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Trust is the foundation of trade credit. Failure to pay on time affects the supplier's business, causing stress and potential bankruptcy. Small businesses employ formal (solicitors, debt collectors, statutory demands) and informal (discounts, extended payment terms, violence) techniques to enforce payment. The Government has enacted measures requiring larger buyers to report their payment practices and has given businesses the right to claim interest, yet businesses are either unaware or do not use these provisions. The research phase of this thesis was conducted in 2018/19 and incorporated an initial survey with 74 respondents followed by a second survey with 250 respondents. During the period, 20 in-depth interviews were undertaken to gain a deeper insight into specific points. This research finds that small businesses do not conduct sufficient due diligence, selling to anyone and hoping buyers will pay while relying on law to ensure payment. The effects of late payment resulted in 81% of respondents saying they had experienced increased stress which permeated outside the workplace. Furthermore, the findings revealed that at the micro and small business level respondents considered the emotional effect of late payment to be greater than the monetary impact on the business. Large businesses reported the temporal effect to be of greater concern than the monetary impact. Faced with a late payment, 44% of respondents considered escalating collection processes, and a third commenced litigation. Interviewees considered the current legal system expensive and unworkable. Litigation was however used as a method of restoring communication with a defaulting buyer to obtain (partial) settlement as opposed to gaining judgement and restitution. This thesis widens the debate on late payment from a purely quantitative monetary business problem to incorporate the qualitative impact on human assets.

This study makes a case that eschatological approval is a unifying motif in the epistle of James. While themes like friendship, wisdom, obedience, and perfection have been demonstrated in the epistle of James, none of these occurs in every major portion of the epistle. Eschatological approval, or a favourable verdict from God in the end, runs like a thread through every major section addressed to the hearers. This study is developed in several stages. First, it establishes that James 1:2-27 serves as the introductory prologue of the epistle. Also, James 1 introduces major concepts of James, such as the use of speech, the rich and poor, and coming judgment. Next, this study contends for the structure of James. We examine two uses of a grand inclusio in James: 1:12/5:11 and 2:12-13/4:11-12. Next, using the principle of cohesiveness, we segment James into sections. We provide a tentative outline for the structure of James based on these principles. In the third stage, we examine eschatological approval in the text of the epistle. First, we make a case that the main idea is developed in the introductory prologue. The repeated themes in the beginning (Jas 1:2-3), middle (1:12), and end (1:25) of the prologue reveal a double-inclusio that points to 1:12 as a key saying that sums up the main idea: the author is concerned for his hearers to have a favourable verdict in divine eschatological judgment. After that, we examine James 2-5 to see how this main idea recurs throughout each section as delineated earlier. We will make the case that the motif of eschatological approval is the recurring motif that holds the epistle together. Even 4:13-5:6, which addresses those outside the epistle's hearers, addresses eschatological approval by presenting the other side of eschatological judgment. The study concludes by arguing that James 1:12 is the thesis statement for the epistle, presenting both the main idea of the prologue and the thread that runs through the body of James. This main idea is reprised at Jas 5:11, with its repetition of the concepts of blessedness and perseverance. Ultimately, the author of James directs his hearers so that they will be approved by God at eschatological judgment.

The imprecatory psalms contain some of the most violent and, particularly to modern sensibilities, disturbing images in all of Scripture, prayers for divine judgment against enemies that seem to contravene Christ’s command for enemy love. Drawing together the resources of redemptive-historical biblical theology and narrative ethics, Cursing with God argues that prayerful performance of the imprecatory psalms is an ethically permissible, even ethically obligatory, means by which the Christian church faithfully enacts her God-given calling as a royal priesthood within God’s ethically determinative narrative of the world. This examination of the ethics of Christian enactment of the imprecatory psalms begins with an evaluation of the ethics of the imprecatory psalms within their intertextually constructed narrative world, contending that these psalms’ petitions are the morally legitimate prayers of the royal-priestly son of God against the serpentine enemies of God’s temple-kingdom, pleas that align with the petitioner’s vocation in God’s redemptive-historical narrative. Turning to the New Testament’s intertextual and thematic interaction with the imprecatory psalms, the study investigates how the New Testament narrates God’s works, reflects upon God’s action, and depicts various players in the Christian-era scene of redemptive history—not least Jesus himself—with reference to the inhabiting figures and constitutive theological structures of the imprecatory psalms, and the resultant narrative framework generates a reading of the New Testament’s several imprecatory speech acts as the ethically faithful petitions of the royal-priestly sons and daughters of God. Receiving the redemptive-historical narrative of Scripture as the governing story within which the Christian church dwells and acts, the dissertation culminates with a proposal for Christian performance of the imprecatory psalms that coheres with her royal-priestly vocation and inter-advent location in God’s teleologically-oriented narrative and further contends that Christian performance of the imprecatory psalms in union with the polyvalent Christ to whom they bear witness has the dynamic capacity to stimulate the affective dispositions of faith, hope, and love that make for ethical imprecatory enactment.

In Mind and World, John McDowell argues for a picture of perceptual experience that sees experience as both richly contentful and propositionally structured. His thought is that by picturing our conceptual capacities as passively drawn into operation we can do justice to the independence of the world while also being able to account for the rational role of perceptual experience. Recently, however, this account has come under attack by Charles Travis, who has suggested that this conceptualist picture involves both an appeal to an illegitimate notion of looks and a confusion of facts and things, leaving us unable to understand how the world is able to bear on thought. Indeed, Travis's critique has led McDowell to rewrite much of his original account, dropping both the claim that perceptual experience is propositionally contentful and the claim that it contains everything that it allows the subject to know non-inferentially. This thesis argues that McDowell is wrong to make these concessions to Travis, and instead argues in favour of a richly contentful picture of perceptual experience. In particular, it is argued that perceptual experience should be seen as constituted by rational capacities for recognition. This helps to mitigate Travis's concern, since for a conceptual capacity to be realised in perceptual experience on this account simply is for some particular to be (ostensibly) recognised as falling under a generality. In fact, by drawing on Kant's account of the threefold synthesis in the first version of the Deduction, it will be shown that recognition in terms of empirical concepts is a condition of the possibility of perceptual experience. It is only because we are able to recognise an object as in some sense 'the same' over time that any visual awareness is possible, and this recognition is only possible in terms of concepts. The second half of the thesis will then defend this account against potential objections. Chief among these is the so-called 'bootstrap problem', namely the apparent paradox that emerges from holding that empirical concepts are necessary for and yet originate from perpetual experience. It will be argued that this problem can be solved by reference to what Andrea Kern calls 'acts of learning', where a subject is able to obtain their initial conceptual capacities via a relation to another subject who already has command of the capacities in question. The final chapter will then respond to two external 'phenomenological' objections: the argument from fineness of grain and Dreyfus's suggestion that conceptualists like McDowell ignore the phenomenology of 'absorbed coping'. Dreyfus bases his account on a reading of Heidegger in a way that could seem to set the latter's picture in opposition to the account offered in this thesis. Instead, it will be suggested that, to the extent that they both take empirical meaning to be a priori, McDowell and Heidegger are in agreement. The difference is that Heidegger is not interested in giving us a therapeutic account of how the world is able to bear rationally on thought, but rather in asking after the conditions of such meaningful presence. Nonetheless, it will be argued that the account of rational capacities put forward by this thesis can be helpful in answering this transcendental question. Our self-conscious awareness of the fallibility of our recognitional capacities is that which produces the logical gap between recognition and judgment. It will be suggested that it is this gap that Heidegger calls die Lichtung or 'the clearing'.

