menon are almost identical, and yet we never dream of calling the process general, or attributing it to a general cause. It is true its " prevalence" may be influenced by general conditions. Famine or sickness would render it less general; and plenty and health more general; yet it would be an absurdity to generalize the phenomenon or rather the aggregate of phenomena, as we are apt to treat th...

Over recent years, gamification has been a frequent strategy to increase user engagement. Gamification of systems is usually associated with incorporating mechanisms for attributing points and badges to guide users' behaviors. However, since the dawn of the digital game industry in the 1980's, Malone's work has shown that the desire to play and master a game are important motivations to engage ...

In this paper we raise the question whether technological artifacts can properly speaking be trusted or said to be trustworthy. First, we set out some prevalent accounts of trust and trustworthiness and explain how they compare with the engineer’s notion of reliability. We distinguish between pure rational-choice accounts of trust, which do not differ in principle from mere judgments of reliabi...

Some patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) reveal low-level impairment in their concepts of living things (i.e., forgetting that zebras are striped). To test for more profound impairment, we investigated the concept alive--a "higher order" concept spanning every member of the domain. Many elderly controls were animists, attributing life to inanimates capable of self-generated activity (the sun...

There are ongoing divisions in the learning sciences between perspectives that treat cognition as occurring within individual minds and those that treat it as irreducibly distributed or situated in material and social contexts. We contend that accounts of individual minds as complex systems are theoretically continuous with distributed and situated cognition. On this view, the difference is a m...

The Authentic and Hubristic Pride Scales (AHPS) are the methodological core of an influential perspective on pride. The Authentic Pride (AP) scale purportedly measures a distinct facet of pride rooted in attributing success to effort (but not ability), and related to prestige (but not dominance). The Hubristic Pride (HP) scale purportedly measures a complementary facet rooted in attributing suc...

We propose two new methods for attributing the risk of a portfolio or system to its components, when it is required to produce non-negative risk components that sum to the risk of the portfolio or system as a whole. One method attributes risk entirely to losses, taking profits for granted. The other method does allow profits in some scenarios to offset losses in other scenarios to some extent, ...