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Motivation
- HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY (5TH ED., PP. 268-316). NEW YORK: WILEY. CHAPTER 8
, 2010
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From what might have been to what must have been: Counterfactual thinking creates meaning.
- Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
, 2010
"... Four experiments explored whether 2 uniquely human characteristics-counterfactual thinking (imagining alternatives to the past) and the fundamental drive to create meaning in life-are causally related. Rather than implying a random quality to life, the authors hypothesized and found that counterfac ..."
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Four experiments explored whether 2 uniquely human characteristics-counterfactual thinking (imagining alternatives to the past) and the fundamental drive to create meaning in life-are causally related. Rather than implying a random quality to life, the authors hypothesized and found that counterfactual thinking heightens the meaningfulness of key life experiences. Reflecting on alternative pathways to pivotal turning points even produced greater meaning than directly reflecting on the meaning of the event itself. Fate perceptions ("it was meant to be") and benefit-finding (recognition of positive consequences) were identified as independent causal links between counterfactual thinking and the construction of meaning. Through counterfactual reflection, the upsides to reality are identified, a belief in fate emerges, and ultimately more meaning is derived from important life events.
Conscious thought is for facilitating social and cultural interactions: How mental simulations serve the animal-culture interface
- Psychological Review
, 2010
"... Five empirically based critiques have undermined the standard assumption that conscious thought is primarily for input (obtaining information from the natural environment) or output (the direct control of action). Instead, we propose that conscious thought is for internal processing, to facilitate d ..."
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Five empirically based critiques have undermined the standard assumption that conscious thought is primarily for input (obtaining information from the natural environment) or output (the direct control of action). Instead, we propose that conscious thought is for internal processing, to facilitate downstream interaction with the social and cultural environment. Human consciousness enables the construction of meaningful, sequential thought, as in sentences and narratives, logical reasoning, counting and quanti-fication, causal understanding, narratives, and the simulation of events (including nonpresent ones). Conscious thought sequences resemble short films that the brain makes for itself, thereby enabling different parts of brain and mind to share information. The production of conscious thoughts is closely linked to the production of speech because the human mind evolved to facilitate social communication and information sharing, as culture became humankind’s biological strategy. The influence of conscious thought on behavior can be vitally helpful but is mostly indirect. Conscious simulation processes are useful for understanding the perspectives of social interaction partners, for exploring options in complex decisions, for replaying past events (both literally and counterfactually) so as to learn, and for facilitating participation in culture in other ways.
Counterfactuals in Logic Programming with Applications to Morality
"... Counterfactuals are conjectures about alternatives to events that did not occur in the past; thoughts about what would have happened, had an alternative event oc-curred. Herein we show how counterfactual reasoning is modeled using Logic Programming (LP), particularly by benefitting from LP abduction ..."
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Counterfactuals are conjectures about alternatives to events that did not occur in the past; thoughts about what would have happened, had an alternative event oc-curred. Herein we show how counterfactual reasoning is modeled using Logic Programming (LP), particularly by benefitting from LP abduction and updating. The ap-proach is inspired by Pearl’s causal model of counter-factuals, where causal direction and conditional reason-ing are captured by inferential arrows of rules in logic programs. In this approach, LP abduction hypothesizes background conditions from given evidences or obser-vations, whereas LP updating helps frame these back-ground conditions as a counterfactual’s context. More-over, LP updating imposes causal interventions into the program, imposing minimal adjustments in the model through defeasible LP rules. We apply counterfactuals to computational morality resorting to this LP-based approach, and show their potential for specifying and querying morality issues, viz., to examine viewpoints on moral permissibility of actions through classic moral examples from literature. The results from this applica-tion have been validated on a prototype implementing the approach on top of an integrated LP abduction and updating system with tabling.
Flexibility and Consistency in Evaluative Responding: The Function of Construal Level
"... 2. Evaluations that Immerse or Transcend 261 3. Mentally Representing the Attitude Object 263 3.1. Psychological distance and level of construal 263 ..."
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2. Evaluations that Immerse or Transcend 261 3. Mentally Representing the Attitude Object 263 3.1. Psychological distance and level of construal 263
What we regret most are lost opportunities: A theory of regret intensity
- Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
, 2009
"... and debilitating as it may be, regret can in theory also motivate corrective action (Markman, McMullen, & Elizaga, 2008; Roese, 1994; Zeelenberg, 1999). If regret arises primarily following outcomes that offer opportu-nities for improvement, then the experience of regret may well be worth the em ..."
