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Background: Uncertainty poses a pervasive challenge in decision analysis and risk management. When the problem is poorly understood, probabilistic estimation exhibits high variability and bias. Analysts then utilize various strategies to find satisficing solutions, and these strategies can sometimes adequately address even highly complex problems. Previous literature proposed a hierarchy of uncertainty, but did not develop a quantitative score of analytical complexity., Methods: In order to develop such a score, this study reviewed over 90 strategies to cope with uncertainty, including methods utilized by expert decision-makers such as engineers, military planners and others., Results: It found that many decision problems have pivotal properties that enable their solution despite uncertainty, including small action space, reversibility and others. The analytical complexity score of a problem could then be defined based on the availability of these properties., Competing Interests: The author is an employee of Amazon Web Services, however the study is not related to his employment and any positions in this study are his own., (© 2024 Gutfraind.)

Response times (RTs) to ecological momentary assessment (EMA) items often decrease after repeated EMA administration, but whether this is accompanied by lower response quality requires investigation. We examined the relationship between EMA item RTs and EMA response quality. In one data set, declining response quality was operationalized as decreasing correspondence over time between subjective and objective measures of blood glucose taken at the same time. In a second EMA study data set, declining response quality was operationalized as decreasing correspondence between subjective ratings of memory test performance and objective memory test scores. We assumed that measurement error in the objective measures did not increase across time, meaning that decreasing correspondence across days within a person could be attributed to lower response quality. RTs to EMA items decreased across study days, while no decrements in the mean response quality were observed. Decreasing EMA item RTs across study days did not appear problematic overall., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting InterestsThe author(s) declared the following potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: AS is a senior scientist with the Gallup Organization and a consultant for HRA Pharma. RCM is a co-founder of KeyWise AI, Inc. and NeuroUX Inc. The other authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.

Problem solvers often need to choose between adapting a current solution and exchanging it for a new one. However, previous studies have not considered how such decisions might depend on structural and surface features of the task. Therefore, the present study investigated the interplay between the costs of the two solutions (a structural feature) and the format in which this information is presented (a surface feature). In a computer-based modular plant scenario, participants chose between modifying process parameters (Adapt) and reconfiguring the module setup (Exchange). The solution costs were presented either as graphs depicting parameter relations, separate numbers for each parameter, or integrated numbers for each solution. It was hypothesised that graphs induce satisficing (i.e., basing decisions only on Adapt), whereas the numeric formats foster a comparison of the solutions (i.e., basing decisions on the Adapt/Exchange ratio). The hypothesised effects were restricted to situations with medium Adapt costs. A second experiment replicated these findings while adjusting the scale of the numeric formats. In conclusion, Adapt/Exchange decisions are shaped by an interaction of structural and surface features of the task. These findings contribute to a more detailed understanding of the influences on decision strategies in complex scenarios that require a balance between stability and flexibility.

Health institutions recommend that young infants be exclusively breastfed on demand, and it is widely held that parents who can breastfeed have an obligation to do so. This has been challenged in recent philosophical work, especially by Fiona Woollard. Woollard's work critically engages with two distinct views of parental obligation that might ground such an obligation-based on maximal benefit and avoidance of significant harm-to reject an obligation to breastfeed. While agreeing with Woollard's substantive conclusion, this paper (drawing on philosophical discussion of the 'right to rear') argues that there are several more moderate views of parental obligation which might also be thought to ground parental obligation. We first show that an obligation to breastfeed might result not from a general obligation to maximally benefit one's child, but from what we call 'choice-specific' obligations to maximise benefit within particular activities. We then develop this idea through two views of parental obligation-the Dual Interest view, and the Best Custodian view-to ground an obligation to exclusively breastfeed on demand, before showing how both these more moderate views fail. Finally, we argue that not only is there no general obligation to breastfeed children, but that it is often morally right not to do so. Since much advice from health institutions on this issue implies that exclusive breastfeeding on demand is the best option for all families, our argument drives the feeding debate forward by showing that this advice often misrepresents parents' moral obligations in potentially harmful ways., Competing Interests: Competing InterestsNot Applicable., (© The Author(s) 2023.)

