Each month many women experience an ovulatory cycle that regulates fertility. Whereas research finds that this cycle influences women’s mating preferences, we propose that it might also change women’s political and religious views. Building on theory suggesting that political and religious orientation are linked to reproductive goals, we tested how fertility influenced women’s politics, religio...

Many preference aggregation problems are not, by nature, one-shot. In these settings, voter preferences need to be repeatedly aggregated as a function of the underlying pool of options that are being voted over. For example, imagine that a firm votes an offer to a candidate. If the offer is declined, then the pool of options shrinks, votes are aggregated once more, and a subsequent offer is mad...

The runtime creation of pedagogically coherent learning content for an individual learner’s learning preferences is a considerable challenge. By selecting and combining appropriate learning assets into a new learning object a learner’s needs and preferences may be accounted for. There are a number key aspects that need to be addressed in order to perform this kind of personalization, such as th...

Inspired by studies demonstrating mate-choice copying effects in non-human species, recent studies of attractiveness judgements suggest that social learning also influences human preferences. In the first part of our article, we review evidence for social learning effects on preferences in humans and other animals. In the second part, we present new empirical evidence that social learning not o...

The bomb disposal community seeks to attract, train, and retain individuals who are physically, mentally, and emotionally capable of performing diverse and complex tasks. However, while bomb disposal technicians and organisations tend to believe that bomb disposal requires a certain “type” of individual, little research has been conducted to identify the cognitive characteristics that make a “g...

We study a sequential model of Bayesian social learning in networks in which agents have heterogeneous preferences, and neighbors tend to have similar preferences—a phenomenon known as homophily. We find that the density of network connections determines the impact of preference diversity and homophily on learning. When connections are sparse, diverse preferences are harmful to learning, and ho...

There has been a considerable growth in the use of flexible methods of delivery for workplace learning and development. However, in designing programmes of flexible learning there is often the assumption that learners will exhibit uniformity in the ways in which they process and organise information (cognitive style), in their predispositions towards particular learning formats and media (instr...

The runtime creation of pedagogically coherent learning content for an individual learner’s learning preferences is a considerable challenge. By selecting and combining appropriate learning assets into a new learning object a learner’s needs and preferences may be accounted for. There are a number key aspects that need to be addressed in order to perform this kind of personalization, such as th...

Finding an appropriate insurance product on the Web can be a difficult and time-consuming process. The majority of insurers continue to build sites that are structured on a corporate orientation rather than customer needs. Customers are left on their own to figure out how to analyse and compare different proposals. In this paper we analyse the application of machine learning techniques in model...

Academic success in first-year college science coursework can strongly influence future career paths and usually includes a solid performance in introductory biology. We wanted to know whether factors affecting biology student performance might include learning style preferences and one’s ability and confidence in self-assessing those learning preferences in order to engage in appropriate study...