Talent management is an organisational process aimed at maximising the benefit gained from the organisation's workforce, mostly by assessing the future potential of senior organisational members to fill key positions based on their proportional contribution to the business. Despite the increasing prevalence of talent management, evidence is accumulating to indicate an extremely low success rate of just 20-25% in predicting high performers. While talent management continues to address a growing business need, a better understanding of the process may help to refine its practice. The underpinning assumptions of the practice of talent management are that organisations are systemic and linear, and that talent management must produce a single answer identifying what it means to be a 'talent' in any specific circumstance. As a profession, talent management also maintains a fantasy of control: the expectation that assessed individuals will indeed behave as anticipated, and that stated targets will remain unchanged. As a progressive and trending HR process, talent management's close connection to organisational power relations and political dynamics is rarely acknowledged. The emotional toll on assessed senior executives, as well as potential ramifications for their colleagues, is also often overlooked, despite the significant implications for individual careers and broader inferences of inclusion-exclusion inherent in the process of talent selection. Talent management practitioners and scholars tend not to consider the impact on individuals of inaccurate assessments and mistaken decisions. As a talent manager practitioner who decrees the fate of individuals, such glaring oversights provoked in me an acute ethical anxiety that drove this research. This work offers a critical perspective on the practice of talent management - in particular, the process of judgment involved in the assessment of 'high potentials' and the potent dynamics of inclusion in/exclusion from the talent group. Having witnessed first-hand the inconsistency between apparently robust predictions (based on best practice) and subsequent outcomes, I began this research with strong feelings of ambivalence towards my practice of 25 years and my prospering business of 10 years. The critical perspective of the current study took shape within the research framework, which is based on the philosophy of pragmatism and the complex responsive process of relating that draws on it, as well as on process sociology and complexity sciences. The research methodology insists that scholars take their own direct experience seriously, collect their raw data through writing narratives, and then exercise reflection and reflexivity both as individuals and as part of the Doctor of Management (DMan) learning community. The narratives 'translate experience so that it is meaningful to the reader' (Cunliffe, 2010, p. 228). Applying this innovative approach not only to my research, but also to my professional practice, has led me to challenge the most fundamental assumptions of talent management. I now have a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the process of judgment at its core, and have developed a new way to approach and implement this process within my work. This thesis culminates in three main arguments describing talent management from a new perspective, as well as redefining the role and degree of involvement of talent management consultants. First, the central process of judgment emerged not as an objective analysis communicated in a unidirectional, linear way from the assessor to the assessed, but rather as a relational and social process that involves shifting power relations and an inclusion-exclusion dynamic influenced by many unpredictable factors. Second, from the perspective of the research framework, the assessor can no longer be seen as an objective observer, but must be regarded as a participant who is simultaneously both involved and detached and who must rely on their practical judgment. Talent management's traditional promise of future-oriented focus and reliable predictions is illusory, given that all participants are continuously merging their ongoing experiences to spontaneously co-create the future in unpredictable ways. . Understanding that the assessment process is not a simple numerical exercise (ranking individuals on various scales) and that no single truth can be obtained through an assessment process (since assessment results are co-created with all participants in the process) has eased my ethical concerns and enabled me to continue practising my profession with confidence, by taking a fresh viewpoint of what it is that I am doing. It is my hope that other talent management practitioners will find these insights useful and generalisable, and valid to their own practice - extrapolating from the local to the global.

The speeches in Acts 10 and 17 include climactic statements about the role of Jesus in judgment. These statements raise the question of what Acts presents its protagonists to be saying about Jesus when they speak of him as a judge. The fields of research related to this question have not focused on these statements nor on the general christological significance of judgment. This study offers a reading of the speeches in Acts 10:34-43 and 17:22-31 in the context of Judaism from the late Second Temple period and shortly following that interprets them in light of their place within Luke-Acts as a narrative. Analysis of the activity and nature of eschatological judgment figures in selected pseudepigraphal and Qumran literature, as well as of the use of scripture to construct the figures in these texts, reveals similarities and differences in comparison to the presentation of Jesus in the Acts speeches. Like Jesus, these figures are unique eschatological judges who judge righteously. Several texts label such figures "messiah." With the possible exception of Melchizedek, they are humans, although often with exceptional characteristics. In contrast to Jesus, most texts clearly distinguish their judgment from the final judgment of God at the time of the resurrection. Moreover, they neither forgive nor mediate forgiveness. Exegesis of Acts 10 and 17 demonstrates two points of the christological significance of judgment in those speeches. Specifically, it demonstrates that the statements about the role of Jesus as a judge both express messianic identity and suggest divine authority. The scope of Jesus' judgment and the use of scriptural patterns in these speeches suggest his divine authority by associating him with the final judgment at the resurrection in a manner other texts only do of God. At the same time, his judgment identifies him as the appointed human messiah whom the speeches proclaim.

My study offers a constructive exploration of divine judgment as salvific rather than destructive which I describe aphoristically as iudicandus est salvandus ('to be judged is to be saved'). My provocation to Christian eschatology is that human beings are not saved from judgment, but are saved within it. In chapter 1, I introduce the context of the study and propose the concept of salvific judgment. In chapter 2, I engage in an exploration of the symbols and problems of judgment through a reappraisal of De novissimis ('concerning the last things'), the last section found in traditional works of dogmatics. This is followed, in chapter 3, by a critical engagement with the soteriological optimism posited by four twentieth- and twenty-first century theologians: Sergei Bulgakov, Hans Urs von Balthasar, J.A.T. Robinson, and Marilyn McCord Adams. In chapter 4, I explore four versions of the purpose of judgment: (1) as retributive with a dual outcome, engaging the work of Paul O'Callaghan; (2) as retributive and universalist, in conversation with Sergei Bulgakov; (3) as non-retributive, rectifying, and universalist, exploring the oeuvre of Jürgen Moltmann; and (4) as non-retributive, constitutive of personhood, and quasi-universalist, investigating the eschatological thought of Markus Mühling. In chapter 5, I propose to approach divine judgment as the event of absolute recognition. I posit that it is within the eschatic recognition of God, the self, and the other that transformation and glorification occur in a way that avoids a dual outcome of salvation and damnation. I then explore the problems concerning eternal life ('heaven') in the received tradition and propose that life in the eschatic realm of God is not eternal stasis, but the semper novum. I also explore this understanding of eternal life as it relates to the communion of saints. I conclude by arguing that we may approach divine judgment with faith, hope, and love – not only for ourselves, but for the human race as a whole.

This thesis claims that temporality can provide a novel means through which to distinguish between different types of judgment. Specifically, it focusses upon how the adjudicative process determines factual construction and argues that the resultant construction is, at least in part, contingent upon temporality. As the first of two starting points, the thesis begins by rejecting the subsumption thesis of judgment which states laws simply subsume facts that they ‘correspond to’. It attributes this rejection to the generality of laws and their flexibility as either rules or standards. Second of the two starting points, though related to the first, is what the thesis refers to as the ‘Kantian axiom’ which argues that time shapes consciousness. Extending this, the thesis posits that, filling in the lacuna created by the shortcomings of the subsumptive theory of judgment, adjudication’s temporality shapes its factual construction. Having established these preliminary points, the thesis describes the different ends of a spectrum of judgment in which legal decisions can tend toward. Adjudication as Cognition (abstract judgment), predicated I argue on a spatial-temporality at one end, and Adjudication as Understanding (concrete judgment), grounded on a creative reading of Bergsonian and Gadamerian temporality at the other. The main differences between these forms of judgment is the qualitatively different types of fact they produce, made possible through the temporalities upon which they are contingent. This results in different constructions of the subject and event (facts which law gives meaning to) which may impact upon ascriptions of responsibility. In addition, it is with adjudication as understanding that a potentially transformative form of judgment is possible and in which the radical difference of the subject and event of law emerges. Temporality is thus capable of reframing old problems of jurisprudence as well as articulating new ones. It argues that factual construction, in particular subjectivity is, in part, predicated upon time, and that temporality, as unproblematised, may conceal an exercise of judicial power. It also highlights the general marginalisation of temporality in (legal) modernity and reveals the ‘temporal trap’ of legal subjectivity in which futures are bound and pasts are arbitrarily selected.

This thesis investigates the conceptual use of discernment in First Corinthians. As a motif, discernment spans many issues in the epistle while forming a key element in Paul’s understanding of the eschatological people of God in Christ and his expectations for them to emerge through the renewing process of the Gospel into their new identity. This identity has its type in the Wilderness Tradition of Israel, with the literary influences of 2TJ Wisdom and the OT scriptures undergirding Paul’s conceptualization in an intertextual matrix. Paul develops the motif through an open, subtle intertextuality that does not rely primarily on overt citation, but reflects a conceptual/theological movement from text/history/type to existential situation/antitype in the new covenant community being formed in the first century context of Pauline communities. Discernment does not recur in random, discrete units, but builds throughout the epistle in consistent applications that contribute in significant ways to the development of the Corinthian community. Part I analyses the Pauline groundwork for wisdom exercised through discernment as a foundational necessity for the ἐκκλησία of Corinth. Part II demonstrates the importance of discernment for the community as it functions within society, with respect to internal and external relationships. Part III studies aspects of discernment in the community gathered for worship, with discernment forming a basis for interactions of the worshipping community. Part IV concludes the study. These aspects are tracked in order through the epistle to follow Paul’s coherent use of the motif even as he addresses the occasional nature of varied issues in the Corinthian community. This study moves the discussion away from a strong focus on the dysfunctional aspect of Corinthian schism toward a more positive theology for and about the community. It also expands on limited or fragmented approaches to issues of judgement/discernment to argue for an additional coherent thread in Paul’s thought. Paul maintains a highly hopeful view for this community as an emerging people of realized eschatological fulfilment, empowered to function at a high level of spiritual wisdom as a manifestation of the body of Christ.