The previous literature has provided mixed findings regarding whether consumers appreciate or are opposed to algorithms. The primary goal of this paper is to address these inconsistencies by identifying the maximizing tendency as a critical moderating variable. In Study 1, it was found that maximizers, individuals who strive for the best possible outcomes, exhibit greater reactance toward algorithm-recommended choices than satisficers, those who are satisfied with a good-enough option. This increased reactance also resulted in decreased algorithm adoption intention. Study 2 replicated and extended the findings from Study 1 by identifying the moderating role of choice goals. Maximizers are more likely to experience reactance to algorithm-recommended options when the act of choosing itself is intrinsically motivating and meaningful (i.e., autotelic choices) compared to when the decision is merely a means to an end (i.e., instrumental choices). The results of this research contribute to a nuanced understanding of how consumers with different decision-making styles navigate the landscape of choice in the digital age. Furthermore, it offers practical insights for firms that utilize algorithmic recommendations in their businesses.

Our understanding of decision-making processes and cognitive biases is ever increasing, thanks to an accumulation of testable models and a large body of research over the last several decades. The vast majority of this work has been done in humans and laboratory animals because these study subjects and situations allow for tightly controlled experiments. However, it raises questions about how this knowledge can be applied to wild animals in their complex environments. Here, we review two prominent decision-making theories, dual process theory and Bayesian decision theory, to assess the similarities in these approaches and consider how they may apply to wild animals living in heterogenous environments within complicated social groupings. In particular, we wanted to assess when wild animals are likely to respond to a situation with a quick heuristic decision and when they are likely to spend more time and energy on the decision-making process. Based on the literature and evidence from our multi-destination routing experiments on primates, we find that individuals are likely to make quick, heuristic decisions when they encounter routine situations, or signals/cues that accurately predict a certain outcome, or easy problems that experience or evolutionary history has prepared them for. Conversely, effortful decision-making is likely in novel or surprising situations, when signals and cues have unpredictable or uncertain relationships to an outcome, and when problems are computationally complex. Though if problems are overly complex, satisficing via heuristics is likely, to avoid costly mental effort. We present hypotheses for how animals with different socio-ecologies may have to distribute their cognitive effort. Finally, we examine the conservation implications and potential cognitive overload for animals experiencing increasingly novel situations caused by current human-induced rapid environmental change., (© 2023 The Authors. American Journal of Primatology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.)

We examined the extent to which intentionally underperforming a goal-directed reaching task impacts how memories of recent performance contribute to sensorimotor adaptation. Healthy human subjects performed computerized cognition testing and an assessment of sensorimotor adaptation, wherein they grasped the handle of a horizontal planar robot while making goal-directed out-and-back reaching movements. The robot exerted forces that resisted hand motion with a spring-like load that changed unpredictably between movements. The robotic test assessed how implicit and explicit memories of sensorimotor performance contribute to the compensation for the unpredictable changes in the hand-held load. After each movement, subjects were to recall and report how far the hand moved on the previous trial (peak extent of the out-and-back movement). Subjects performed the tests under two counter-balanced conditions: one where they performed with their best effort, and one where they intentionally sabotaged (i.e., suppressed) kinematic performance. Results from the computerized cognition tests confirmed that subjects understood and complied with task instructions. When suppressing performance during the robotic assessment, subjects demonstrated marked changes in reach precision, time to capture the target, and reaction time. We fit a set of limited memory models to the data to identify how subjects used implicit and explicit memories of recent performance to compensate for the changing loads. In both sessions, subjects used implicit, but not explicit, memories from the most recent trial to adapt reaches to unpredictable spring-like loads. Subjects did not "give up" on large errors, nor did they discount small errors deemed "good enough". Although subjects clearly suppressed kinematic performance (response timing, movement variability, and self-reporting of reach error), the relative contributions of sensorimotor memories to trial-by-trial variations in task performance did not differ significantly between the two testing conditions. We conclude that intentional performance suppression had minimal impact on how implicit sensorimotor memories contribute to adaptation of unpredictable mechanical loads applied to the hand., (© 2023. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

