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Humans need to rapidly select movements that achieve their goal while avoiding negative outcomes. The processes leading to these decisions have only recently been studied. In the typical paradigm used to gain insight into the decision process, participants aim to a target circle that is overlapped by a penalty circle. They receive 100 points for hitting the target, and lose points for hitting the penalty region. Previous research has shown that participants generally behave like a rational decision maker by adapting their endpoint when the distance between the target and penalty circle and the penalty value changes (although some suboptimal selection has been noted). The overall purpose of the research reported in the present thesis was to determine if there are contexts when participants’ behaviour is suboptimal in a rapid, motor decision making tasks. Taken together, the results from four studies showed that: 1) participants require experience and feedback to aim to optimal locations; 2) participants often aimed closer to target center than optimal; and, 3) probability (represented through spatial parameters) has more influence over participant’s motor decisions than does the value of the penalty. Therefore, participants’ actions do not necessarily conform to a rational model of decision making; rather, there are consistent biases arising in the selection, planning, and execution of actions in specific contexts. These findings and conclusions can lead to a more descriptive understanding of motor decision making to provide information that is in addition to prescriptive models of rational behaviour.

Humans need to rapidly select movements that achieve their goal while avoiding negative outcomes. The processes leading to these decisions have only recently been studied. In the typical paradigm used to gain insight into the decision process, participants aim to a target circle that is overlapped by a penalty circle. They receive 100 points for hitting the target, and lose points for hitting the penalty region. Previous research has shown that participants generally behave like a rational decision maker by adapting their endpoint when the distance between the target and penalty circle and the penalty value changes (although some suboptimal selection has been noted). The overall purpose of the research reported in the present thesis was to determine if there are contexts when participants’ behaviour is suboptimal in a rapid, motor decision making tasks. Taken together, the results from four studies showed that: 1) participants require experience and feedback to aim to optimal locations; 2) participants often aimed closer to target center than optimal; and, 3) probability (represented through spatial parameters) has more influence over participant’s motor decisions than does the value of the penalty. Therefore, participants’ actions do not necessarily conform to a rational model of decision making; rather, there are consistent biases arising in the selection, planning, and execution of actions in specific contexts. These findings and conclusions can lead to a more descriptive understanding of motor decision making to provide information that is in addition to prescriptive models of rational behaviour.

Since the 9/11-attacks several nations have been confronted with a new international threat, its nature traces back to the political- and religious- radical movements of the 20th century Cold War. Ever since, various states have been under threat by terrorist organizations around the world due to mainly participating in worldwide counter-terrorist interventions created by western alliances. In Sweden, amongst other countries, the state took security-precautions that would imply total control of information throughout the territorial borders. The assigned proposition was accepted by the Swedish parliament in June 18th 2008, after this date wild spread criticism was still in effect ever since the Swedish government first publicly announced the proposition in May 8th 2007. This study emphasizes on understanding why the Swedish government chose to present this proposition to parliament, in order to complete this task the study will present the motives and the alleged threats that were the core of the proposition and its value-maximizing goal of creating a new surface for Swedish homeland security. The core questions of the study to be examined are; “How was the decision-making progress being managed?”, “What was the core arguments of the opposition in the official debates?” and “Why did the government choose to announce the proposition?”. In addition, the study will present the solution to the problem through the usage of Allison & Zelikow’s famous geopolitical study “Essence of Decision”, in where the Swedish government will take the place of the “rational actor” in this national dilemma. As the process moves forward the reader will be aware of the consequences and the options of the Swedish government during the decision making process, and due to this also able to determine the cause of action that was required by the state to prevent the later confirmed threats.

