christelijke beeldspraak rond trauma, blik en kruisdood in Vlaamse WOI-literatuur – een analyse van Longinus (1934) van Franz De Backer.
No full textDeze scriptie onderzoekt hoe christelijke beeldspraak wordt ingezet om oorlogstrauma te representeren in Longinus (1934), een Vlaamse roman van Franz De Backer die zich afspeelt tegen de achtergrond van de Eerste Wereldoorlog. De roman verweeft autobiografische oorlogservaringen met religieuze elementen, met name de kruisiging van Christus en de legende van Longinus – de centurio die de zijde van Jezus doorboorde. De analyse hanteert een kwalitatieve, narratieve methode en bestudeert de motieven van de blik en kruisdood als religieuze symbolen en literaire strategieën om trauma te verbeelden. Vanuit trauma- en religiewetenschappelijke theorieën onderzoekt deze studie hoe religieuze beeldspraak bijdraagt aan de narratieve verwerking van traumatische ervaringen, en hoe deze symboliek woorden geeft aan thema’s als schuld, lijden en verlangen naar verlossing
ARS IMITATUR SUPERNATURAM The Relation Between Trecento Concepts of Art and Nature in Commentaries on Giotto
No full textThe character of the poet Giovanni Boccaccio, deeply immersed in a dream, is wandering through deserted places when he encounters a woman, who leads him to a castle. She gives him the option to pass through either a small door, which promises virtue, or a large door, which promises wealth and earthly glory. After rashly choosing the latter option, he enters a hall of gold, blue and other colours, where many personifications of deceivable earthly triumph are depicted, from Averroes to Tristan. No one, the poet believes, was ever able to depict this multiplicity of figures as described in this imaginary castle with such ingegno, with the sole exception of Giotto: only for him, part of Natura is unconcealed, as he resembles her.
However, Boccaccio does not explain exactly how Giotto resembles her in this part of the Amorosa Visione. He either seems to suggest that Nature did not conceal from Giotto a part of herself in the very act by which she "seals".2 This implies that Giotto was granted a special artistic ability, almost as if Nature herself had impressed her mark upon him, allowing him to resemble her truthfully in making his art. Or Giotto is suggested to be an active participant in capturing Nature – his artistic genius allows him to "seal" or "imprint" Nature in his paintings. It would suggest that he does not merely imitate Nature but rather confirms or solidifies her truth through his work. In his monumental Decamerone, he seems to confirm the latter interpretation:
“[…] l’altro, il cui nome fu Giotto, ebbe uno ingegno di tanta eccelenza, che niuna cosa dá la natura, madre di tutte le cose ed operatrice col continuo girar de’cieli, che egli con lo stile e con la penna e col pennello non dipignesse sí simile a quella, che non simile, anzi piú tosto dessa paresse, in tanto che molte volte nelle cose da lui fatte si truova che il visivo senso degli uomini vi prese errore, quello credende esser vero che era dipinto.” 3
Here Boccaccio provides a more efficient and empirical, but less particularized impression of the manner in which he perceives the works of the painter. Giotto, he says, had ingegno of such excellence, that it enabled him to depict with stylus, pen and brush anything that Natura presented to him, to the point of deceiving man’s visual senses, which would take the thing depicted for the thing itself. Boccaccio was not alone in praising Giotto for his supposed ability to imitate nature; other poets and historians referenced him in various contexts in this regard as well.4 How did they relate the artist to Nature while praising his ability to imitate her? And what specific abilities did they attribute to Giotto in recognizing his ability of this imitation? These questions are closely interconnected: the first defines the perceived ontological relationship between the artist and Nature, the second explores how Giotto was believed to possess knowledge of Nature. Michael Baxandall has laid a strong foundation on the humanist writing on Giotto, in Giotto and the Orators, but almost no scholar has provided such depth since. Monographs revolve around the paintings themselves; clues on their time provided their patronage, style and influence. By centralizing the writers in their intellectual context, we aim to more directly approach the perception of Giotto’s art during his time.
Boccaccio does not refer to any particular work of art by Giotto – let alone one in the real world – to both exemplify the painter’s practice and to animate the poet’s experience. Let us then seek to fill this gap and illustrate his point more concretely by examining a real work that exemplifies the connection between the conception of a painting and the way it is experienced. Throughout Italy, Giotto adorned churches with works of gold, blue and colour, presenting a multitude of figures that narrate the lives of saints, from their humble, earthly beginnings to their heavenly glory. The remarkable clarity and naturalism of these works must have been so striking as to inspire Boccaccio’s uniquely personal and specific praise. In the Stigmatization of Saint Francis (fig. 1), for example, we are able retrace these qualities on the saint, who walked the same earth as a monk not even a century before the completion of the panel. The figure, kneeling on the ground, is rendered with strong, harsh facial features, pale skin and slender fingers; he is shaped with a consistent weight and broad tonal range to indicate the solidity of his body underneath the graceful folds of his cloak. We thus realize the source for Boccaccio’s praise when we approach the Stigmatization from a standpoint that recognizes its representational adequacy. In doing this, we express the manner in which we are aware of the relation between the representation of human figures on panel and how they appear to us in the real world.5
Comparing the Stigmatization to a panel of the same subject by the Master of San Francesco Bardi (fig. 2) from half a century earlier, we observe only a few of the qualities we associated with Giotto’s work. Here the figure is represented with harsh but weak facial features, golden skin and stiff hands; the folds of his cloak seem rigid and schematized, making the body underneath stylized and construed. The figure appears flat and assembled from distinct parts, as if each visible plane or brushstroke represents a specific, tangible component of the saint. In contrast, Giotto’s Francis feels present and grounded in space, his form constructed through seamless brushstrokes that merge into a plastically unified and naturalistically convincing figure. Boccaccio’s praise of Giotto derives from this manner of looking at a painting as well. He asserts the resemblance between the painted figure and its natural referent as the result of the painter’s ability to appeal to human visual perception in a way that merges a panel painting with reality.