Rationale: As over 90% of people who register to be organ donors do so at the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), DMVs are perceived as a key context for increasing donor registration rates. Scholars have recently noted that the driver's license application itself, including the placement of the donor registration item relative to other questions, can possibly influence donor registration behavior. The goal of the current study was to experimentally investigate this possibility., Method: We conducted an experiment using Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) between March and May of 2021 to investigate the influence of question order on donor registration willingness. Participants received a question regarding their willingness to register either before or after a series of health and legal questions often asked at DMVs., Results: The placement of the donor registration question had a positive effect on registration willingness for non-registered individuals (OR = 2.01, 95% CI [1.59, 2.54]) and previously registered donors (OR = 2.57, 95% CI [2.22, 2.99])., Conclusion: Changing the question order of driver's license applications has the potential to influence registration rates., (Published by Elsevier Ltd.)

This paper investigates how maximizing or satisficing decision styles and cultural orientation influence individuals' entrepreneurial intentions. With a growing interest in social entrepreneurship, it also measures if these factors encourage individuals to start ventures with a social mission. Two studies are conducted to compare students' entrepreneurial intentions in the U.S. and in Slovenia. By identifying that maximizing decision styles are associated with an individualistic cultural orientation in both the U.S. and Slovenia, the current study indicates that the maximizing - individualism connection spans national and cultural boundaries. In the U.S. sample, individualism mediated the relationship between decision styles and entrepreneurial intentions, suggesting that in individualistic cultures, such as the U.S., those who maximize their decision efforts and apply a more individualistic cultural perspective are especially inclined to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities. Similarly, individualism mediated the relationship between maximizing and social entrepreneurial intentions in the U.S. sample; suggesting that maximizers who are less individualistic may be more likely to start social enterprises over traditional ventures. Among the Slovenian sample, there was a marginally significant relationship between maximizing and entrepreneurial intentions and no relationship with social entrepreneurial intentions. These cross-cultural differences are discussed in relation to the economic and social conditions in each country., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2023 Soltwisch, Dimitrov and Hojnik.)

Several studies suggest that "don't know" (DK) responses to risk perception items may represent meaningful expressions of uncertainty about disease risk. However, researchers are often discouraged from including a DK response option in survey items due to concerns about respondents overusing it to minimize cognitive effort-a phenomenon often referred to as satisficing . Our objective was to investigate whether patterns of DK responses to risk perception survey items were consistent with satisficing behavior. We conducted a secondary analysis of survey data from 814 parents and guardians (hereafter caregivers ) of children with asthma. Caregivers answered 18 items assessing their perceived risk of their child experiencing two types of poor asthma outcomes: asthma exacerbation, and low asthma control. We examined differences in the frequency and distribution of DK responses across all 18 items and by type of risk perception item (i.e., 2 vs. 5 response options, absolute vs. comparative risk). We found that 32% ( n =548) of respondents marked DK at least once. Of the 266 caregivers who provided any DK response, most did so for only 1 or 2 items (51.9%, n =138), and only 6% ( n =15) answered DK to more than half of the items. Using random coefficient Poisson models, we found more DK responding for dichotomous absolute (30.1%) than ordinal absolute items (5.3%), b =1.72, p <.001. We also found fewer DK responses to the ordinal absolute items than the comparative items (8.2%), b =-0.49, p <.001. Using Chi-square tests, we found that inattentive responding was not associated with responding DK. Our findings suggest that satisficing is unlikely to completely explain DK responding to perceived risk survey items. Researchers who exclude DK response options from risk perception survey items may obtain an incomplete understanding of their study sample's beliefs about risk., Competing Interests: Conflicts of interest: None of the authors have conflicts of interest to report.

