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When looking at mass shooting incidents, suicidal shooters seem to carry an even more extreme sense of terror and brutality. The current study aimed to examine how mass shooters suicidality and suicide behavioral threshold influence the severity of the mass shooting. We employed Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics on a dataset of 194 mass shooters (incidents with four or more victims killed) from 1966 to 2023 in the United States (U.S.). The data were retrieved from The Violence Project Database, originally supported by the National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice. Based on the statistical analysis, we discovered that mass shooters with suicidal ideation were more likely to kill two more victims on average than their non-suicidal counterparts. For suicidal mass shooters found dead on the scene (either by self-killing or suicide by cop), their victim count rises by around four on average when compared to non-suicidal mass shooters. The findings were reasoned through the information-processing perspective of the Mindsponge Theory. Based on the findings and reasoning, we suggest that mass shootings should be considered within larger socio-cultural settings instead of attributing it to be driven primarily by diagnosable psychopathology. Also, promoting an appropriate interpretation of the values of life and death can be an effective way to alleviate the effects of suicidality on mass shooting severity.

Rapid urbanization with poor city planning has resulted in severe air pollution in low- and middle-income countries' urban areas. Given the adverse impacts of air pollution, many responses have been taken, including migration to another city. The current study explores the psychological process and demographic predictors of migration intention among urban people in Hanoi, Vietnam - one of the most polluted capital cities in the world. The Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) was used to construct the model and perform Bayesian analysis on a stratified random sampling dataset of 475 urban people. We found that the migration intention was negatively associated with the individual's satisfaction with air quality. The association was moderated by the perceived availability of a better alternative (or nearby city with better air quality). However, the high migration cost due to geographical distance made the moderation effect of the perceived availability of a better alternative negligible. Moreover, it was also found that male and young people were more likely to migrate, but the brain drain hypothesis was not validated. The results hint that without air pollution mitigation measures, the dislocation of economic forces might occur and hinder sustainable urban development. Therefore, collaborative actions among levels of government, with the semi-conducting principle at heart, are recommended to reduce air pollution.

Human resource management technologies have moved from biometric surveillance to emotional artificial intelligence (AI) that monitor employees' engagement and productivity, analyze video interviews and CVs of job applicants. The rise of the US$20 billion emotional AI industry will transform the future workplace. Yet, besides no international consensus on the principles or standards for such technologies, there is a lack of cross-cultural research on future job seekers' attitude toward such use of AI technologies. This study collects a cross-sectional dataset of 1,015 survey responses of international students from 48 countries and 8 regions worldwide. A majority of the respondents (52%) are concerned about being managed by AI. Following the hypothetico-deductivist philosophy of science, we use the MCMC Hamiltonian approach and conduct a detailed comparison of 10 Bayesian network models with the PSIS-LOO method. We consistently find having a higher income, being male, majoring in business, and/or self-rated familiarity with AI correlate with a more positive view of emotional AI in the workplace. There is also a stark cross-cultural and cross-regional difference. Our analysis shows people from economically less developed regions (Africa, Oceania, Central Asia) tend to exhibit less concern for AI managers. And for East Asian countries, 64% of the Japanese, 56% of the South Korean, and 42% of the Chinese professed the trusting attitude. In contrast, an overwhelming majority of 75% of the European and Northern American possesses the worrying/neutral attitude toward being managed by AI. Regarding religion, Muslim students correlate with the most concern toward emotional AI in the workplace. When religiosity is higher, the correlation becomes stronger for Muslim and Buddhist students., Comment: 58 pages, 9 tables, 10 figures

Entrepreneurs play crucial roles in global sustainable development, but limited financial resources constrain their performance and survival rate. Entrepreneurial finance discipline is, therefore, born to explore the connection between finance and entrepreneurship. Despite the global presence of entrepreneurship, the literature of entrepreneurial finance is suspected to be Western ideologically homogenous. Thus, the objective of this study is to examine the existence of Western ideological homogeneity in entrepreneurial finance literature. Employing the mindsponge mechanism and bibliometric analyses (Y-index and social structure), we analyze 412 highly cited publications extracted from Web of Science database and find Western ideological dominance as well as weak tolerance towards heterogeneity in the set of core ideologies of entrepreneurial finance. These results are consistent across author-, institution-, and country-levels, which reveals strong evidence for the existence of Western ideological homogeneity in the field. We recommend editors, reviewers, and authors to have proactive actions to diversify research topics and enhancing knowledge exchange to avoid the shortfalls of ideological homogeneity. Moreover, the synthesis of mindsponge mechanism and bibliometric analyses are suggested as a possible way to evaluate the state of ideological diversity in other scientific disciplines., Comment: 27 pages, 8 figures

