1,721,515 research outputs found
Simple heuristics in a social game
Full text linkSimple Heuristics in a Social World invites readers to discover the simple heuristics that people use to navigate the complexities and surprises of environments populated with others. The social world is a terrain where humans and other animals compete with conspecifics for myriad resources, including food, mates, and status, and where rivals grant the decision maker little time for deep thought, protracted information search, or complex calculations. Yet, the social world also encompasses domains where social animals such as humans can learn from one another and can forge alliances with one another to boost their chances of success.
According to the book's thesis, the undeniable complexity of the social world does not dictate cognitive complexity as many scholars of rationality argue. Rather, it entails circumstances that render optimization impossible or computationally arduous: intractability, the existence of incommensurable considerations, and competing goals. With optimization beyond reach, less can be more. That is, heuristics--simple strategies for making decisions when time is pressing and careful deliberation an unaffordable luxury--become indispensible mental tools. As accurate as or even more accurate than complex methods when used in the appropriate social environments, these heuristics are good descriptive models of how people make many decisions and inferences, but their impressive performance also poses a normative challenge for optimization models. In short, the Homo socialis may prove to be a Homo heuristicus whose intelligence reflects ecological rather than logical rationality
Simple heuristics: The foundations of adaptive social behavior
Full text linkThis chapter shows how simple heuristics can be an essential tool for navigating the complexities and vagaries of social environments. The research program on the nature of social rationality presented here can be summarized by the following theses: As perceived by the human mind, the social world (Umwelt) is complex, but not necessarily more complex than the nonsocial world. However complex the social world may be, its complexity does not require cognitive complexity; rather, it entails conditions that make simple heuristics indispensible, such as intractability, multiple competing goals, and incommensurable reasons. Much of reasoning and decision making occurring in human and animal social environments can be modeled in terms of simple heuristics. Although simple heuristics forgo extensive information search and complex calculations, they can be as accurate and even more accurate than more complex strategies and/or can be used to reach other goals that are valued in social environments (e.g., transparency, fairness, speed). Heuristics can be simultaneously successful and simple by coopting evolved capacities. The capacities themselves can represent complex adaptive specializations (e.g., memory, movement tracking). Simple heuristics per se are neither rational nor irrational. Their rationality is ecological. That is, their performance depends on the match between the architecture of the heuristic and the structure of the environment in which it is used. The heuristics' simplicity inoculates them against overfitting and enables them to achieve robust performance given small samples of information. Simple heuristics can model adaptive decision making both in games against nature and in social games. There is no social intelligence distinct from nonsocial intelligence. Simple heuristics are tools of moderate generalizability. Some can be used only in games against nature, whereas others are restricted to social games. Still other heuristics can be applied in both types of games. Shedding light on the adaptive toolbox of simple heuristics used to navigate social environments, and characterizing their strengths and weaknesses, can help us design environments and/or heuristics in ways that improve public welfare
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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