The decision-making literature distinguishes one maximizing style from another satisficing decision-making style, but it is unknown whether these styles remain stable or are variable depending on the occasion. One way to approach it is to verify eventual generalization of these styles in behavior of people in different decision domains. Some incipient results with University students from the United States and Austria suggest that these styles would remain in three different domains. However, it is unknown if this is the case in adults, other cultures, or vital areas of great relevance, such as health and personal finances. The objective here is to identify if Chilean Latin American participants of different sex and age maintain their decision-making style in five different decision domains. The sample was 343 volunteers, 52.6% men, from two regions of central-southern Chile (Maule and Ñuble), aged between 20 and 90 years ( M = 45.47; SD = 16.05), who answered the Maximization Tendency Scale, and 45 items corresponding to five different decision domains: health, life decision, finances, services and experiences, and consumer's good. An apparent coherence of decision-making style-maximizing and satisficing-was obtained in the five domains. The health domain stands out for being the one in which it is maximized and with greater internal homogeneity., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2021 Moyano-Díaz and Mendoza-Llanos.)

How do we choose when confronted with many alternatives? There is surprisingly little decision modelling work with large choice sets, despite their prevalence in everyday life. Even further, there is an apparent disconnect between research in small choice sets, supporting a process of gaze-driven evidence accumulation, and research in larger choice sets, arguing for models of optimal choice, satisficing, and hybrids of the two. Here, we bridge this divide by developing and comparing different versions of these models in a many-alternative value-based choice experiment with 9, 16, 25, or 36 alternatives. We find that human choices are best explained by models incorporating an active effect of gaze on subjective value. A gaze-driven, probabilistic version of satisficing generally provides slightly better fits to choices and response times, while the gaze-driven evidence accumulation and comparison model provides the best overall account of the data when also considering the empirical relation between gaze allocation and choice., Competing Interests: AT, FM, IK No competing interests declared, (© 2021, Thomas et al.)

When selecting from too many options (i.e., choice overload), maximizers (people who search exhaustively to make decisions that are optimal) report more negative post-decisional evaluations of their choices than do satisficers (people who search minimally to make decisions that are sufficient). Although ample evidence exists for differences in responses after-the-fact, little is known about possible divergences in maximizers' and satisficers' experiences during choice overload. Thus, using the biopsychosocial model of challenge/threat, we examined 128 participants' cardiovascular responses as they actively made a selection from many options. Specifically, we focused on cardiovascular responses assessing the degree to which individuals (a) viewed their decisions as valuable/important and (b) viewed themselves as capable (vs. incapable) of making a good choice. Although we found no differences in terms of the value individuals placed on their decisions (i.e., cardiovascular responses of task engagement), satisficers-compared to maximizers-exhibited cardiovascular responses consistent with feeling less capable of making their choice (i.e., greater relative threat). The current work provides a novel investigation of the nature of differences in maximizers'/satisficers' momentary choice overload experiences, suggesting insight into why they engage in such distinct search behaviors., (© 2020 Society for Psychophysiological Research.)

We propose a novel framework for the economic assessment of environmental policy. Our main point of departure from existing work is the adoption of a satisficing , as opposed to optimizing, modeling approach. Along these lines, we place primary emphasis on the extent to which different policies meet a set of goals at a specific future date instead of their performance vis-a-vis some intertemporal objective function. Consistent to the nature of environmental policymaking, our model takes explicit account of model uncertainty. To this end, the decision criterion we propose is an analog of the well-known success-probability criterion adapted to settings characterized by model uncertainty. We apply our criterion to the climate-change context and the probability distributions constructed by Drouet et al. (2015) linking carbon budgets to future consumption. Insights from computational geometry facilitate computations considerably and allow for the efficient application of the model in high-dimensional settings., (© The Author(s) 2021.)