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and debilitating as it may be, regret can in theory also motivate corrective action (Markman, McMullen, & Elizaga, 2008; Roese, 1994; Zeelenberg, 1999). If regret arises primarily following outcomes that offer opportu-nities for improvement, then the experience of regret may well be worth the emotional pain. The purpose of this research was to determine whether people experi-ence greater regret over things they believe they can change or things they believe they once could but now cannot change. Contrary to a recent theory of regret (Roese & Summerville, 2005; Saffrey, Summerville, & Roese, 2008), this research suggests strongly that people regret lost opportunities. As Helen Rowland points out in the quotation above, the opportunity one once had but now has not elicits the most intense regret. THE (FUTURE) OPPORTUNITY PRINCIPLE Regret has been described as a “comparison-based emotion of self-blame, experienced when people realize or imagine that their present situation would have been better had they decided differently in the past” Authors ’ Note: We thank Neal Roese, Diederik Stapel, and an anony-mous reviewer for their comments on a previous draft of this manu-script. Direct correspondence to Denise R. Beike at the University of
Abduction and beyond in logic programming with application to morality. Accepted
- in “Frontiers of Abduction”, Special Issue in IfCoLog Journal of Logics
, 2015
"... In this paper we emphasize two different aspects of abduction in Logic Pro-gramming (LP): (1) the engineering of LP abduction systems, and (2) appli-cation of LP abduction, complemented with other non-monotonic features, to model morality issues. For the LP engineering part, we present an implemente ..."
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In this paper we emphasize two different aspects of abduction in Logic Pro-gramming (LP): (1) the engineering of LP abduction systems, and (2) appli-cation of LP abduction, complemented with other non-monotonic features, to model morality issues. For the LP engineering part, we present an implemented tabled abduction technique in order to reuse priorly obtained (and tabled) ab-ductive solutions, from one abductive context to another. Aiming at the inter-play between LP abduction and other LP non-monotonic reasoning, this tabled abduction technique is combined with our own-developed LP updating mecha-nism – the latter also employs tabling mechanisms, notably incremental tabling of XSB Prolog. The first contribution of this paper is therefore a survey of our tabled abduction and updating techniques, plus further development of our preliminary approach to combine these two techniques. The second contribution of the paper pertains to the application part. We formulate a LP-based counterfactual reasoning, based on Pearl’s structural the-
Why envy outperforms admiration
- Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
, 2011
"... Four studies tested the hypothesis that the emotion of benign envy, but not the emotions of admiration or malicious envy, motivates people to improve themselves. Studies 1 to 3 found that only benign envy was related to the motivation to study more (Study 1) and to actual performance on the Remote A ..."
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Four studies tested the hypothesis that the emotion of benign envy, but not the emotions of admiration or malicious envy, motivates people to improve themselves. Studies 1 to 3 found that only benign envy was related to the motivation to study more (Study 1) and to actual performance on the Remote Associates Task (which measures intelligence and creativity; Studies 2 and 3). Study 4 found that an upward social comparison triggered benign envy and subsequent better performance only when people thought self-improvement was attainable. When participants thought self-improvement was hard, an upward social comparison led to more admiration and no motivation to do better. Implications of these findings for theories of social emotions such as envy, social comparisons, and for understanding the influence of role models are discussed.
TABDUAL: a tabled abduction system for logic programs. Accepted in IfCoLog Journal of Logics and their Applications. Available from http://goo.gl/lcQGes
, 2015
"... Abduction has been on the back burner in logic programming, as abduction can be too difficult to implement, and costly to perform, in particular if abductive solutions are not tabled. On the other hand, current Prolog systems, with their tabling mecha-nisms, are mature enough to facilitate the intro ..."
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Abduction has been on the back burner in logic programming, as abduction can be too difficult to implement, and costly to perform, in particular if abductive solutions are not tabled. On the other hand, current Prolog systems, with their tabling mecha-nisms, are mature enough to facilitate the introduction of tabling abductive solutions (tabled abduction) into them. Our contributions are as follows. First, we conceptualize a tabled abduction technique for abductive normal logic programs, permitting abductive solutions to be reused, from one abductive context to another. The approach is underpinned by the theory of AB-DUAL and relies on a transformation into tabled logic programs. It particularly makes use of the dual transformation of ABDUAL that enables efficiently handling the prob-lem of abduction under negative goals, by introducing dual positive counterparts for them. Second, we realize this tabled abduction technique in TABDUAL, a system im-plemented in XSB Prolog. The implementation poses several challenges to concretely realize the abstract theory of ABDUAL, e.g., by taking care of all varieties of loops
Bridging Two Realms of Machine Ethics
"... We address problems in machine ethics dealt with using computational techniques. Our research has focused on Computational Logic, particularly Logic Programming, and its appropriateness to model morality, namely moral permissibility, its justification, and the dual-process of moral judgments regardi ..."
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We address problems in machine ethics dealt with using computational techniques. Our research has focused on Computational Logic, particularly Logic Programming, and its appropriateness to model morality, namely moral permissibility, its justification, and the dual-process of moral judgments regarding the realm of the individual. In the collective realm, we, using Evolutionary Game Theory in populations of individuals, have studied norms and morality emergence computationally. These, to start with, are not equipped with much cognitive capability, and simply act from a predetermined set of actions. Our research shows that the introduction of cognitive capabilities, such as intention recognition, commitment, and apology, separately and jointly, reinforce the emergence of cooperation in populations, comparatively to their absence. Bridging such capabilities between the two realms helps understand the emergent ethical behavior of agents in groups, and implements them not just in simulations, but in the world of future robots and their swarms. Evolutionary Anthropology provides teachings.
