Judges as Altruistic Hierarchs

Evaluating Judges

Much of the interest in empirical studies of judges lies in the comparison of actual to ideal behavior. When we ask what makes a good judge or whether a judge rightly decided a case, we implicitly compare the judge's decisions to a normative standard. In some instances, the content of the normative standard is uncontroversial and its application straightforward. Hence, a trial judge who sentenc...

Doctors as judges: the verdict on responsibility for health.

Smokers, drinkers, animal fat eaters, the inactive and the obese, they are all blamed for their potential ill health by doctors, society and their families, in western societies victim blaming is a widespread phenomenon. Doctors are encouraged or even put under pressure to judge behaviour as a tool to allocate and ration medical procedures, by governments or insurance companies that want to kee...

Students as Judges of Teachers' Verbal and Nonverbal Behavior

Altruistic Learning

The origin of altruism remains one of the most enduring puzzles of human behaviour. Indeed, true altruism is often thought either not to exist, or to arise merely as a miscalculation of otherwise selfish behaviour. In this paper, we argue that altruism emerges directly from the way in which distinct human decision-making systems learn about rewards. Using insights provided by neurobiological ac...

Judging the judges: Evaluating the performance of international gymnastics judges

Judging a gymnastics routine is a noisy process, and the performance of judges varies widely. The International Federation of Gymnastics (FIG), in collaboration with Longines and the Université de Neuchâtel, is designing and implementing an improved statistical engine to analyze the performance of gymnastics judges during and after major competitions like the Olympic Games and the World Champio...