Background: Sustaining high-quality, critical care practice is challenging because of current limits to financial, environmental, and social resources. The National Health Service in England intends to be more sustainable, although there is minimal research into what sustainability means to people working in critical care, and a theoretical framework is lacking that explains the social processes influencing sustainability in critical care., Aims and Objectives: This study aimed to explain the concept of sustainability from the perspective of practitioners caring for critically ill patients., Design: The qualitative research followed a Charmazian constructivist grounded theory approach, including concurrent data collection and interpretation through constant comparison analysis., Methods: In-depth interviews were conducted online or by telephone with 11 health care professionals working in critical care in the South of England (8 nurses, 2 physiotherapists, and 1 technician). Schatzman's dimensional analysis and Straussian grounded theory techniques supplemented the data analysis., Results: Sustainability was defined as maintaining financial, environmental, and social resources throughout the micro, meso, and macro systems of critical care practice. The most pertinent social process enabling sustainability of critical care was satisficing (satisfaction of achieving a goal of quality care while sufficing within the limits of available resources). Increased satisficing enabled practitioners to fulfil their sense of normative, responsible, sustainable, and flourishing practice. Satisficing was bounded by the cognitive and environmental influences on decisions and an ethical imperative to ensure resources were used wisely through stewarding., Conclusions: An explanation of the concept of sustainability and significant social processes, in relation to critical care, are presented in a theoretical framework, with implications for how financial, environmental, and social resources for critical care practice can be maintained., Relevance to Clinical Practice: This theory offers clinicians, managers, educators, and researchers a definition of sustainability in critical care practice and provides a structured approach to addressing critical care sustainability issues., (© 2019 British Association of Critical Care Nurses.)

The advent of electronic documentation systems has made it easy to generate and store vast amounts of information, and has enabled easy access to patient care information, so much so that they are now considered a critical infrastructure for supporting the cognitive tasks in healthcare work. But, electronic documentation systems are not without their share of problems. Accountability and liability requirements have made electronic information creation and documentation particularly challenging. Mandatory documentation requirements and templated electronic formats have increased the amount of information, but have not always resulted in reliable, useful, or meaningful information. Documentation systems have become rigid, offering little opportunity for healthcare providers to engage in meaningful conversations about the information, and to sense problem status without additional coordination. A particularly significant information interaction problem that we have identified from our field work in healthcare information modeling, which this paper focuses on, deals with what we term creator-consumer interaction behaviors. The purpose of this paper is to examine in-depth the problem of creator-consumer information interaction behaviors in electronic healthcare documentation systems. A creator-consumer interaction behavioral framework highlights satisficing behavior during creation and consumption of medical documentation, and the characteristics of the work system that may lead to satisficing on documentation tasks., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Respondents may use satisficing (i.e., nonoptimal) strategies when responding to self-report questionnaires. These satisficing strategies become more likely with decreasing motivation and/or cognitive ability (Krosnick, 1991). Considering that cognitive deficits are characteristic of depressive and anxiety disorders, depressed and anxious patients may be prone to satisficing. Using data from the Netherland's Study of Depression and Anxiety ( N = 2,945), we studied the relationship between depression and anxiety, cognitive symptoms, and satisficing strategies on the NEO Five-Factor Inventory. Results showed that respondents with either an anxiety disorder or a comorbid anxiety and depression disorder used satisficing strategies substantially more often than healthy respondents. Cognitive symptom severity partly mediated the effect of anxiety disorder and comorbid anxiety disorder on satisficing. The results suggest that depressed and anxious patients produce relatively low-quality self-report data-partly due to cognitive symptoms. Future research should investigate the degree of satisficing across different mental health care assessment contexts.