The thesis inquires into the theme of political judgement and aims to rethink it from the perspective of twentieth-century philosophies of existence. It seeks to take up the contemporary challenge of political judgement that remains inadequately addressed within recent theorizing: how, given the modern breakdown of metaphysical absolutes, to reinvigorate the human capacity for political judgement as a practical activity able to confront the ambiguous, plural and complex character of our postfoundational world. Against this background, the thesis aspires to reclaim the distinctly historical orientation of twentieth-century existentialism, in particular the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus and Hannah Arendt. It draws on their aesthetic sensibility to resuscitate the human judging ability in its worldly ambiguity and point towards an account of political judgement capable of facing up to the challenges of our plural and uncertain political reality. Retrieving their vigilant assumption of the situated, worldly condition of human political existence and the attendant perplexity of judging politically, the aim of the thesis is to suggest how the existentialists' insights can be brought to bear on contemporary problematics of political judgement that seem to elude the grasp of abstract standards and predetermined yardsticks.

In On Christian Teaching, Saint Augustine writes, “Just and holy living depends on being a good judge of things.” This brief sentence lucidly articulates the importance that judgment plays in Augustine’s thought. This thesis is the first full-length study of how he understands the distinct role of the Holy Spirit in judgment. I argue that judgment denotes both the discernment of a thing’s nature and evaluation of it; and we become good judges only as we are re-ordered by the love which is, in Augustine’s favourite pneumatological verse, “poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit” (Romans 5:5). I analyse this transformative work of the Spirit according to two broad categories: first, the Spirit re-orders our relation to creation principally by uniting us to the Word, the second person of the Trinity, in whom all things are created, and so we are able to discern a thing’s nature and evaluate it according to God’s purposes in creation; and, second, the Spirit re-orders our relation to time, as we patiently endure this troublous life as pilgrims hoping for eternal Sabbath rest; within this eschatological horizon situated in the age between Christ’s first coming and his return, we restrain ourselves from making both unfounded and unnecessary judgments as we defer to God’s final judgement. This thesis is divided into two parts. In the first part, on the “theory” of judgment, I explicate the consistent relation throughout Augustine’s corpus between pneumatology, judgment and ethics (chapter one). I then proceed to trace out his account of how the gift of the Spirit’s love perfects our judgment by re-ordering our relation to creation, and, conversely, how lust distorts it. A right relation to creation turns on taking up our middle place: below God, next to our neighbours, and above nature (chapter two). In the second part, on the “practice” of judgment, I focus first on other-judgment, especially the role of mercy (chapter three), and then in the fourth and final chapter I turn to self-judgment, including a lengthy consideration of the nature and role of conscience (chapter four). For Augustine, then, it is only by the Spirit’s love that we are made good judges, and, simultaneously, it is only when we are good judges that our love conforms to the truth both of God’s good creation and of our in-between age.

The knowledge base of empirical psychology is more expansive than ever before. So too is the impulse to integrate this factual knowledge into political theory. But how should this psychological turn be undertaken? What would a political psychology for political theorists look like? How could psychology credibly tackle the questions that political theorists characteristically ask, especially regarding the nature and consequences of prescriptive political judgment? In this thesis, I explore this issue through the framework of recent debates between political moralists—specifically, John Rawls, G. A. Cohen, and Peter Singer—and political realists—largely Bernard Williams. Deploying the insights of political realists, I argue that moralists cannot quarantine the relevance of psychological facts through the ideal of a 'pure' normative judgment. To explore what this empirical engagement might look like, I contrast these moralist ideals of judgment with Jonathan Haidt’s social intuitionism, which proposes a more affectively laden and pluralistic model of judgment. I then redeploy the insights of political realism to critique social intuitionism, to uncover its weaknesses from the perspective of existing political theory. Finally, to stabilize this critique, I lay out the framework for a reflexive political psychology, which acknowledges the co-constitutive relationship between the discipline of psychology and its subject matter: human psychology. This reflexive political psychology offers an agenda by which we can investigate the political usefulness of psychological and political theories.

The present thesis set out to investigate how sensory modality and spatial presentation influence visual and auditory duration judgments in the millisecond range. The effects of modality and spatial location were explored by considering right and left side presentations of mixed or blocked visual and auditory stimuli. Several studies have shown that perceived duration of a stimulus can be affected by various extra-temporal factors such as modality and spatial position. Auditory stimuli lead to more precise duration judgments than visual stimuli and often last subjectively longer than visual stimuli of equal duration. The circumstances under which these modality differences occur are not clear yet. Recent studies indicated an interaction between temporal and spatial processing. Overestimation of durations was associated with right side presentation of visual stimuli, underestimation with left side presentation. However, the effect of spatial presentation has not been explored in the auditory temporal judgments. Furthermore, there is a debate concerning the mechanisms underlying processing of visual and auditory intervals with some researchers supporting the view that there is a central, amodal temporal mechanism and others arguing in favour of distinct, modality specific temporal mechanisms. The above issues were examined in a series of experiments using the duration discrimination paradigm. Processing demands where varied between experiments by varying the number of stimuli positions and the way that different modality trials were presented (mixed or blocked). Across all experiments we found no effect of location either in visual or auditory domain. However, in experiments in which different modality trials were intermixed, participants in the visual versions of the task tended to overestimate durations of comparison stimuli that were presented at different locations to the standard stimuli. In such conditions, visual stimuli were also judged to be longer than the auditory. However, when the location of the comparison stimulus was at the same side as the standard a reverse effect was observed. These findings call into question an influence of the position per se on temporal judgments as the visual duration judgments were affected rather by the change of the location. Auditory judgments were not affected by location manipulations, suggesting that different mechanisms might underlie visual and auditory temporal processing. Based on these results, we propose the existence of an error-correction mechanism, according to which a specific duration is added in order to compensate for the loss of time caused by spatial attention shifts. This mechanism is revealed under some circumstances (such as mixed modality) where it is over-activated, resulting into a systematic bias. This work has important implications for the contemporary research in time perception as it is shedding new light on the possible ways that a unified experience of timing arises from modally and spatially specific temporal mechanisms.

My dissertation draws upon ancient political philosophy (Plato and Aristotle) and 20th century hermeneutic thought (Heidegger and Gadamer) to argue that our judgment and understanding is always “situated” within a world, or horizon, shaped by the projects, practices, and traditions in which we are engaged. This means that judgment never starts from scratch. The exercise of judgment, in evaluating competing arguments in politics or law, in trying to understand a philosophical text, in deliberating about how to act in this or that circumstance, is always informed by preconceptions and commitments that we have not justified in advance. In this sense, our judgment is always “prejudiced.” But contrary to a familiar way of thinking, the prejudicial aspect of judgment is not some regrettable limitation. Certain prejudices, I argue, can actually enable good judgment rather than hinder it. The primary goal of the dissertation is to clarify the concept of prejudice and to draw out its implications for politics, ethics, and philosophy. What does it mean to reason from within the world? What room does such reasoning allow for human agency and political reform? By drawing upon Heidegger’s notion of “Being-in-the-World” and Gadamer’s notion of “horizon,” I develop the idea that our life circumstance is an intelligible perspective that informs our deliberation and judgment. Moreover, our life perspective provides the basis for a kind of situated agency. After elaborating the situated conception of understanding, I show that it is implicit in Aristotle’s notion of practical wisdom (phronesis) and in Plato’s notion of dialectic. My goal is to bring out a link that is often overlooked between their philosophy and 20th century hermeneutic thought. By reading each in light of the other, we gain a deeper understanding of what it means to reason from within the perspective of our lives.