To praise someone who has accomplished to produce these plastic effects by applying pigments onto a panel was no strange phenomenon in the Trecento. During this period there was a growing awareness of painting beyond the mere presentation of subject matter, to prescribing the manner in which the picture is perceived. The awareness of the viewer as visual recipient, and the painter as interpreter of his own visual experience into painting, grew accordingly.6 Giotto appears to have awakened a discourse on the visual experience of his paintings by making the viewer part of what constitutes their form; it exemplifies the awareness that the presence of the viewer constitutes their legitimacy and meaningfulness.7 This would have given rise to discourse from the side of the viewer on the experience of artworks in relation to the perception of Nature.
We can note another figure in the Stigmatization, for whom the relation between the work of art and Nature will not be as straightforward to comment on. No empirical comparison can be made between this outer phenomenon and its representation, regardless of the mode and the conception of depiction, since its supernatural essence makes it unsusceptible for cognition. It is the figure of the heavenly Christ, wrapped in six angelic wings, suspended in the sky to send the stigmata to the saint, as indicated by the hatched tracing lines. Equally distinct as the other, it displays the same substance and texture in its weightless body and simplified feathers.
But would Boccaccio have been referring to an inapprehensible figure when commenting on Giotto’s ability to imitate Nature? Would he have implicitly claimed to have apprehended such a phenomenon himself, in order for him to appraise Giotto on the quality of his depiction? He has made no concrete comparison between a figure inside a picture and its counterpart in reality anywhere, only noting the semblances between the general sense of the picture and how he perceives the real world. Nonetheless, his use of “figura” and “cosa” does indicate to the appearance of individual elements inside a painting, instead of a more general sense of the painting itself. In this way, a distinction between a natural and supernatural referent within the same painting could be made – or has implicitly been made – as not to measure the painting’s general sense against a supposed referent in Nature. Boccaccio thus asserts that Giotto’s paintings appropriately depict both apprehensible and inapprehensible phenomena according to a unified standard. He is convinced that Giotto’s decision to depict a monk and a heavenly figure in the same stylistic manner is appropriate for both figures.
Indeed, there was “niuna cosa dá la Natura, madre di tutte le cose” that Giotto was not able to represent; this notion thus seems to include the supernatural. From this, we get a broadened concept of the artist as imitator of Nature, as included in this notion of Nature are phenomena, he is not even able to apprehend himself. And somehow the writers that praised Giotto this way still decided that all figures inside his paintings are represented accurately. So, we retrieve our questions, and rephrase them is this context: How did they relate the artist to Nature while praising his ability to imitate her? And what specific abilities did they attribute to Giotto in recognizing his ability of representing the supernatural? Our question stems from a somewhat naïve concept of “Nature”, which would be shaped by the concurrent intellectual tradition. Therefore, we will firstly explore the relation between art and Nature, from which we will conceptualize an epistemology on the conception of art, and on the limits of knowledge
Een overschot aan interpretaties
No full textDeze scriptie onderzoekt het concept van het Europees nihilisme binnen het werk van Friedrich Nietzsche, waarbij de interpretaties van Paul van Tongeren en Gianni Vattimo centraal staan. In het eerste gedeelte wordt er een analyse gemaakt van de interpretaties van Paul van Tongeren en Gianni Vattimo over de aard en dreiging van het nihilisme. Deze interpretaties worden geëvalueerd aan de hand van het onderscheid dat Paul Ricoeur maakt tussen een objectieve en een existentiële lezing van een tekst. Van Tongeren biedt een systematische en objectieve analyse van het nihilisme die dicht bij de brontekst blijft, terwijl Vattimo het nihilisme vanuit een hermeneutisch perspectief benadert en stelt dat Nietzsches denken een radicale breuk met de metafysica bewerkstelligt. In het laatste gedeelte wordt de waarde van deze interpretaties beoordeeld, evenals hun bredere betekenis voor de filosofie. Daarbij staat de vraag centraal welke benaderingswijze de voorkeur verdient en om welke redenen
in hoeverre beïnvloeden sportieve prestaties van de voetbalclub de Graafschap de regionale identiteit en betrokkenheid van haar supporters?