As reinforcement learning algorithms are being applied to increasingly complicated and realistic tasks, it is becoming increasingly difficult to solve such problems within a practical time frame. Hence, we focus on a satisficing strategy that looks for an action whose value is above the aspiration level (analogous to the break-even point), rather than the optimal action. In this paper, we introduce a simple mathematical model called risk-sensitive satisficing (RS) that implements a satisficing strategy by integrating risk-averse and risk-prone attitudes under the greedy policy. We apply the proposed model to the K-armed bandit problems, which constitute the most basic class of reinforcement learning tasks, and prove two propositions. The first is that RS is guaranteed to find an action whose value is above the aspiration level. The second is that the regret (expected loss) of RS is upper bounded by a finite value, given that the aspiration level is set to an "optimal level" so that satisficing implies optimizing. We confirm the results through numerical simulations and compare the performance of RS with that of other representative algorithms for the K-armed bandit problems., (Copyright © 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Background: People who say they don't know (DK) their disease risk are less likely to engage in protective behavior., Purpose: This study examined possible mechanisms underlying not knowing one's risk for common diseases., Methods: Participants were a nationally representative sample of 1005 members of a standing probability-based survey panel who answered questions about their comparative and absolute perceived risk for diabetes and colon cancer, health literacy, risk factor knowledge and health information avoidance, and beliefs about illness unpredictability. Survey satisficing was a composite assessment of not following survey instructions, nondifferentiation of responses, haphazard responding, and speeding. The primary outcomes were whether a person selected DK when asked absolute and comparative risk perception questions about diabetes or colon cancer. Base structural equation modeling path models with pathways from information avoidance and health literacy/knowledge to DK responding for each DK outcome were compared to models that also included pathways from satisficing or unpredictability beliefs., Results: Base models contained significant indirect effects of health literacy (odds ratios [ORs] = 0.94 to 0.97, all P < 0.02) and avoidance (ORs = 1.05 to 1.15, all P < 0.01) on DK responding through risk factor knowledge and a direct effect of avoidance (ORs = 1.21 to 1.28, all P < 0.02). Adding the direct effect for satisficing to models resulted in poor fit (for all outcomes, residual mean square error estimates >0.17, all weighted root mean square residuals >3.2, all Comparative Fit Index <0.47, all Tucker-Lewis Index <0.49), indicating that satisficing was not associated with DK responding. Unpredictability was associated with not knowing one's diabetes risk (OR = 1.01, P < 0.01)., Limitations: The data were cross-sectional; therefore, directionality of the pathways cannot be assumed., Conclusions: DK responders may need more health information, but it needs to be delivered differently. Interventions might include targeting messages for lower health literacy audiences and disrupting defensive avoidance of threatening health information.

Intuition suggests that for a conditional to be evaluated as true, there must be some kind of connection between its component clauses. In this paper, we formulate and test a new psychological theory to account for this intuition. We combined previous semantic and psychological theorizing to propose that the key to the intuition is a relevance-driven, satisficing-bounded inferential connection between antecedent and consequent. To test our theory, we created a novel experimental paradigm in which participants were presented with a soritical series of objects, notably colored patches (Experiments 1 and 4) and spheres (Experiment 2), or both (Experiment 3), and were asked to evaluate related conditionals embodying non-causal inferential connections (such as "If patch number 5 is blue, then so is patch number 4"). All four experiments displayed a unique response pattern, in which (largely determinate) responses were sensitive to parameters determining inference strength, as well as to consequent position in the series, in a way analogous to belief bias. Experiment 3 showed that this guaranteed relevance can be suppressed, with participants reverting to the defective conditional. Experiment 4 showed that this pattern can be partly explained by a measure of inference strength. This pattern supports our theory's "principle of relevant inference" and "principle of bounded inference," highlighting the dual processing characteristics of the inferential connection., (Copyright © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Real-life decision-making often involves combining multiple probabilistic sources of information under finite time and cognitive resources. To mitigate these pressures, people "satisfice", foregoing a full evaluation of all available evidence to focus on a subset of cues that allow for fast and "good-enough" decisions. Although this form of decision-making likely mediates many of our everyday choices, very little is known about the way in which the neural encoding of cue information changes when we satisfice under time pressure. Here, we combined human functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with a probabilistic classification task to characterize neural substrates of multi-cue decision-making under low (1500 ms) and high (500 ms) time pressure. Using variational Bayesian inference, we analyzed participants' choices to track and quantify cue usage under each experimental condition, which was then applied to model the fMRI data. Under low time pressure, participants performed near-optimally, appropriately integrating all available cues to guide choices. Both cortical (prefrontal and parietal cortex) and subcortical (hippocampal and striatal) regions encoded individual cue weights, and activity linearly tracked trial-by-trial variations in the amount of evidence and decision uncertainty. Under increased time pressure, participants adaptively shifted to using a satisficing strategy by discounting the least informative cue in their decision process. This strategic change in decision-making was associated with an increased involvement of the dopaminergic midbrain, striatum, thalamus, and cerebellum in representing and integrating cue values. We conclude that satisficing the probabilistic inference process under time pressure leads to a cortical-to-subcortical shift in the neural drivers of decisions., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