I conducted two studies to explore cultural differences between Chinese and European Canadians in considering opportunity cost while making purchase decisions. In Study 1, participants (121 Euro-Canadians and 119 Chinese) read a scenario in which they would decide whether to buy a single product (e.g., a backpack) or not. Participants were randomly assigned to either a condition in which opportunity cost information was made salient or a control condition in which opportunity cost was not mentioned. I found that participants in the opportunity cost salient condition displayed a higher level of opportunity cost consideration than did participants in the control condition. When individual differences in the habit of considering opportunity cost and spending habits were controlled for, Chinese participants’ purchase decisions revealed a higher degree of opportunity cost consideration than those of European Canadians. Chinese were also more likely to mention opportunity cost thoughts than did European Canadians while making the decision. In Study 2, participants chose one of two laptops to buy (one was cheaper but had less memory than the other). The results demonstrated that Chinese living in Canada displayed a higher degree of opportunity cost consideration by opting more often for the cheaper laptop, than did European Canadians. However, the culture main effect was confounded by cultural differences in family income. Study 2 also replicated the results of Study 1 that Chinese were also more likely to mention opportunity cost thoughts than European Canadians while making the decision. Although inconclusive, these results suggest that opportunity cost consideration varies, at least to some extent, across cultures. Implications of the current research for consumer behavior and directions for future research are discussed. / Thesis (Master, Psychology) -- Queen's University, 2013-08-01 15:22:09.816

Fertilizer plays a major role in the profitability of the farmer’s business, his/her future success as well as the sustainability of his business. Fertilizer is also one of the most expensive farm inputs, and therefore, has the ability to make or break the farmer. The emerging farmer market segment is expanding and holds a great deal of potential for fertilizer companies to supply the growing need of fertilizer in this market. Almost all fertilizer marketing strategies of South African companies have been designed to cater for the commercial farming sector; however, if fertilizer suppliers want to focus on the emerging farmer market segment, they need to understand buying behaviour of emerging farmers as well as their needs when developing strategies to utilize opportunities in this developing market. This study aims to do just that by identifying factors playing an important role in the buying behaviour of emerging farmers in the Free State when purchasing fertilizer. This study was conducted in two phases. During phase one, a literature review was conducted; phase two consisted of an empirical study. Questionnaires were used as a measuring instrument and were filled out by 32 participants to determine emerging farmer buying behaviour. Data was analysed by means of descriptive statistics and correlation analyses. The Coefficient of Cronbach’s Alpha was employed to verify the validity of the data. The results show that four (4) factors; (i) Service, (ii). Brand, (iii) Product and (iv). Learning/Psychological factors highly influence emerging farmers’ fertilizer purchase decision. The study also finally draws recommendations and conclusions for managerial perusal. / MBA, North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014

A fuzzy approach for handling uncertain preferences is developed within the paradigm of the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution and new advances in trust modeling and assessment are put forward for permitting decision makers (DMs) to decide with whom to cooperate and trust in order to move from a potential resolution to a more preferred one that is not attainable on an individual basis. The applicability and the usefulness of the fuzzy preference and trust research for giving an enhanced strategic understanding about a dispute and its possible resolution are demonstrated by employing a realworld environmental conflict as well as two generic games that represent a wide range of real life encounters dealing with trust and cooperation dilemmas. The introduction of the uncertain preference representation extends the applicability of the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution to handle conflicts with missing or incomplete preference information. Assessing the presence of trust will help to compensate for the missing information and bridge the gap between a desired outcome and a feared betrayal. These advances in the areas of uncertain preferences and trust have potential applications in engineering decision making, electronic commerce, multiagent systems, international trade and many other areas where conflict is present. In order to model a conflict, it is assumed that the decision makers, options, and the preferences of the decision makers over possible states are known. However, it is often the case that the preferences are not known for certain. This could be due to lack of information, impreciseness, or misinformation intentionally supplied by a competitor. Fuzzy logic is applied to handle this type of information. In particular, it allows a decision maker to express preferences using linguistic terms rather than exact values. It also makes use of data intervals rather than crisp values which could accommodate minor shifts in values without drastically changing the overall results. The four solution concepts of Nash, general metarationality, symmetric metarationality, and sequential stability for determining stability and potential resolutions to a conflict, are extended to accommodate the new fuzzy preference representation. The newly proposed solution concepts are designed to work for two and more than two decision maker cases. Hypothetical and real life conflicts are used to demonstrate the applicability of this newly proposed procedure. Upon reaching a conflict resolution, it might be in the best interests of some of the decision makers to cooperate and form a coalition to move from the current resolution to a better one that is not achievable on an individual basis. This may require moving to an intermediate state or states which may be less preferred by some of the coalition members while being more preferred by others compared to the original or the final state. When the move is irreversible, which is the case in most real life situations, this requires the existence of a minimum level of trust to remove any fears of betrayal. The development of trust modeling and assessment techniques, allows decision makers to decide with whom to cooperate and trust. Illustrative examples are developed to show how this modeling works in practice. The new theoretical developments presented in this research enhance the applicability of the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution. The proposed trust modeling allows a reasonable way of analyzing and predicting the formation of coalitions in conflict analysis and cooperative game theory. It also opens doors for further research and developments in trust modeling in areas such as electronic commerce and multiagent systems.