No full textDeze scriptie onderzoekt in hoeverre de sportieve prestaties van voetbalclub De Graafschap invloed hebben op de ervaren regionale identiteit en betrokkenheid van haar supporters. De club speelt een centrale rol in de Achterhoek en wordt door veel supporters gezien als symbool van regionale trots. Op basis van kwantitatief onderzoek, uitgevoerd via een enquête onder supporters met een binding aan de regio, is in kaart gebracht hoe successen en tegenslagen op het veld deze verbondenheid beïnvloeden. De resultaten tonen aan dat sportieve successen het gevoel van trots en betrokkenheid versterken, met name bij oudere en langdurige supporters. Tegelijkertijd blijkt dat tegenslagen nauwelijks afbreuk doen aan die band: veel supporters blijven trouw, ongeacht de prestaties. Seizoenkaarthouders en fans met een lange geschiedenis tonen de meest stabiele betrokkenheid. De bevindingen laten zien dat de relatie tussen De Graafschap en de Achterhoekse gemeenschap niet alleen diepgeworteld is, maar ook veerkrachtig is – en daarmee verder reikt dan sportieve prestaties alleen
Procreatio Interrupta: Reproductive Fear in the Malleus Maleficarum and the Eruption of the Witch as Anti-Mother
No full textThis article approaches the European witch-hunt through the lens of reproduction to reveal how fears surrounding fertility constructed a violent mother/anti-mother binary. Focusing on the Malleus Maleficarum, where theological anxieties and material fears converge, I argue that the witch is framed as the dark inversion of the ideal mother exemplified by the Virgin Mary. This binary exposes contradictory expectations placed on women: to be pure yet reproductive, disembodied yet maternal. By analyzing how witches are portrayed as threats to reproduction—through infertility, infanticide, and sexual deviance—I show how reproduction becomes both the symbolic core and material site of persecution, and how this logic extends into contemporary narratives of reproductive control
Prefiguring Succes – Meaningfully conceptualizing success for social movements
No full textSuccess in social movements has never been extensively addressed in the literature of prefigurative theory. In prefigurative politics the means are just as important as the ends. Therefore the prefigurative idea of success, the alignment of means, can be a great addition to the conceptualization of success. Together with successful consequences like discourse change or cultural impact. This thesis weighs the successes against negative consequences of a protest movement like imprisonment, trauma or even death. I will conceptualize success in a meaningful way and create a framework to analyze if a social movement is successful or not. I conclude that the alignment of means is a compelling way of speaking about success but when this goes along with negative consequences for activists, then the protest is not always a success. When the stakes are high some form of positive consequences (ends) need to be a part of the movement to call it successful. The case of the Lebanese uprising in 2019 will be used as a constant example to concretely show what it means to think about success in social movements, it will create clarity in a sometimes dense theoretical work
The lone wolf versus the herd The influence of individualism on the decision-making process of investors in the biotechnological sector – a cognitive perspective on signaling theory.
No full textHow does the level of individualism influence the cognitive process behind investor decision-making? This research attempts to answer this question by examining how investors interpret acquisition announcements through the lens of signaling theory with a focus on the cognitive aspects behind individualism. Literature gaps including the cognitive complexity of signaling theory and the influence of cultural dimensions on market reactions are addressed. Moreover, prior research on acquisition motives is extended by exploring how individualism shapes market responses to different acquisition motives. The focus is set on the biotechnology sector for its high M&A activity and its strong presence in both Europe (high-individualism) and Japan (low-individualism). An event study and OLS regression of 378 acquisition announcements was conducted. While all hypotheses were rejected, several interesting trends emerged. High-individualistic investors respond more positively to acquisition announcements, especially for explorative motives. Conversely, low-individualistic investors respond more cautiously. An unexpected finding revealed that increased acquisition experience is associated with increased cumulative abnormal returns in low-individualistic countries, while in high-individualistic countries, cumulative abnormal returns tend to decrease as acquisition experience increases. The findings advance signaling theory by highlighting how cognitive filters and cultural differences influence investor reactions to acquisition announcements
Counter-Stereotypical Priming: Exploring Children’s Gender Norms & Sports Preferences
No full textGender differences in sports often start already early in life and are shaped by social norms and stereotypes. This thesis explores whether counter-stereotypical priming, through short stories that challenge traditional gender stereotypes in sports, can influence how children think about and choose sports. A behavioural experiment was conducted with Dutch primary school children aged 7 to 10, where different classes were assigned to either a neutral or counter-stereotypical story condition. After hearing the stories, children chose between boxing and gymnastics, then answered questions about what sport they thought others expected them to choose, what sport they would recommend to others and how suitable they found each sport for boys and girls. The results show that girls who heard counter-stereotypical stories were significantly more likely to choose boxing, which is a sport that is typically seen as masculine. No significant effects were found for boys or on broader perceptions of gender and sport suitability. These findings suggest that a short priming intervention can shift individual preferences, particularly among girls, but may not be enough to affect broader gender norms