This dissertation raises the question of the political world, and pursues it as central theme in the political thought of Hannah Arendt and the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Within the phenomenological tradition, world refers to a referential context of relations between beings, within which those beings appear as meaningful. Since Heidegger, the concept of world has been inextricably linked with that of understanding, the disclosedness that guides any interpretation of beings and allows them to appear as what they are. In what sense is the world political? In what sense does the political constitute a world? For Arendt, the political concerns human beings in their plurality. It concerns the relations between members of a polis, who are related to each other by the world that they share in common in action and speech. The polis is not simply a city or a political entity, but a space within which both things and human beings appear according to a distinctively political mode of disclosedness, a plural understanding. In this, Arendt operates within a hermeneutical ontology, though it is often unthematized or underdeveloped within her work. Gadamer’s hermeneutical philosophy makes it possible to explicate and develop this ontology, illuminating the complex reciprocal relationship Arendt develops between the worldliness of human beings and the space of appearance that arises out of the exchange of interpretive judgments: the political world. The central theme of the political world serves to uncover the hermeneutical underpinnings of Arendt’s political thought, as well as the political implications of Gadamer’s philosophy. Part I shows how an embryonic and unthematized concept of the political world arises from the analysis of being-with [Mitsein] in Heidegger’s Being and Time. Part II proposes a novel systematic interpretation of The Human Condition, situating the conceptual distinctions of the vita activa within a hermeneutical ontology, with particular emphasis on Arendt’s appropriation and development of the concept of world. Part III turns to Gadamer’s treatment of tradition and historically-effected consciousness [wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein] in Truth and Method, arguing that the handing-down of tradition describes an historical activity of plural understanding, from which the political world emerges. Part IV traces the development of Arendt’s theory of judgment in tandem with her account of δόξα, the discursive mode proper to plural understanding, and proposes a revisionist interpretation of her mature theory of judgment. Gadamer’s fusion of horizons, rather than a Kantian extended mentality, emerges as an apt description of the space of appearance that emerges within plural interpretive discourse.

This research explores how labeling an information source as AI can help to improve the message credibility of science information and reduce the partisan bias in the evaluation of fact-checking messages in the context of science communication. To that end, two moderated mediation models were constructed and tested. In Study 1, experimental results suggest that AI sources will conditionally assist scientists to develop more persuasive science communication information. Results also indicated that trust in machines moderates the effect of source labeling as AI. Additionally, the experiment provided empirical evidence that public trust in science may be more significant than source effects when individuals judge the credibility of science information. In Study 2, an experiment was designed to delve into information processing for fact-checking messages about politicized science issues. The research model showed that individuals’ polarized perception of the fact-checking message decreased when they recognize that fact-checking was created by AI while the polarization existed when the source of the fact-checking was labeled as human scientists. This study extends the theoretical discussion on AI in communication by shedding light on the role of AI in human judgment and decision-making. It also provides practical implications for communication practitioners.

This dissertation focuses on three main subject areas for applied judgement and decision making: Vaccine uptake, the effects of concussions, and discretionary parole hearings. Vaccination is a key component of maintaining community health. Nevertheless, there has been a recent trend of people refusing vaccines, causing many dangerous diseases to return to modern society. Using a sample of 722 college students, we constructed theory-based measures to determine why people vaccinate (or not). Using hierarchical linear and logistic regressions, we predicted whether participants intended to get vaccinated in the future and whether they got vaccinated last year, respectively. We found that, as predicted, endorsement of bottom-line gist principles predicted vaccination intentions and behavior but in opposite directions. These results were significant while controlling for potential confounds and suggest that decision making theories, particularly FTT, may help explain why some individuals vaccinate, while others choose not to.Turning to concussions, research suggests that concussions may alter decision-making, specifically with respect to intertemporal choice, increasing discounting of larger later rewards relative to sooner smaller rewards. The objective of this study was to illuminate the relationships between concussions, as well as sub-concussive injuries, and temporal discounting in a non-clinical sample of college-aged athletes. We hypothesized that the length of time a person spends participating in a high-impact sport and the number of recent concussions a person sustains would predict greater discounting. We found that more years playing a high-impact sport (American football) and a higher number of diagnosed concussions within the past year were independently associated with greater discounting of delayed rewards, controlling for trait measures of impulsivity. Together, these results are consistent with predictions that recent concussive and cumulative sub-concussive trauma among young, nonprofessional athletes increase discounting of delayed rewards, with potentially deleterious effects on health. The U.S. prison system is one of the largest in the world, and it comes as no surprise that this system comes with its share of biases. However, although there is a large literature which has examined bias that may lead a person to prison, there is little research on what bias might exist to prevent someone from leaving prison, often through parole. Existing research on whether race plays a role in parole hearings is scarce, and most of the work is outdated and/or has been conducted without using data from real hearings. Further, there are no studies on potential sex bias using real parole data nor participants from the United States. Using data from all of South Carolina’s parole hearings from 2014 to 2016, we analyze, using chi-square and regression analyses, whether race and sex play a role in parole board decisions. Results indicated a bias in favor of women compared to men and against minorites compared to Whites. Further, an interaction indicated a possible effect akin to the defeminization of minority women and dehuminzation of miniority men. These results are the first of their kind and support the unfortunate notion that race and sex may be determining factors in whether an inmate is allowed to serve their sentence outside of the confines of prison.

Forecasting using judgment is common in practice. From project planning to investing in a house, we routinely make important decisions based on how we expect the future to unfold. In much the same way, governments and businesses rely on forecasts related to political and economic events in order to appropriately plan for future challenges and opportunities. The cybersecurity industry is no different, and each year many security organizations release ``annual predictions'' of anticipated cybersecurity issues. The premise behind such predictions is that experts are in a superior position due to their knowledge and experience to anticipate future cybersecurity-related events. However, this premise is untested and motivates this research.This master's thesis examines the primary question of whether security professionals' predictions about future cybersecurity-related questions are systematically distinct from those of other Information Technology professionals, who lack the same specialized experience. In particular, this research examines the results of 20 security-related surveys. Each survey takes a different approach to the category and format of the question in order to analyze a variety of types of forecasting questions. Using a combination of measurement techniques, I determine if there exist any significant patterns among security professionals and non-security professionals. Additionally, I analyze two cohorts within security professionals to determine if there are measurable differences between them with regard to judgment forecasts. Through this study, I concluded that I cannot support the claim that security professionals offer a distinct judgment over non-security experts.

In this qualitative multi-case study, three college-age music majors from the local state university were interviewed, observed, and asked to complete reflections in order to answer the following questions: How do mindfulness activities affect collegiate double bass music students’ perceptions of their own playing and practicing? My secondary questions were 1) how do mindfulness activities affect flow experiences among collegiate double bass music students, and 2) how do mindfulness activities affect students’ perception of self-care? The interviews were transcribed, coded using “concept coding” (Miler, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2020), and then grouped into categories, themes, and sub-themes. The themes were time, judgement, perceptions of playing, perceptions of practicing, flow, and self-care. The participants, John, Emily, and Gabriel, each reported more positivity in the perception of playing and perception of the act of practicing. They also reported fewer situations of being pulled out of flow states. Finally, John and Gabriel decided to continue pursuing mindfulness meditation as it helped them with their mental well-being. The findings from this study could change how music educators construct their curriculum, and how musicians approach their instrument.

With age, decision makers rely more on heuristic and affect-based processing. However, age differences in reliance on the ‘affect heuristic’ have not yet been quantified. This heuristic derives judgments by drawing on one’s positive and negative feelings towards stimuli. To test whether affect heuristic usage is associated with age, an adult lifespan sample (N = 195, 21 – 90 years, Mage = 52.95, 50% female, 71% non-Hispanic White) completed three affect heuristic tasks. Reliance on affect was indexed through a positive relationship between feelings of dread and statistical inferences about mortality risks, a positive relationship between affective responses and impact judgments when evaluating catastrophes, and a negative perceived relationship between food risks and benefits. Contrary to our hypothesis, older age did not predict stronger use of the affect heuristic. Indices did not correlate across tasks, suggesting that use of the affect heuristic is context- or stimulus-dependent rather than a stable trait.