Currently, gaming is the world's favorite form of entertainment. Various studies have shown how games impact players' perceptions and behaviors, prompting opportunities for purposes beyond entertainment. This study uses Animal Crossing: New Horizons (ACNH), a real-time life-simulation game, as a unique case study of how video games can affect humans' environmental perceptions. A dataset of 584 observations from a survey of ACNH players and the Hamiltonian MCMC technique has enabled us to explore the relationship between in-game behaviors and perceptions. The findings indicate a probabilistic trend towards exploiting the in-game environment despite players' perceptions, suggesting that the simplification of commercial game design may overlook opportunities to engage players in pro-environmental activities., Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, 1 table

This research employs the Bayesian network modeling approach, and the Markov chain Monte Carlo technique, to learn about the role of lies and violence in teachings of major religions, using a unique dataset extracted from long-standing Vietnamese folktales. The results indicate that, although lying and violent acts augur negative consequences for those who commit them, their associations with core religious values diverge in the final outcome for the folktale characters. Lying that serves a religious mission of either Confucianism or Taoism (but not Buddhism) brings a positive outcome to a character (\b{eta}T_and_Lie_O= 2.23; \b{eta}C_and_Lie_O= 1.47; \b{eta}T_and_Lie_O= 2.23). A violent act committed to serving Buddhist missions results in a happy ending for the committer (\b{eta}B_and_Viol_O= 2.55). What is highlighted here is a glaring double standard in the interpretation and practice of the three teachings: the very virtuous outcomes being preached, whether that be compassion and meditation in Buddhism, societal order in Confucianism, or natural harmony in Taoism, appear to accommodate two universal vices-violence in Buddhism and lying in the latter two. These findings contribute to a host of studies aimed at making sense of contradictory human behaviors, adding the role of religious teachings in addition to cognition in belief maintenance and motivated reasoning in discounting counterargument.

The study of cultural evolution has taken on an increasingly interdisciplinary and diverse approach in explicating phenomena of cultural transmission and adoptions. Inspired by this computational movement, this study uses Bayesian networks analysis, combining both the frequentist and the Hamiltonian Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach, to investigate the highly representative elements in the cultural evolution of a Vietnamese city's architecture in the early 20th century. With a focus on the fa\c{c}ade design of 68 old houses in Hanoi's Old Quarter (based on 78 data lines extracted from 248 photos), the study argues that it is plausible to look at the aesthetics, architecture and designs of the house fa\c{c}ade to find traces of cultural evolution in Vietnam, which went through more than six decades of French colonization and centuries of sociocultural influence from China. The in-depth technical analysis, though refuting the presumed model on the probabilistic dependency among the variables, yields several results, the most notable of which is the strong influence of Buddhism over the decorations of the house fa\c{c}ade. Particularly, in the top 5 networks with the best Bayesian Information criterion (BIC) scores and p<0.05, the variable for decorations (DC) always has a direct probabilistic dependency on the variable B for Buddhism. The paper then checks the robustness of these models using Hamiltonian MCMC method and find the posterior distributions of the models' coefficients all satisfy the technical requirement. Finally, this study suggests integrating Bayesian statistics in social sciences in general and for study of cultural evolution and architectural transformation in particular., Comment: 35 pages, cultural evolution, Hanoi architecture, Old Quarter, house fa\c{c}ade, Buddhism, FrancoChinese style, French colonialism, Bayesian network, Hamiltonian Markov chain Monte Carlo

Every year, the Vietnamese people reportedly burned about 50,000 tons of joss papers, which took the form of not only bank notes, but iPhones, cars, clothes, even housekeepers, in hope of pleasing the dead. The practice was mistakenly attributed to traditional Buddhist teachings but originated in fact from China, which most Vietnamese were not aware of. In other aspects of life, there were many similar examples of Vietnamese so ready and comfortable with adding new norms, values, and beliefs, even contradictory ones, to their culture. This phenomenon, dubbed "cultural additivity", prompted us to study the co-existence, interaction, and influences among core values and norms of the Three Teachings--Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism--as shown through Vietnamese folktales. By applying Bayesian logistic regression, we evaluated the possibility of whether the key message of a story was dominated by a religion (dependent variables), as affected by the appearance of values and anti-values pertaining to the Three Teachings in the story (independent variables)., Comment: 8 figures, 35 pages

Nowadays, protecting trust in social sciences also means engaging in open community dialogue, which helps to safeguard robustness and improve efficiency of research methods. The combination of open data, open review and open dialogue may sound simple but implementation in the real world will not be straightforward. However, in view of Begley and Ellis's (2012) statement that, "the scientific process demands the highest standards of quality, ethics and rigour," they are worth implementing. More importantly, they are feasible to work on and likely will help to restore plausibility to social sciences research. Therefore, I feel it likely that the triplet of open data, open review and open dialogue will gradually emerge to become policy requirements regardless of the research funding source., Comment: 5 pages