Mobile app users' privacy concerns: different heuristics for privacy assurance statements in the EU and China

PurposeAs mobile apps request permissions from users, protecting mobile users' personal information from being unnecessarily collected and misused becomes critical. Privacy regulations, such as General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union (EU), aim to protect users' online information privacy. However, one’s understanding of whether these regulations effectively make mobile users less concerned about their privacy is still limited. This work aims to study mobile users' privacy concerns towards mobile apps by examining the effects of general and specific privacy assurance statements in China and the EU.Design/methodology/approachDrawing on ecological rationality and heuristics theory, an online experiment and a follow-up validation experiment were conducted in the EU and China to examine the effects of privacy assurance statements on mobile users' privacy concerns.FindingsWhen privacy regulation is presented, the privacy concerns of Chinese mobile users are significantly lowered compared with EU mobile users. This indicates that individuals in the two regions react differently to privacy assurances. However, when a general regulation statement is used, no effect is observed. EU and Chinese respondents remain unaffected by general assurance statements.Originality/valueThis study incorporates notions from fast and frugal heuristics end ecological rationality – where seemingly irrational decisions may make sense in different societal contexts.

Conceptualizing Cuvée Organizations: Characteristics Leading towards Sustainable Decision-Making Practices

This paper discusses the role and responsibility of business organizations in a sustainability transition with a thought-provoking hypothetical construct, the cuvée organization. The aim of the paper is to introduce and conceptualize this normative concept on what sustainable and responsible business would look like in an ideal world—more specifically, which meta features should characterize a business organization that is designed for sustainability? It also tests the concept’s applicability to a micro-process, an everyday challenge any organization aiming for sustainability would face, namely discounting. The concept of the cuvée organization emerged from participatory backcasting, a normative scenario-building exercise conducted with a sustainability expert panel. In this co-creative process, the panel capitalized on the metaphor of cuvée wine and winemaking, which provided the cognitive means to chart the unknown. The emerged concept of the cuvée organization stands for a business archetype which is designed to serve a prosocial cause, subordinating activities and structural features accordingly. When applying this construct to discounting, our approach lies with ecological rationality in behavioral decision making as well as the practice-based approach of corporate strategy research. In this theoretically rigorous effort, we aim to show which meta-characteristics could support an organizational structure leading to better decision making, aiming to avoid various forms of temporal and spatial discounting. The originality of the research is filling the normative vision with details through the conceptualization of the cuvée organization. On the level of methodologies, our research contributes to understanding the novelty and applicability of backcasting processes and provides an astounding example for the use of metaphors in future studies.

Concluding Thoughts

This brief concluding chapter draws the threads of the previous chapters together. Previous work on human decision-making has tended to conclude that rationality is a scarce resource and most cognition is arational or irrational. Pushback against this view has come from proponents of ecological rationality. They concede, in effect, that our decision-making is irrational, inasmuch as it fails to respond to good information, but argue that it is rational in a broader sense: we better achieve our epistemic goals by believing arationally. This chapter argues that the evidence surveyed in the previous chapters shows that this is false: we respond rationally to the higher-order evidence we’re presented with, and there’s therefore no need to appeal to ecological rationality to defend our self-image as rational agents. Once we recognize the pervasiveness of higher-order evidence, we can vindicate something very like the Enlightenment picture of ourselves as rational animals.