Across four chapters, we answer four empirical questions and, in theorizing about each, we explore the relationships between moral or romantic evaluations of others and perceptions of others’ desires and values. In Chapter 1, we ask whether the side-effect effect—an asymmetry in intention attribution—is a function of moral judgment, as leading hypotheses maintain. We test the predictions of an alternative moral-free hypothesis that attributes the effect to the asymmetric involvement of costly and beneficial side-effects, and people’s tendency to treat foreseen costs as sacrifices. We successfully produce the effect in cases that are morally neutral and successfully mute the effect in cases that are morally charged. In Chapter 2, we ask whether and to what extent the base rate of a behavior influences associated moral judgment. We find that base rates influence moral judgment with only very small effect sizes. Additional studies suggest that previous research purporting to find more substantial effects of base-rate information on moral judgment may have failed to properly isolate base rates from injunctive norms. We reconcile our findings with the more general but well-established impacts of social-influence by showing that the influence of others’ behavior depends on whether we consider them part of a morally relevant reference group. In Chapter 3, we examine the factors underlying a blaming discrepancy between responses to a cyber peeper and to a peeping Tom; a discrepancy for which current theories of blame do not provide a straightforward explanation. We focus on major differences between cyber peeping and peeping Tom scenarios that may contribute to a blaming discrepancy, such as the effort involved on the part of the peeper and the risk-taking on the part of the victim. Four of eight such factors are found to account for most of the discrepancy. In Chapter 4, we use a new method to ask men and women to self-report the traits they prefer in a romantic partner and to indicate what they imagine the opposite gender prefers. The results reveal striking discrepancies between what people report wanting in a potential partner and what the opposite gender imagines they want.

A meta-study is a collection of many very small studies, called micro-studies, based on one core design. Meta-studies address many disadvanta7ges of meta-analyses and provide a possible solution for the replication crisis in research. In addition to addressing the problems related to meta-analyses, meta-studies provide several unique advantages to conducting research, specifically by testing the limits of generalizability and by having higher statistical power than a traditional design of the same total sample size. As a demonstration of the methodology, we conducted two meta-studies of the risky-choice gain-loss framing effect. In addition to replicating many past findings involving the framing effect, we also found two novel results, one of which was particularly surprising. One novel result was the nonlinear moderation of the framing effect by extreme probabilities (e.g., 1% and 99%). Participants were less likely to exhibit the framing effect when presented with extreme probabilities than when presented with moderate probabilities. The surprising novel result was that the framing effect doubled in size when participants were presented with a slightly risky option instead of a certain option. This result is contradictory to both Prospect Theory and Fuzzy Trace Theory predictions.

Multiple-cue judgment tasks involve predicting a continuous outcome from multiple sources of information known as cues. In any given judgment task, there are an infinite number of ways that the cues could relate to the outcome. So, how do people efficiently learn in a multiple-cue judgment task? Based on the findings of decades of experimental and naturalistic measurements, researchers have proposed that human judges have innate biases to expect that the task they are learning in features cues with a linear-additive relationship to the outcome. That is, each cue has a linear relationship to the outcome, and each cue value can be added together to make an accurate judgment. We use a recently developed procedure known as iterated learning to measure the strength of this linear-additive bias. Iterated learning measures biases by having participants learn from each other in a sequence, like in the children’s game of telephone. If a strong linear-additive bias exists, the errors that participants make in learning will be consistent with the bias, and these errors will accumulate over the sequence until the data in the sequence is linear-additive. We conducted 10 multiple-cue judgment experiments with the iterated learning procedure, manipulating the function that the sequence was started with, how the stimuli were presented to participants, and whether stimuli featured alternative or directional cues. To our surprise, we did not find evidence of a strong linear-additive bias. Instead, our results suggest two implications for biases in multiple-cue judgment: they may be heterogeneous across the population or they may be weaker than anticipated. We argue that the previous evidence in favor of the linear-additive bias may have been overstated and outline several future directions for better elucidating how judges learn in multiple-cue judgment tasks.

A normality judgment is a type of generalization that ascribes a normal feature or property to a kind. The explanatory link account of normality—an account of what it is to be a normal feature or property and therefore an account of the content of a normality judgment—is defended in this dissertation. According to the explanatory link account, a feature is normal for a kind if and only if an individual’s possession of that feature is explained by its being a member of that kind. The account is inspired by the Aristotelian notion that being a carpenter explains one’s house-building activities whereas being a grammarian wouldn’t explain the same. The second chapter defends this form of explanation—called herein “kind explanation.” The dissertation closes with a study of the extensional relationship between normality and statistical regularity, and finally with a study of the inferential profile of normality judgments.

Eight chapters examine cognitive processes underlying three moral judgments: how much harm is acceptable for greater good, how much to help others, and how responsible to hold them for their successes and failures. Chapters 1-3 examine how judgments of actions that cause harm to achieve a greater good are sensitive to expected value (the ratio of good done to harm done), outcome likelihoods, and where shifts in outcome likelihoods occur. Findings contradict dominant dual-process theories of moral cognition, which posit that people either react to the harm caused by the action or to the net benefit resulting from it, irrespective of the specific ratio of harm done to good done. We demonstrate that moral judgments are remarkably sensitive to this ratio, in ways partially consistent with Prospect Theory. Chapter 4 provides further evidence for the interaction of affective and deliberative processes by demonstrating how incidental affect can shift moral risk preferences. Chapter 5 explores the mental representation of good deeds. The proposed Moral Accounting Model illustrates how moral credit from prior beneficence excuses further beneficence. Effort, effect, domain generalizability, temporal generalizability, and temporal diffusion are identified as features of moral credit. Chapter 6 identifies the extent to which people care about the effectiveness of their beneficence: Though donors prefer to give to more efficient charities of the options they are presented with, whether the options explicitly fail to meet or exceed efficiency standards does not affect donor behavior. Chapter 7 examines responsibility attribution, challenging a prevalent view in lay theory research that thinking of people as changeable is universally adaptive. It provides a theoretical argument for how viewing people as changeable may result in holding others increasingly personally responsible for their circumstances. Chapter 8 provides empirical evidence for this process: the same mindset inductions used to demonstrate the benefits of changeability are shown to increase blame of others for continual failures.Implications for real-world decision-making, from how to program autonomous vehicles to avoid collisions, to how to encourage donation to charity, to how to address structural barriers to achievement are discussed.

This dissertation contains three papers that together demonstrate how the structure of a choice process and of the information consumers encounter can influence what they think, feel, and do. Chapter 1 investigates how the structure of a choice process—and in particular, the timing of a decision to act relative to the timing of the action—influences how individuals feel at the point of acting. We demonstrate that the emotional experience of guilt is composed of two dissociable sources: one tied to the decision to act, and one tied to the behavior itself. With this unpacking, we find that introducing a temporal gap between one’s decision to act and one’s behavior allows decision guilt to decay, which reduces the guilt at the point of acting and carries important behavioral consequences.Chapter 2 probes the structure of a purchasing interaction. We compare two ways that the purchase and quantity decisions in a purchase process can be organized. In one, customers make the purchase and quantity decisions separately; in the other, customers simultaneously indicate whether and how much to buy. We find that the simultaneous consideration of both choices changes the psychology of how people decide, and ultimately increases their willingness to purchase. In 27 lab experiments and a large field experiment, we find that this “quantity integration” can lead to substantial lift.Finally, chapter 3 reveals how the structure of one aspect of a customer interaction, a small monetary incentive, can influence what people believe and accordingly what they do. We show that customers who encounter a small surcharge for failing to perform some behavior infer that this behavior is more socially normative than those who encounter a small discount for performing it. This inference carries key consequences, changing how people feel and what they decide to do in the future. Collectively, these three chapters demonstrate the critical importance of the structuring of choices and information for consumers’ beliefs, emotional responses, decisions, and behaviors.

Creativity is a fundamental component of innovation and critical for long-term business success. Identifying the products and ideas that are most creative, and therefore worthy of further development and investment, is an essential part of the creative process. However, experimental research into creativity over the past 20 years has yielded inconsistent and contradictory results. Moreover, this same research has shown that organizations struggle to identify their most creative products and ideas for further development. Critics suggest organizational creativity research may suffer from measurement misspecification due to a misalignment between existing construct definitions of creativity as a response that is both “novel and useful” and experimental studies that use only a single item, creativity, to measure creative output. This research investigates whether the theorized misalignment may be due, in part, to the research use of judges with little or no experience in the creative domain and their failure to understand the criteria, approaches, and techniques that expert judges actually use to assess creative output. To better understand how these issues may affect research results, this research utilized Naturalistic Decision Making field-study methods to investigate how expert judges assess the creative output of experienced professionals in the setting of a creativity awards contest. Through a series of interviews, observations, think-aloud protocols, and simulations with expert judges of creativity award contests, this research identifies six factors experts use to assess professional level creative output, and uncovers the processes, approach, and challenges involved in the real-world assessment of creative products and ideas. Recommendations for how assessing creativity can be improved in research and practice are discussed as well as suggestions for future research.