This study examined the predictors and psychometric outcomes of survey satisficing, wherein respondents provide quick, "good enough" answers (satisficing) rather than carefully considered answers (optimizing). We administered surveys to university students and respondents-half of whom held college degrees-from a for-pay survey website, and we used an experimental method to randomly assign the participants to survey formats, which presumably differed in task difficulty. Based on satisficing theory, we predicted that ability, motivation, and task difficulty would predict satisficing behavior and that satisficing would artificially inflate internal consistency reliability and both convergent and discriminant validity correlations. Indeed, results indicated effects for task difficulty and motivation in predicting survey satisficing, and satisficing in the first part of the study was associated with improved internal consistency reliability and convergent validity but also worse discriminant validity in the second part of the study. Implications for research designs and improvements are discussed., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting Interests: The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Julian Savulescu's principle of procreative beneficence (PB) states that, other things being equal, and of the possible children they could have, a couple contemplating procreation are morally obliged to (attempt to) procreate the child with the best chance of the best life. The critique of PB is in three parts. The first part argues that PB rests on a particular conception of the good life, and that alternative conceptions of the good life afford no obvious way in which PB can be rendered operational. The second part identifies six flaws in the attempt to justify PB in terms of a particular conception of the good life according to which the best life is understood as the life with the most well-being. The third part explores some of the uncertainties that surround the potential implications and ramifications of adopting the principle. The overall purpose is not to demonstrate that the principle is untenable, but only to demonstrate that no compelling reason has yet been given for adhering to it., (© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

It has been widely assumed that the full meaning of a linguistic expression can be grasped only within a situation, the context of the utterance. There is even agreement that certain factors within the situation are particularly significant, including gestures and facial expressions of the participants, their social roles, the setting of the exchange, the objects surrounding the participants, the linguistic, cultural and educational backgrounds of the participants, their beliefs, including those concerning the situation, the social procedures and conventions that regulate the situation. Finally, there is some agreement that context is dynamic, reflexive (the speakers are mutually aware of their beliefs), not limited to linguistics actions, and last but not least, a psychological construct. This definition of context is not (very) controversial, but it leaves out two major problems, which will be addressed in this paper: how is context arrived at? And, since a perfectly natural interpretation of the above definition could be that the context of each utterance is the entire universe, how is the relevant context delimited? Four related concepts will provide the answer to both questions: abductive reasoning, driven by relevance and cooperation, and bounded rationality and the principle of charity. Simply put, context is derived abductively by the speakers assuming that for the speakers to behave the way they behave and do so rationally, a given context must be available to them. The context is bounded by the simple requirement that speakers not try to optimize their interpretation/calculation, but rather satisfice, i.e., find the first acceptable solution and by the need to follow the principle of charity, which forces intersubjective agreement. Thus, abductive reasoning and bounded rationality will be shown to be sufficient to calculate the relevant context of utterances (or other rationality-driven interactions) and to effectively delimit the potentially infinite search space that must be explored to do so.

Grid or matrix questions are associated with a number of problems in Web surveys. In this paper, we present results from two experiments testing the design of grid questions to reduce breakoffs, missing data, and satisficing. The first examines dynamic elements to help guide respondent through the grid, and on splitting a larger grid into component pieces. The second manipulates the visual complexity of the grid and on simplifying the grid. We find that using dynamic feedback to guide respondents through a multi-question grid helps reduce missing data. Splitting the grids into component questions further reduces missing data and motivated underreporting. The visual complexity of the grid appeared to have little effect on performance.