Communicating Uncertainty in National Security Intelligence: Expert and Non-expert Interpretations of and Preferences for Verbal and Numeric Formats

Organizations in several domains including national security intelligence communicate judgments under uncertainty using verbal probabilities (e.g., likely) instead of numeric probabilities (e.g., 75% chance), despite research indicating that the former have variable meanings across individuals. In the intelligence domain, uncertainty is also communicated using terms such as low, moderate, or high to describe the analyst’s confidence level. However, little research has examined how intelligence professionals interpret these terms and whether they prefer them to numeric uncertainty quantifiers. In two experiments (N = 481 and 624, respectively), uncertainty communication preferences of expert (n = 41 intelligence analysts inExperiment 1) and non-expert intelligence consumers were elicited. We examined which format participants judged to be more informative and simpler to process. We further tested whether participants treated probability and confidence as independent constructs and whether participants provided coherent numeric probability translations of verbal probabilities. Results showed that whereas most non-experts favored the numeric format, experts were about equally split, and most participants in both samples regarded the numeric format as more informative.Experts and non-experts consistently conflated probability and confidence. For instance, confidence intervals inferred from verbal confidence terms had a greater effect on the location of the estimate than the width of the estimate, contrary to normative expectation. Approximately ¼ of experts and over ½ of non-experts provided incoherent numeric probability translations of best estimates and lower and upper bounds when elicitations were spaced by intervening tasks.

Recognising British Bodies: The Significance of Race and Whiteness in ‘Post-Racial’ Britain

This article examines the significance of race in how nation is articulated by the white middle-classes in ‘post-racial’ Britain. In doing so, it highlights the centrality of bodies and informal markers of difference within processes of national recognition and reveals a normative expectation for British bodies racialised as non-white to perform or inhabit (particular kinds of) whiteness. Bringing insights from post-race theory and advocating a broad conceptualisation of whiteness as a set of relational ideas and codes, the article demonstrates that whiteness continues to shape and underpin dominant conceptions of Britishness – articulated by middle-class white Britons – even as they recognise people of colour individually, and to some extent collectively, as British. Since the role and symbolic power of the white middle-classes is often overlooked in discussions of Britishness, the article makes an important contribution to debates on race and nation, illustrating how whiteness continues to function in alledgedly ‘post-race’ societies. It concludes that narrow definitions of race and whiteness allow their continued significance to be under-estimated and ultimately enable the perpetuation of racialised hierarchies of belonging.

Hope’s Place in Our Lives

This chapter explores the nature of hope. It argues that hope is a way of seeing in a favorable light the possibility that an outcome one desires and believes to be possible obtains. This understanding of hope is similar to many competing accounts of the nature of hope in the philosophical literature. Setting the debate about which precise theory of hope is correct aside, the significance of human difference to experiences of hope and our relative power to affect the world is explored. A feminist perspective on hope reveals that oppression is a threat to hope. Attending to the power dynamics that shape how we hope, this chapter illustrates the ways in which people and institutions in positions of power use hope to further their ends. It then traces the relationship between the hope we place in others, normative expectation, and trust.

Absent appreciation in Mandarin Chinese interaction

When receiving something beneficial, interlocutors are expected to express their appreciation in the second pair part (SPP) or the sequence-closing third position with linguistic resources such as ‘thanks’ and ‘thank you’, thus forming an adjency pair or a complete sequence. However, under some circumstances, relevant or appropriate appreciation is expected but does not appear. Adopting conversation analysis as the research methodology, this article examines the absence of appreciation in ordinary Mandarin interactions where gratitude and appreciation are often socially prescribed. Its sequential analysis of talks demonstrates that at times a verbal appreciative response in situations such as offering and requesting does not occur until a later conversational turn rather than in the preferred second pair part, whereas at other times the social action, although expected, is actually absent in social interaction. The analysis of the data shows that when interlocutors transgress the normative expectation of appreciation, the expected pattern of action and interactional organisation will be evidenced circumstantially within the ongoing interaction itself. The present study proves that deviations from standard forms in the interactional organisation can give rise to additional accounts or other visible interactional behaviour.

The Speaker’s Expectation of Trust

Given a speaker who tells one that p, there are ways of responding to what one is told whereby one wrongs (or does an injustice to) the speaker. This motivates the idea that a speaker is entitled to expect that her say-so not be responded to in those ways. Chapter 3 argued that this sort of normative expectation is the key to understanding the conversational pressure that bears on an audience who is told that p. Chapter 4 considers recent attempts to understand the source and scope of the speaker’s normative expectation. It argues that all extant attempts fail in this regard. The lesson that it takes from these failures concerns the main challenge of providing what is wanted: our account must illuminate how the interpersonal and pragmatic dimensions of the speech acts of telling and testifying interact with the epistemological dimension of testimony.

Calling Mr Speaker ‘Mr Speaker’

Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) in the UK House of Commons is a ritual event, governed by a cluster of conventions. Members of Parliament (MPs) must address their remarks to the Prime Minister (PM) through the medium of the Speaker of the House, who is responsible for maintaining order during debates, and determining which MP may speak next. Due to the sacred role of the Speaker and the prevalence of conventionalised conflict avoidance between the PM and those who ask challenging questions, PMQs resembles archaic tribal councils, in which rights and obligations prevail. Yet, the importance of conventionalised indirectness and the sacred role of the Speaker do not correlate with a lack of face-threats and challenges. PMQs represents an aggressive ritual setting in which the ritual roles and rules only offer a façade to package aggression, and indeed may operate as interactional resources whereby participants can even increase the efficiency of their verbal attacks. Thus, PMQs embodies a scene that ritual experts define as ‘anti-structural’ in character: in this setting, the normative expectation in daily life to avoid conflict is temporarily suspended, to such an extent that conflict has become the ritual norm and is regarded as quintessential to this parliamentary institution.

LONG-TERM BENEFITS OF REASONING TRAINING: A PREDICTED DIFFERENCE APPROACH

In 928 ACTIVE participants, we investigated predictors of exceptional reasoning performance ten years post-enrollment. Participants had been randomized into a training arm (memory, reasoning, or speed of processing) or a no-contact control group. Each participant received an age- and education adjusted expected normative trajectory on a reasoning composite score, derived from the untrained control group. They were then classified as within- (n=467, 50%), above- (n=285, 31%), or below-normative expectation (n=176, 19%) ten years post-training. At a p<.001 significance criterion, reasoning training (b=, 0.632, OR =1.88) and younger age (b=-0.048/year, OR = 1.05) were associated with 10-year above-normative expectations. No other baseline factors considered (other training arms, education, cardiovascular risk, life space, mobility, locus of control, morale, motivation) predicted ten year status, nor did they interact with training arm. Reasoning training appears to have produced long term alterations in reasoning trajectory for many participants.

In Defense of the Commons: Young Children Negatively Evaluate and Sanction Free Riders

Human flourishing depends on individuals paying costs to contribute to the common good, but such arrangements are vulnerable to free riding, in which individuals benefit from others’ contributions without paying costs themselves. Systems of tracking and sanctioning free riders can stabilize cooperation, but the origin of such tendencies is not well understood. Here, we provide evidence that children as young as 4 years old negatively evaluate and sanction free riders. Across six studies, we showed that these tendencies are robust, large in magnitude, tuned to intentional rather than unintentional noncontribution, and generally consistent across third- and first-party cases. Further, these effects cannot be accounted for by factors that frequently co-occur with free riding, such as nonconforming behaviors or the costs that free riding imposes on the group. Our findings demonstrate that from early in life, children both hold and enforce a normative expectation that individuals are intrinsically obligated to contribute to the common good.