The predictive validity of any assessment system is only as good as its implementation. Across a range of decision settings, algorithmic methods of data combination often match or outperform the judgmental accuracy of expert judges. Despite this, individual assessments still largely rely on the use of expert judgment to combine candidate assessment information into an overall assessment rating to predict desired criteria such as job performance. This typically results in lower levels of validity than what could theoretically have been achieved. Based on archival assessment data from an international management consulting firm, this dissertation presents three related studies with an overarching goal of better understanding the processes underlying why expert judgment tends to be less accurate in prediction compared to algorithmic judgmental methods. First, the Lens Model is used to break down expert judgment in individual assessments into its component processes, finding that when combining assessment information into an overall evaluation of candidates, expert assessors use suboptimal predictor weighting schemes and also use them inconsistently when evaluating multiple candidates. Second, the ability of expert assessors to tailor their judgments to maximise predictive power for specific organisations is tested by comparing models of expert judgment local and non-local to organisations. No evidence of valid expertise tailored to organisations is found as models of expert judgment local to a specific organisation performed only as well as models non-local to that organisation. Third, the importance of judgmental consistency in maximising predictive validity is evaluated by testing random weighting schemes. Here, simply exercising mindless consistency by applying a randomly generated weighting scheme consistently is enough to outperform expert judgment. Taken together, these results suggest that the suboptimal and inconsistent ways that expert assessors combine assessment information is drastically hampering their ability to make accurate evaluations of assessment candidates and to predict candidates’ future job performance. Even if they are able to demonstrate valid expert insight from time to time, over the long run the opportunities for human error far outweigh any opportunity for expertise to be truly influential. Implications of these findings for how assessments are conducted in organisations as well as recommendations for how expert judgment could still be retained and improved are discussed.

The field of intuitive physics has been reinvigorated in recent years, providing converging computational, behavioral, and neural evidence demonstrating that humans possess a wealth of knowledge about the attributes and dynamics of physical entities in the world. However, progress in the field has led to many questions regarding (i) the human capacity for perception, physical inference, and higher-level reasoning; and (ii) how to design a machine to emulate newfound capabilities. My dissertation focuses on a range of research topics, from the characteristics of human perception and representation in dynamic scenes, to mental simulation of novel situations and transfer of higher-level knowledge to seemingly unrelated problem domains. In sum, my dissertation makes five major contributions:1. There is a signicant division between early research in intuitive physics and more recent investigations. This is largely due to a discrepancy between the reasoning systems utilized in each era's tasks; namely, explicit reasoning in early (pencil-and-paper)tasks, and implicit reasoning in recent (prediction and recognition) ones. While many earlier results have been explained by modern computational approaches, a number of findings remain unexplained. My dissertation provides a review of early intuitive physics research and places it in the context of modern computational approaches utilizing Bayesian statistics and machine learning. Critically, my dissertation outlines the shortcomings of each approach and the hurdles that must be overcome before an intelligent and generalizable intuitive physics architecture can be developed.2. We examine how humans perceive and represent observable information in dynamic, two-body object collision situations. The hypothesis that humans perceive motion in relation to meaningful|sometimes moving|landmarks in space is tested under thenoisy Newton framework for mass and causal inference. We term this the relative noisy Newton model, with the key distinction that the slow motion prior for motion perception is evaluated with respect to stationary points in the local environment.3. We report human experiments demonstrating the viability of virtual reality (VR) technology in intuitive physics research. VR technology allows for the construction of novel environments whose characteristics differ from the real world in ways that preclude laboratory experimentation. One manipulation explored in my dissertation is the variation of gravitational acceleration in projectile motion situations. We show that the influence of unfamiliar gravity fields on human reasoning varies based on task demands. Shortcomings of current VR technologies are further discussed.4. We introduce the intuitive substance engine (ISE) for explaining human reasoning about non-solid substance dynamics through mental simulation. This model is formed under the noisy Newton framework and provides converging evidence that people reason about complex physical situations by propagating noisy representations forwards in time using approximate, Newtonian principles. We explore whether people utilize coarse perceptual approximations of non-solid substance volumes when making their predictions; specifically, by representing substances as collections of rigid balls. We further propose specific task and stimulus characteristics which facilitate scene representation and subsequent mental simulation.5. We explore the benefits of animated instructional materials in demonstrating higher-level concepts based on low-level physical interactions. We report a moderated mediation (path analysis) model exploring how individual differences in fluid intelligenceimpact comprehension of source information and subsequent transfer to novel target problems. The reported findings are the first to explore the interaction between fluid intelligence and spontaneous analogical transfer.

Jurors have duties to follow strict interpretations of the law when making decisions about defendant guilt. However, jurors are not blank slates – by the time trial has started, eligible jurors (i.e. adults) have already accumulated strong senses of gist (intuition) built upon experience, emotion, and moral reasoning irrespective of the law. We investigate the impact of verbatim (violations of rote legal definitions) and gist (bottom-line or essence) manipulations of rape on juror decision-making. Despite jury instructions, we predict that legal verdicts will be influenced by gist. Conversely, we predict that verbatim manipulations will influence personal assignments of guilt such that scenarios that violate the law will be judged as more immoral or personally violating. The first experiment measured responses to scenarios involving alcohol (N = 158) and scenarios involving age disparities (N = 206). Participants received one of four combinations of two cases, giving two verdicts per case, resulting in 4 total responses. These verdicts corresponded to whether the actions in the scenario rose to the level of rape legally and personally - participants gave hard legal verdicts (guilty and not guilty) as if participants were on a jury, and personal verdicts that corresponded to personal expectations of rape (still coded as guilty/not guilty). The presence of verbatim violations and gist violations of rape both significantly increased the rate of legal and personal verdicts, implying that 1) the gist of rape inflates legal guilty verdicts and 2) written law inflates personal opinions of what qualifies as rape while controlling for rape myth acceptance (endorsement of myths related to sexual assault and aggression). Experiment 2 (N = 258) improved upon the methods of Experiment 1. The age scenario was revised, and scenarios related to coercion and deception replaced alcohol. Overall, age-related scenarios were more influenced by verbatim, and coercion and deception were more overall influenced by gist. Follow-up studies with gender, survivor status, and law enforcement are suggested for informing relevant policy.

In this dissertation, I examine the complex role that the body played in early modern constructions of judgment. Moving away from an overreliance on anti-theatrical texts as the authority on the body in Shakespeare's plays, my project intervenes in the field Shakespearean studies by widening the lens through which scholars view the body's role in the early modern theater. Through readings of four plays—Richard II, Hamlet, King Lear, and The Winter's Tale—I demonstrate that Shakespeare uses a wide range of ideas about the human body from religious, philosophical, medical, and cultural spheres of thought to challenge Puritan accusations that the public theater audience is incapable of rational judgment. The first chapter outlines the parameters of the project. In Chapter 2, I argue that Richard II draws parallels between the theatrical community and the community created through the sacramental experiences of baptism and communion to show that bodies play a crucial role in establishing common experience and providing an avenue for judgment. In Chapter 3, I argue that Shakespeare establishes correspondences between bodily and social collaboration to show how both are needed for the memory-making project of the theater. In the next chapter, I show how Shakespeare appropriates what early moderns perceived of as the natural vulnerability in English bodies to suggest the passionate responses associated with impressionability can actually be sources of productive judgment and self-edification. I argue the storm models this passionate judgment, providing a guide for audience behavior. In Chapter 5, I argue that the memories created by and within the women in The Winter's Tale evoke the tradition of housewifery and emphasize the female role in preservation. Female characters stand in for hidden female contributors to the theater and expose societal blindness to women's work. Through each of these chapters, I argue that Shakespeare's plays emphasize the value of bodily experience and suggest that the audience take up what I have termed "corporeal judgment."

