Within the context of multi-agent systems, an agent may often ̄nd itself in a position where it receives information through informants. These informants are independent agents who have their own interests and, therefore, are not necessarily completely reliable. It is natural for an agent to be more inclined to believe one informant over another, especially if the informant has proven itself re...

While the evolution of cooperation has been widely studied, little attention has been devoted to adversarial settings wherein one actor can directly harm another. Recent theoretical work addresses this issue, introducing an adversarial game in which the emergence of cooperation is heavily reliant on the presence of "Informants," actors who defect at first-order by harming others, but who cooper...

OBJECTIVE This study explored how Greek men with spinal cord injury experience sexuality. METHODS Six men with spinal cord injury acted as key informants and data collection consisted of in-depth unstructured interviews, field notes, and a reflective log. The transcribed interviews were analyzed thematically. RESULTS The themes that emerged were: Barriers, Metamorphoses, and Enjoying. Sexua...

Organizational research frequently involves seeking judgmental data from multiple informants within organizations. Researchers are often faced with determining how many informants to survey, who those informants should be and (if more than one) how best to aggregate responses when disagreement exists between those responses. Using both recall and forecasting data from a laboratory study involvi...

In three experiments, we investigate how 187 3- to 5-year-olds weigh competence and benevolence when deciding whom to trust. Children were presented with two informants who provided conflicting labels for novel objects--one informant was competent, but mean, the other incompetent, but nice. Across experiments, we manipulated the order in which competence and benevolence were presented and the w...

Informants who describe others' behaviors are perceived as having more of the trait implied by the behavior they describe (the trait transference effect). Associative and attributional explanations for this phenomenon are reviewed and examined in 3 experiments. Findings were inconsistent with attributional interpretations: (a) transference effects persisted with extended coding times, online ju...

Purchasing agents are often employed as individual informants in studies of organizational buying. This practice occurs in spite of the fact that several researchers have identified problems with using individual informants to study group buying behavior. The purpose of this study is to examine the appropriateness of using either single or multiple informants both in non-new task and new task g...

We present a gold standard for evaluating scale membership and the order of scalar adjectives. In addition to evaluating existing methods of ordering adjectives, this knowledge will aid in studying the organization of adjectives in the lexicon. This resource is the result of two elicitation tasks conducted with informants from Amazon Mechanical Turk. The first task is notable for gathering open...

In two experiments, 3- and 4-year-olds were tested for their sensitivity to agreement and disagreement among informants. In pretest trials, they watched as three of four informants (Experiment 1) or two of three informants (Experiment 2) indicated the same referent for an unfamiliar label; the remaining informant was a lone dissenter who indicated a different referent. Asked for their own judgm...

Much of what we learn, we learn from others. What guides learners' choice of informants? Research suggests that learners resist informants who provide incorrect information or insufficient information for accurate inference. Here we propose that learners’ choices of informants are rationally guided by the extent to which evidence supports accurate inference, rather than the sheer amount of evid...