In this paper, a view of non-compliance in practical healthcare is provided that identifies certain non-compliant behaviours as rational. This view of rational non-compliance is used to update a current form of doctor patient relationships with the aim of reducing non-compliance. In addition to reforming one standard doctor patient relationship model, the normative implications of understanding non-compliance as a rational form of human behaviour are described.

The purpose of this study was two-fold. First, it was designed to determine what factors physicians consider most important when choosing a hospital to use for patient referrals. The second portion of the study sought to determine what means of communication were most effective in reaching physicians. A review of the available literature showed that some studies had been conducted on the physician-tophysician referral process. However, nothing had been done on the physician-to-hospital relationship. No communication studies were found regarding what form(s) of communication is/are the most effective in reaching the physicians.A survey was sent to all members of the medical communities in Madision County/Anderson, Indiana, and Allen County/Fort Wayne, Indiana. All results of the survey were tested by statistics with all results found to be non-significant. Only percentages were reported in the study.The study showed that physicians were mostly concerned with care-related factors when referring patients to a hospital. These factors include quality of patient management, patient results, availability of specialists and reputation of specialists. Of least importance to the physicians were patient-related factors such as cost, convenience, and preference of hospital.The survey also showed that the physicians' age and area of specialty made no difference in how receptive they were to communications. When asked about mass media, the physicians said they noticed newspapers the most, followed by television and radio. When asked how they preferred to receive information from or about a hospital, doctors listed, from most preferred to least preferred, direct mail, medical staff newsletters, medical society publications, hospital publications, and educational meetings.The researcher feels that an in-depth interview approach with the physicians would better determine the more complex reasons for referral decisions. A readability study would also determine to what extent the physicians read, heard, or saw the messages sent to them, and how design, layout and writing style would assist the hospitals and other health professions in reaching the physicians more effectively.

This study aimed to examine the psychological effects of considering a move into residential care. It sought to explore the wistful ‘prefactual’ and ‘counterfactual’ evaluation of ‘what if’ and ‘if only’ scenarios. Sanna, Carter, and Small’s (2006) ‘Time, Environment, Motivation, Personality, and Outcome’ (TEMPO) model was applied to investigate whether individuals moving closer in time to a prefactual scenario (a hypothetical vignette about two older adults facing a move towards residential care) express increased prefactual/counterfactual statements. Additional hypotheses explored the impact of personality and outcome (mood as input) factors on prefactual/counterfactual statement generation. This study employed a naturalistic experimental design. The main grouping variable was each participant’s life stage (working-age adults or older adults). These two groups were selected to represent two distinct stages along the TEMPO timeline. The dependent variable involved the number of written prefactual/counterfactual statements. In total, 33 working-age adults and 33 older adults completed the study. Each wrote what they thought could be better or worse about each character’s position in the prefactual scenario. They also completed relevant demographic information and information about personal circumstances, along with a range of personality measures. Independent-Samples T Tests revealed a significantly higher number of prefactual/counterfactual statements generated by the older adult group for the prefactual scenario. Effect sizes were medium to large. However, tests of personal scenarios, and the effects of personality and outcome did not reach significance. The implications of these findings, in relation to research and clinical work, were discussed. This was particularly in relation to furthering the investigation of prefactual and counterfactual generation and in relation to the significant emotional implications of considering a move away from independent living. The limitations of this research were discussed and related to future research possibilities, particularly concerning the potential impact of prefactual and counterfactual thinking on behaviour.