Very little is known about the underlying neural mechanisms of individual differences in judgment and reasoning ability, and even less work has been done to investigate neural correlates of dual-processing. According to many dual-processing theories, type 2 processing in judgment and reasoning relies heavily on cognitive control. Two particular patterns of neural activity, frontal midline theta (FMT) and fronto-parietal theta coherence, have been related to cognitive control in several different paradigms. As such, they presented candidates for neural correlates of type 2 processing. Additionally, working memory capacity has been linked to FMT, fronto-parietal theta coherence, and performance on judgment and reasoning tasks. However, the relationship between these variables had not been tested in previous research. Across two experiments, working memory capacity failed to predict FMT or fronto-parietal theta coherence, but did predict more logical fallacies and semantic coherence in Experiment 2. Judgment ability was measured through the number of conjunction and disjunction fallacies committed, as well as semantic coherence, a stricter benchmark of judgment ability that measures how well participants’ responses correspond to the type of probability set described in the problem In Experiment 1, FMT predicted more logical fallacies and more semantic coherence, reflecting higher levels of cognitive control. In Experiment 2, there was less fronto-parietal theta coherence in identical sets compared to other types of probability sets, which require more cognitive control, supporting the link between fronto-parietal theta coherence and cognitive control. However, neither FMT nor fronto-parietal theta coherence predicted logical fallacies or semantic coherence in Experiment 2. Together, these experiments provide preliminary evidence that FMT and fronto-parietal theta coherence are important for cognitive control in judgment and reasoning tasks, but no evidence that they are neural correlates for type 2 processing.

This dissertation investigates how people make inferences about missing information. Whereas most prior literature focuses on how people process known information, I show that the extent to which people make inferences about missing information impacts judgments and choices. Specifically, I investigate how (1) awareness of known unknowns affects overconfidence in judgment in Chapter 1, (2) beliefs about the knowability of unknowns impacts investment strategies in Chapter 2, and (3) inferences about forgotten unknowns influence choices from memory in Chapter 3.Chapter 1 investigates how overconfidence can stem from neglecting to consider missing information. Most prior research has attributed overconfidence to people focusing disproportionately on evidence favoring the chosen hypothesis relative to its alternatives. In this chapter, I find that neglecting unknown evidence independently contributes to overconfidence. In a first study, respondents answered questions such as, “Which of these fast food items has more calories, a Subway sandwich, or a McDonald's cheeseburger? / How confident are you?” Using a process tracing technique, I found that participants who considered more missing evidence were less overconfident than those that thought about more known evidence. Meanwhile, participants who considered more unknown information answered the same number of questions correctly, resulting in better calibration. In two additional studies, I prompted participants to list unknowns before assessing confidence in their judgments. This “consider the unknowns” technique reduced overconfidence substantially, and was more effective than the de-biasing technique most often prescribed in the research literature (“consider the alternative”). Importantly, considering the unknowns was selective in its impact: it reduced confidence only in domains where participants were overconfident, but did not affect confidence in domains where participants were well-calibrated or under-confident. Chapter 2 investigates how inferences about the knowability of missing information impacts investment choices. Recent research has found that people intuitively distinguish aleatory uncertainty that is inherently random or stochastic (e.g. What is the probability that a fair coin will land heads?) from epistemic uncertainty that is attributed to missing knowledge or information (e.g., Which company had a larger market capitalization at the end of 2015, Google or Apple?). In a series of surveys and experiments involving laypeople, experienced investors, and financial advisors, I found that investors who viewed stock market uncertainty as more epistemic/knowable searched for more stock information and were willing to pay more for financial advice, whereas investors who viewed stock market uncertainty as more aleatory/random diversify more. Similarly, when investors were primed to think about epistemic uncertainty they are more willing to pay for stock information whereas when they were primed to think about aleatory uncertainty they diversified more when completing an incentive-compatible investment task. Taken together, these studies point to the critical role that the perception of the nature of uncertainty can have on an investor’s judgments and choices.Chapter 3 investigates how inferences about forgotten product features impact consumer choices from memory. Consumers must often make product judgments and choices based on information contained in memory. For instance, a consumer may learn information about the Apple Watch, then choose among smart watches later. The consumer may recall some features clearly, such as the Apple Watch’s ability to respond to text messages, but also realize that they have forgotten other features entirely. Whereas most prior research has focused on how consumers evaluate remembered information, this research examines how product judgments and choices are also guided by inferences consumers make about forgotten information. First, I found that consumers overestimated how closely the quality of forgotten features resembled remembered features. As a result, consumers tended to choose a product from memory over an equivalent product that is fully described when the remembered features are more positive and choose a product that is fully described over an equivalent product from memory when the remembered features are more negative.Taken together, this work expands our understanding of how people make inferences about missing evidence, the nature of uncertainty, and forgotten information. Importantly, this work shows how these inferences impact critical outcomes in the field, such as overconfidence, investment strategy, and product choice.

Across 11 studies, the authors demonstrate a novel framing effect, attribute matching, whereby matching a salient attribute of a decision frame with that of a decision’s options facilitates decision making. This attribute matching is shown to increase decision confidence and, ultimately, consensus estimates by increasing feelings of metacognitive ease. In Study 1, participants choosing the more attractive of two faces or rejecting the less attractive face reported greater confidence in and perceived consensus around their decision. Study 2 extended this finding from valence to calorie judgments, whereas Studies 3-5 extended the effect to different post-decision attitudes. Study 6 found decision ease mediates these changes in confidence and consensus estimates. Consistent with a misattribution account, when participants were warned to this external source of ease in Study 7, the effect disappeared. Studies 8-10 rule out alternative accounts, such as response substitution and language effects. The final study demonstrates attribute matching in a more realistic context. The paper concludes with a discussion of related psychological constructs as well as potential downstream consequences.

When an agent “loses herself” in a project, or becomes completely absorbed in an activity, she has what Heidegger calls “reflected self-understanding”. This kind of reflected understanding allows the agent to find herself out in the world, “in things”, without ever holding any reflexive attitudes about herself. In my dissertation, I develop and defend Heidegger’s account of reflected self-understanding, which constitutes – for Heidegger – the most basic grip an agent has on who she is. I suggest that Heidegger’s account of reflected self-understanding is not only a significant contribution to the history of philosophy, but also the central kernel that structures Heidegger’s thought on the topics of understanding, interpretation, truth, and authenticity in Being and Time.

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant argues that judgment, our faculty for thinking particulars under universals, is governed by what he calls the “principle of purposiveness.” This principle states that we must look at the world as if it were made for our faculty of cognition. The purpose of this principle is not merely that we increase the systematicity of our knowledge, but that we achieve our highest end as rational agents. For Kant, this is the realization of a world in which happiness perfectly accords with morality. Ultimately, all of our activity—including our theoretical scientific pursuits—is directed toward this end. Poor judgment is not a matter of representing something that fails to correspond with the way the world is independent of our point of view. Rather, poor judgment consists in our engaging in the world in such a way that we fail to notice its relevance to any of the ends a human being could justifiably pursue for the sake of our ultimate end. To improve our judgment, we must learn to free ourselves from our particular, and often private, ends in order to see the full significance of objects. This principle of purposiveness is best illustrated by our judgments of taste, which we cannot justify on the basis of articulable rules. Careful analysis of these judgments shows how we must rely on a fundamental capacity to determine what is significant to other points of view, what Kant calls the “common sense.” The normativity of this faculty comes from our shared commitment to the highest end of reason, which compels us to consider how other people see the world. It finds its fulfillment not in our thinking something true about an object but in our taking pleasure in an object that is universally shareable. This experience is made possible not through the perfection of our faculty of cognition, but, as Kant says, “the way of thinking needed to make a purposive use of it.” This “broad-mindedness,” so apparent in our evaluations of beauty in art and nature, is equally necessary for sound theoretical and practical judgment.

