Bandura’s social cognitive construct “perceived selfefficacy” has been used widely to understand individual behavior as a function of domain-specific beliefs about personal capacities. Collective efficacy is the extension of the self-efficacy construct to organizations and groups; it refers to beliefs about collective capacities in specific domains. Our research is investigating the use of coll...

Institutions are governance tools. They are useful only if they impact on behaviour: of citizens, and of those administering the legal system. Models of behaviour are therefore crucial for institutional analysis and design. In light of this, this paper draws lessons for institutional analysis and design resulting from the models of multi-attribute decision-making assembled in this special issue...

3.1 HUMAN AGENCY: CLAIMING CAUSATION THROUGH INTERVENTION 15 3.1.1 CRITIQUE #1: LACK OF EXTERNAL VALIDITY (ACCIDENTALITY) 16 3.1.2 CRITIQUE #2: THREATS TO INTERNAL VALIDITY 16 3.1.3 CRITIQUE #3: PRE-EMPTION 17 3.2 GENERATIVE CAUSATION: THE DESCRIPTION OF THE CAUSAL MECHANISM 18 3.2.1 HOW CAUSATION IS CLAIMED: DIGGING DEEP 20 3.2.2 QUALITY OF INFERENCE 21 3.2.3 MECHANISMS HAVE PARTS: COMPONENT C...

This half-day workshop will discuss how to enrich research by marrying academic and industry-based work. Attendees will learn the theoretical, practical, and logistical complexities involved in advancing cognitive science across these distinct research sites. This topic is relevant to the cognitive community because academia and industry often have common goals but distinct capabilities. For ex...

Health outcomes research applies a wide range of methods to identify optimal approaches to determine optimal approaches to determine the effects of healthcare interventions and policies. Critical evaluation skills are necessary to navigate the evidence and identify studies that should influence clinical decision making and policy. A hierarchical “pyramid of evidence” that emphasizes randomized ...

It is often argued that experiments are strong on causal identification (internal validity) but weak on generalizability (external validity). One widely accepted way to limit threats to external validity is to incorporate as much variation in the background conditions and in the covariates as possible through replication. Another strategy is to make the theoretical foundations of the experiment...

Cognitive Science research is hard to conduct, because researchers must take phenomena from the world and turn them into laboratory tasks for which a reasonable level of experimental control can be achieved. Consequently, research necessarily makes tradeoffs between internal validity (experimental control) and external validity (the degree to which a task represents behavior outside of the lab)...

This paper discusses two conventions pertaining to the study of computer game addiction that are rarely discussed. Traditionally when addictions are assessed, it is not customary for the researcher to be concerned with whether or not the addiction causes harm; or in other words: whether the addiction adds more to the overall life quality than it subtracts. Similarly, it is not customary to ask ...

xperiments E show significant demobilizing and alienating effects of negative advertising. Although internally valid, experiments may have limited external validity. Aggregate and survey data offer two ways of providing external validation for experiments. We show that survey recall measures of advertising exposure suffer from problems of internal validity due to simultaneity and measurement er...

In the development of distance learning, advances in cognitive science merge with new technology to deliver instruction worldwide. However, one major difficulty in evaluating the efficacy of these tools is determining which elements of instruction truly lead to observed changes in student performance. The purpose of this paper is to briefly review current use of various research methods for eva...