Situational ethics

About: Situational ethics is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4023 publications have been published within this topic receiving 145379 citations.

Situational trust and co-operative partnerships between physicians and their patients: a theoretical explanation transferable from business practice

Abstract: A model to explain interpersonal trust development, and its consequences for co-operative behaviour in doctor/patient partnerships derived from the context of business relationships is applied to patient/physician relationships. Threshold barriers exist against all human behaviours or actions and trust is the process by which barriers to co-operation and compliance are overcome. Dispositional trust (a psychological trait to be trusting) is dominant in the early stages of a relationship and contributes to the weight of subsequent trust development. Co-operative behaviour or compliance ultimately requires a secure situational trust emerging from consultations, which is carried forward as learnt trust and modified in each subsequent consultation. The model comprises three types of situational trust (calculus-based, knowledge-based, and identification trust) and five co-operation criteria from which to determine an individual's tendency for co- operative behaviour. These model components can be identified and mapped from a range of qualitative data, with the aim of enhancing co-operative behaviour and efficiently achieving optimal patient compliance.

Current Issues in Psycholinguistics and Second Language Teaching.

Abstract: It is urged that there is no real conflict between the "audiolingual habit" and "cognitive-code learning" theories as applied to language teaching. It is false to make an opposition between rule-governed behavior and language habits. The notion of habit is, however, more general than that of rule, and is not as conceptually inadequate as sometimes claimed. The learning of second languages requires both the acquisition of knowledge about rules and the formation of the habits described by these rules. Language teaching procedures can be improved by application of psychological knowledge concerning the learning of language habits. It is stressed that situational meaning must be incorporated into language rules where it is applicable, and that the corresponding language habits must be made contingent upon these situational meanings.

Human decision-making biases in the moral dilemmas of autonomous vehicles

Abstract: The development of artificial intelligence has led researchers to study the ethical principles that should guide machine behavior. The challenge in building machine morality based on people’s moral decisions, however, is accounting for the biases in human moral decision-making. In seven studies, this paper investigates how people’s personal perspectives and decision-making modes affect their decisions in the moral dilemmas faced by autonomous vehicles. Moreover, it determines the variations in people’s moral decisions that can be attributed to the situational factors of the dilemmas. The reported studies demonstrate that people’s moral decisions, regardless of the presented dilemma, are biased by their decision-making mode and personal perspective. Under intuitive moral decisions, participants shift more towards a deontological doctrine by sacrificing the passenger instead of the pedestrian. In addition, once the personal perspective is made salient participants preserve the lives of that perspective, i.e. the passenger shifts towards sacrificing the pedestrian, and vice versa. These biases in people’s moral decisions underline the social challenge in the design of a universal moral code for autonomous vehicles. We discuss the implications of our findings and provide directions for future research.

Beliefs about Memory and Aging

Abstract: Publisher Summary This chapter explains the beliefs about memory and aging. The chapter describes the status of the work to date and discusses possible future directions for this line of research. The relationship of beliefs to cognitive performance has historically been the principal focus of research and it constitutes an important part of research program. The new method of scaling implicit theories about age changes in memory used in the general beliefs about memory instrument (GBMI) can be extended in several ways. First, it is possible to obtain developmental functions for different kinds of targets. Second, it would be possible to address the issue of contextual or situational variance in functioning by asking about developmental functions for the same person but under different situational circumstances. There are alternative hypothesis which states that many if not almost all individuals believe that memory decline is in large part inevitable because of effects of biological aging and age-related pathologies. Moreover, individuals may believe that the control they have is in the degree to which they can compensate for ongoing decline with effortful activity, such as increased use of external aids and routinized procedures to guide remembering and avoid forgetting. Future empirical research is expected to address these issues and provide an enriched understanding of the subtle complexities of belief systems adults possess regarding their own and others' memory.