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Fighting a global pandemic requires a greater than average cooperative capacity between the states called to coordinate policies, the institutions and organizations that implement them, and the individuals who live in these states and work in these institutions and organizations. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, cooperation between workers has been crucial for organizations' functioning and extremely fragile, as it was under pressure due to a continuously changing situation. This study explores the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on attitudes towards cooperation within a sample of health care and manufacturer workers in Italian-speaking Switzerland. The study includes two sub-studies: a qualitative analysis describing the experience of healthcare and manufacturing workers during the pandemic, and a behavioral experiment aimed at testing some possible mechanisms that emerged during the qualitative study.

This thesis sets out to explore journalists’ anticipatory reasoning on audience uptake, i.e. on the ways in which the audience will react to news. In order to reach this goal, I conduct an argumentative analysis of various types of newsroom activities. The analysis sheds light on journalists’ reasoning processes concerning audience uptake that lead them to broadcast/publish one certain news item instead of another, or on the way they decide to broadcast/publish a news item, starting from their anticipatory inferences. The adopted corpus consists of data gained from two distinct datasets; a) data from a previous project, Ideè Suisse, consisting of TV-journalism data in Swiss German and French, and b) print-journalism data in Italian collected at the newsroom of Corriere del Ticino, the main Italian-language newspaper in Switzerland, in the framework of the project Argumentation in newsmaking process and product. The data consist of videotaped editorial conferences, informal and formal journalist discourses, frame interviews, retrospective interviews, news products and source materials. The contextual and argumentative analysis aims at investigating the distinct aspects involved in the anticipation of audience uptake and at investigating the places of reflection (i.e. editorial conferences, informal meetings and retrospective interviews) wherein certain kinds of standpoints are at stake and particular aspects of audience uptake are anticipated. The anticipated uptake includes 1) anticipation of an emotive effect, of a news 2) anticipation of a cognitive effect, and 3) anticipation of a persuasion. I sketched a typology of journalists’ anticipation of audience uptake in terms of illocutionary, locutionary, and perlocutionary force. On the theoretical level I merge two theories that both aim at studying the human mind from a rational perspective. On the one hand, I use Castelfranchi’s theories on anticipation based on the cybernetic notion of goal, while, on the other hand, I use the Argumentum Model of Topics (Rigotti and Greco Morasso 2011) for the study of the inferential configuration. I connect the fundamental notions of both theories as in a syllogism. Results have shown the noticeable prominence of anticipation of audience emotive uptake, where the object of journalists’ anticipation are the audience emotions. This type of anticipation can be intertwined with cognitive audience uptake anticipation and both types have proven to be subordinated to the anticipation of persuasion, since in the end journalists want to promote public understanding as well as capture audience attention. Results further show that many cases of anticipatory reasoning involved counterfactual reasoning. Counterfactual reasoning focussing on better unrealized scenarios has been found to occur mostly in evaluative editorial conferences. Whereas counterfactual reasoning focused on worse unrealized scenarios mostly occurs in retrospective interviews in which the journalist justifies the goodness of his editorial choices. Empirical evidence of the relationship between invalidation of expectation and counterfactual reasoning is also provided. Finally, I provide evidence of the argumentative foundations of counterfactual reasoning.

Il presente articolo analizza le riunioni di redazione come attività argomentative, attraverso le quali si realizza la funzione di gatekeeping entro le organizzazioni mediatiche. Particolare attenzione viene devoluta alle diverse norme che regolano le decisioni editoriali, e al rapporto tra queste norme e il dispiegarsi delle argomentazioni nelle discussioni. Ci si ricollega qui a una svolta nella ricerca sul gatekeeping: lo studio di Clayman & Reisner (1998) che considera le riunioni di redazione come luogo in cui il gatekeeping viene esercitato nell'interazione verbale. Questo approccio apre un campo di intervento promettente per l'applicazione della teoria dell'argomentazione allo studio delle norme e dei processi di decisione delle organizzazioni mediatiche. L'analisi mostra che emergono tre tipi distinti di discussione argomentativa entro l'activity type della riunione. Accanto a discussioni deliberative legate a singole decisioni editoriali, troviamo infatti discussioni concernenti la valutazione di decisioni passate e delle norme vigenti in redazione.