Adults and children have recently been shown to prefer guessing the outcome of a die roll after the die has been rolled (but remained out of sight) rather than before it has been rolled. This result is contrary to the predictions of the competence hypothesis (Heath & Tversky, 1991), which proposes that people are sensitive to the degree of their relative ignorance and therefore prefer to guess ...

How do we make decisions when faced with multiple options? In the domain of language, some evidence suggests that we exert cognitive control in order to respond in such underdetermined situations when a good option is hard to find but not when we must select among competing options. However, this conclusion, and conclusions about the neural substrates supporting underdetermined responding, are ...

Cycle time reduction often requires coordination across a broad range of functions and groups within an organization. This article describes a decision engineering approach that has proved useful in the analysis and tactical implementation of cycle time reduction at Sun Microsystems. First, a simple model called the Decision Chain is introduced to illuminate the interdependencies among decision...

We conducted four experiments to investigate whether adults can exert attentional strategic control over nonlexical and lexical processing in written spelling to dictation. In Experiment 1, regular and irregular words were produced either in a nonword context (regular and irregular nonwords) or in a word context (high-frequency regular and irregular words), whereas in Experiment 2, the same set...

We report the first study on the optical force exerted by an evanescent wave on a small sphere with both electric and magnetic responses to the incident field, immersed in an arbitrary nondissipative medium. New expressions and effects from their gradient, radiation pressure, and curl components are obtained owing to the particle induced electric and magnetic dipoles, as well as to their mutual...

Most theoretical research in sexual selection has focused on indirect selection. However, empirical studies have not strongly supported indirect selection. A well-established finding is that direct benefits and costs exert a strong influence on the evolution of mate choice. We present an analytical model in which unilateral mate choice evolves solely by direct sexual selection on choosiness. We...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate new fusiform muscle models. Each of these models treats a muscle as a system composed of parts characterized by different mechanical properties. These models explain the influence of differences in the stiffness of lateral parts and the degree of muscle model discretization. Each muscle model is described by a system of differential equations and a si...

This article explores issues associated with organisational governance in the context of stakeholder engagement. It argues that both public relations research and practice have yet to address systematically the challenges inherent in this area, particularly how organisations exert power over stakeholders. Prompted by a consideration of the situational theory of power put forward by the sociolog...

Mental exertion is known to impair endurance performance, but its effects on neuromuscular function remain unclear. The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that mental exertion reduces torque and muscle activation during intermittent maximal voluntary contractions of the knee extensors. Ten subjects performed in a randomized order three separate mental exertion conditions lasting 2...

A well-documented human tendency is to compare outcomes with others, trying to outperform them. These tendencies vary across cultures and among different individuals in a given society. The workplace is an important source for social interaction. The willingness of workers to exert effort depends on the private and social rewards that they receive in the form of wages and esteem. Workers may di...