Abstract In this research, we propose that although consumers view the scientific process as competent, they also perceive it cold. Across 10 experimental studies, demonstrate these lay beliefs impact consumers’ reactions to marketers touting science behind their brands. Specifically, since hedonic attributes are associated with warmth, coldness is conceptually disfluent anticipated warmth of p...

Gender, age, and culturally specific beliefs are often considered relevant to observed variation in social interactions. At present, however, the scientific literature is mixed with respect to the significance of these factors in guiding moral judgments. In this study, we explore the role of each of these factors in moral judgment by presenting the results of a web-based study of Eastern (i.e.,...

How should we aggregate the ex ante preferences of Bayesian agents with heterogeneous beliefs? Suppose state world is described by a random process that unfolds over time. Different have different beliefs about probabilistic laws governing this process. As new information revealed time process, update their and via Bayes rule. Consider Pareto principle applies only to which remain stable in lon...

Belief merging aims at defining the beliefs of a group from the beliefs of each member of the group. It is related to more general notions of aggregation from economy (social choice theory). Two main subclasses of belief merging operators exist: majority operators which are related to utilitarianism, and arbitration operators which are related to egalitarianism. Though utilitarian (majority) op...

Existing multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) algorithms do not account for objectives that arise from players with differing beliefs. Concretely, consider two players with different beliefs and utility functions who may cooperate to build a machine that takes actions on their behalf. A representation is needed for how much the machine’s policy will prioritize each player’s interests o...

I examine the positive and negative features of homeopathy from an ethical perspective. I consider: (a) several potentially beneficial features of homeopathy, including non-invasiveness, cost-effectiveness, holism, placebo benefits and agent autonomy; and (b) several potentially negative features of homeopathy, including failure to seek effective healthcare, wastage of resources, promulgation o...

This article presents a model of the effects of product types (hedonic versus utilitarian) and object interactivity on presence perceptions (i.e., perceptions of nonmediation in technology-mediated environments, Lombard & Ditton, 1997), as well as on subsequent beliefs about a product and web site. A laboratory experiment has been designed to test the hypothesized effects. The expected findings...

This paper considers agency in the setting of embodied or active inference. In brief, we associate a sense of agency with prior beliefs about action and ask what sorts of beliefs underlie optimal behavior. In particular, we consider prior beliefs that action minimizes the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between desired states and attainable states in the future. This allows one to formulate bo...

Decision often implies a utilitarian choice based on personal gain, even at the expense of damaging others. Despite the social implications of utilitarian behavior, its neurophysiological bases remain largely unknown. To assess how the human brain controls utilitarian behavior, we delivered transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the ventral prefrontal cortex (VPC) and over the occi...