ABSTRACT"Attitudinal" models of anchoring have produced a series of clear predictions about how anchors should function over levels of extremity, as well as introducing the potential for differential consequences of initial anchored judgments based on the extent to which perceivers elaborate on the initial anchored response. The current research expands on existing anchoring literature in two distinct ways. First, the research examines differential effects of knowledge across multiple levels of anchor extremity. Past research in both the attitudes and anchoring domain has largely treated knowledge as having a dampening effect on the degree of attitude change or anchoring. However, the current work demonstrates that relatively moderate anchors (or messages that are relatively attitude-consistent) can influence judgments based on relatively high or low levels of knowledge rather equally. It is when anchors or persuasive messages become more extreme that knowledge results in different levels of influence. Second, the research examines the potential for knowledge to create differences in consequences of anchored estimates that are initially influenced equally by the high or low anchor. In each of these contexts, the research also examines the role of perceived plausibility of the anchor as a mediating mechanism for the impact of knowledge on changes in judgments. Study 1 demonstrates the important role of plausibility as a mechanism underlying the traditional knowledge effects on anchoring. Studies 2A and 2B qualifies this by demonstrating that anchoring follows an inverted-U-shaped pattern of influence and knowledge has a differential impact over levels of extremity. Finally, Studies 3 and 4 demonstrate differential resistance to change for low- and high-knowledge individuals who have initially been influenced to the same degree (by numeric anchors or information about the target, respectively).

Existing scholarship on Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s The Roaring Girl, or Moll Cutpurse primarily focuses on the title character and her unconventional gender presentation. This highlighting of Moll deemphasizes the other intriguing aspects of the play, including its thematic concerns involving issues of prejudice, reputation, gender, class, marriage, and sexuality. This thesis takes the spotlight off of Moll and shines it instead on a selection of other significant characters—including Sir Alexander Wengrave, Sebastian Wengrave, Mary Fitzallard, and a grouping of minor characters who have earned this play its designation as a city comedy: Laxton, Goshawk, the Openworks, and the Gallipots.

According to research conducted from 2002-1012 by the International Center for Academic Integrity, 43% of graduate and 68% of undergraduate students admitted to cheating on written assignments or tests. However, minimal research exists on physical therapy (PT) students’ perceptions of academic dishonesty. Moral reasoning has been investigated throughout medical programs with PT students having displayed lower levels than other professional students. However, no studies investigating the relationship between academic integrity and moral reasoning in PT students exist. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate moral reasoning and academic integrity among PT students. Data from seven Midwest PT programs (three private and four public) was collected for this study. Student physical therapists (N = 474) completed McCabe’s Academic Integrity Survey and the Defining Issues Test (DIT-2). Online surveys were available for off-campus students unable to attend in person. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and differences between groups (two-way ANOVA, independent t-tests). Correlations, regressions, and factor analysis were used to identify potential predictors of scores. A significant relationship between moral reasoning and academic integrity was found. As moral reasoning levels elevated, cheating frequencies reduced while perceived seriousness of cheating increased. No significant differences were noted among PT students regarding moral reasoning. However, second- and third-year students perceived and reported witnessing greater cheating in their professional programs than first-year students. PT students attending private institutions reported fewer cheating frequencies, higher perceived seriousness of cheating, and higher moral reasoning scores than PT students attending public institutions. PT students attending public institutions reported witnessing increased cheating in their pre-professional coursework. Predictors of academic integrity included perception of cheating within professional programs, perceived seriousness of cheating, moral reasoning scores, and cheating frequency; predictors of moral reasoning included frequency of cheating, gender, political views, and religion. This study highlighted the relationship between moral reasoning and academic integrity in PT students. These findings may inspire educators to implement additional ethical development and academic integrity training within their PT curriculae. Academic dishonesty has been linked to workplace dishonesty in multiple professions. Therefore, advanced training during PT education may impact workplace integrity in the future.

Research has demonstrated that people systematically overrate their knowledge, intelligence, and skills in various domains. Confronting people with evidence of their miscalibration, however, causes them to reassess these claims. For example, simply asking people to explain how a sewing machine works leads them to subsequently report understanding it less—a bias called the illusion of explanatory depth (Rozenblit & Keil, 2002). While previous work argues that this process is domain-bound, we demonstrate in several experiments that the bias to inflate subjective knowledge is attenuated not only by explanations of the focal item itself but also by explanations of other, entirely different things, implying the existence of a more parsimonious, domain-agnostic process for this bias. We then show that the illusion of explanatory depth holds for difficult, but not easy, explanations.

Kant famously claims his table of judgments is complete. However, Kant does not provide a demonstration of his claim of completeness. In fact, he does not seem to think that a proof of completeness is necessary. I argue that we can reconstruct a demonstration that Kant would accept once we reflect upon his notion of a disjunctive judgment.

This dissertation proposes that task-specific self-confidence, trust in motives, and trust in competency are the three main drivers for advice use and willingness to pay for advice. After developing this general argument, the paper then focuses on how emotions influence advice use and willingness to pay for advice. Furthermore, this paper argues that the influence of emotions on advice is partially mediated by task specific self-confidence, trust in motives, and trust in competency. This model elaborates on the underlying emotional mechanisms which may guide the mediation paths, and then tests this expected pattern with four different incidental emotions; regret, pride, anger, and gratitude. Four of the studies' six hypotheses regarding trust, self-confidence, and advice behavior were supported. The expected relationships between incidental emotions, mediators, and outcomes did not materialize, suggesting that emotions may need to rise to a certain level of salience in order to impact advice behavior. Implications of these findings are discussed.

El estatuto kantiano del juicio, descrito como función de atenencia, establece un ejercicio disminuido de la afirmación, en correspondencia con el predominio del pensamiento negativo, cuya raíz metódica es de orden modal. El aseguramiento de la objetividad del fenómeno a través del juicio supone la devaluación tanto del estatuto del entendimiento como del rango del objeto intelectual abstracto.

The apocalyptic kingdom of God is a common theme in Second Temple Jewish literature. This kingdom is often presented differently in the various literary works of this era. This first chapter of this thesis considers the various aspects of the kingdom in relation to God's coming judgment and the coming messiah who is often seen as the one bringing judgment and setting up the kingdom of God. The second chapter elaborates upon Jesus' teachings about the apocalyptic kingdom of God and compares and contrasts them with the teachings of the kingdom in His day as understood through the Second Temple Jewish literature.

This thesis covers religious aspects of the Aztec culture before and after the conquest of Hernán Cortés between 1519 and 1521. One aspect of this thesis details the Aztecs' history and rise to power, followed by their rapid demise at the hands of Spanish conquistadors, while the other examines the highly flawed but effective instrument used in the destruction of their sprawling Mesoamerican empire--a conquistador from Spain by the name of Hernán Cortés. At the root of this controversial topic is God's perfect justice in relation to this culture's blatant and repeated disregard for those created in His image--by all accounts a swift and catastrophic judgment--presented here as having been executed through a very unlikely tool in the form of a cunning and calculating Spaniard.

No matter what domain, the judgment of performance occupies a key area of investment. Experts are trained and societal institutions are constructed to judge performance, and to identify, develop, and reward the highest levels of achievement. This research demonstrates that experts are just as vulnerable as novices to being confounded by the vision heuristic--the dominance of visual information over more relevant evaluation metrics. Using a multi-method approach spanning laboratory experiments, surveys, interviews, and field data, this research explores the impact of visual information on judgment and decision making in performance contexts. The first paper indicates that professional musicians use primarily visual information to judge music performance, even when they report that sound is most important to their evaluations. The second paper highlights the underlying mechanisms that account for the dominance of visual information. Additional work elaborates on the generalizability of the vision heuristic to management domains. The third paper suggests that visible cues about leadership and team dynamics matter more to expert judges than the group performances themselves. In another set of studies, venture capitalists and investors are found to neglect the content of entrepreneur pitches, instead overweighting dynamic visual cues. Finally, the latest study demonstrates that the visual performance cues displayed by firm managers can lead financial analysts to make less accurate forecasts of firm performance. In sum, this research shows that both laymen and experts rely heavily on visual information in their judgments; this dominance extends to organizational contexts, where it can strongly bias performance assessments. These findings have implications for the optimal design of processes for professional selection and advancement, and communication in organizations.

Research in unethical decision-making has shown that resisting the temptation to cheat requires self-regulatory resources. There is little research done to examine passive acts of unethical decision-making despite the regular occurrences of passive aggressive, deviant, and unethical work behaviors. The current study extends previous findings by examining unethical behaviors through passivity. Participants were asked to evaluate their own response on a situational-judgment task and report their grade for a monetary incentive. The results are consistent with previous findings such that individuals with depleted self-regulatory resources are more likely to give oneself a higher grade. However, there was no difference in behavior between different forms of cheating (active vs. passive).