Generative Rationality

In this paper we contrast bounded and ecological rationality with a proposed alternative, generative rationality. Ecological approaches to rationality build on the idea of humans as “intuitive statisticians” while we argue for a more generative conception of humans as “probing organisms.” We first highlight how ecological rationality’s focus on cues and statistics is problematic for two reasons: (a) the problem of cue salience, and (b) the problem of cue novelty in teeming environments. We highlight these problems by revisiting the statistical and cue-based logic that underlies ecological rationality, by discussing its origins in the field of psychophysics (e.g., signal detection, just-noticeable-differences). We work through the most popular experiment in the ecological rationality literature—the city-size task—to illustrate how psychophysical assumptions have been linked to ecological rationality. After highlighting these problems, we contrast ecological rationality with a proposed alternative, generative rationality. Generative rationality builds on biology, in contrast to ecological rationality’s focus on statistics. We argue that in uncertain environments cues are rarely given and available for statistical processing. Environments “teem” with indefinite cues, meanings and potential objects, the salience or relevance of which is scarcely obvious based on their statistical or physical properties. We focus on organism-specificity and organism-directed probing that shapes perception and judgment. Generative rationality departs from existing bounded and ecological approaches in that cue salience is given by top-down factors rather than the bottom-up, statistical or physical properties. A central premise of generative rationality is that cues in teeming environments are noticed or recognized when they serve as cues-for-something, requiring what might be called a “cue-to-clue” transformation. Awareness toward relevant cues needs to be actively cultivated or “grown.” Thus we argue that perception might more productively be seen as the presentation of cues and objects rather than their representation. The generative approach not only applies to seemingly mundane organism (including human) interactions with their environments—as well as organism-object relationships and their embodied nature—but also has significant implications for understanding the emergence of novelty in economic and other uncertain settings. We conclude with a discussion of how our arguments link with—but modify—Herbert Simon’s popular “scissor” metaphor, as it applies to bounded rationality and its implications for decision making in uncertain, teeming environments.

Generalized Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (G-SLAM) as unification framework for natural and artificial intelligences: towards reverse engineering the hippocampal/entorhinal system and principles of high-level cognition

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) represents a fundamental problem for autonomous embodied systems, for which hippocampal/entorhinal system (H/E-S) adaptations have been optimized over the course of evolution. We have developed a biologically-inspired SLAM architecture based on latent variable generative modeling within the Free Energy Principle and Active Inference (FEP-AI) framework, which affords flexible navigation and planning in mobile robots. We have primarily focused on attempting to reverse engineer H/E-S ‘design’ properties, but here we consider ways in which SLAM principles from robotics may help us better understand nervous systems and emergent minds. After reviewing LatentSLAM and notable features of this control architecture, we consider how the H/E-S may realize these functional properties not only for physical navigation, but also with respect to high-level cognition understood as generalized simultaneous localization and mapping (G-SLAM). We focus on loop closure, graph relaxation, and node duplication as particularly impactful architectural features, suggesting these computational phenomena may contribute to understanding cognitive insight (as proto-causal-inference), accommodation (as integration into existing schemas), and assimilation (as category formation). All these operations can similarly be describable in terms of structure/category learning on multiple levels of abstraction. However, here we adopt an ecological rationality perspective, framing H/E-S functions as orchestrating SLAM processes within both concrete and abstract hypothesis spaces. In this navigation/search process, adaptive cognitive equilibration between assimilation and accommodation involves balancing tradeoffs between exploration and exploitation; this dynamic equilibrium may be near optimally achieved in FEP-AI agents, wherein control systems governed by expected free energy objective functions naturally balance model simplicity and accuracy. With respect to structure learning, such a balance would involve constructing models and categories that are neither too inclusive nor exclusive. We propose these (generalized) SLAM phenomena may represent some of the most impactful sources of variation in cognition both within and between individuals, suggesting the impacts of these neuromodulators on H/E-S functioning may potentially illuminate the adaptive significance of these signaling pathways as fundamental cybernetic control parameters. Finally, we discuss how understanding H/E-S contributions to G-SLAM may provide a unifying framework for high-level cognition and its potential realization in artificial intelligences.

Rules of thumb and cultural evolution: How simple heuristics have guided human adaptation and the emergence of cultural complexity

This article combines insights from ecological rationality and cultural evolution to illustrate how simple heuristics – colloquially, “rules of thumb” – have guided human behaviour and the evolution of complex cultures. Through a variety of examples and case studies, we discuss how human cultures have used rules of thumb in domains as diverse as foraging, resource management, social learning, moral judgment, and cultural niche construction. We propose four main arguments. Firstly, we argue that human societies have a rich cultural history in applying rules of thumb to guide daily activities and social organization. Second, we emphasise how rules of thumb may be convenient units of cultural transmission and high-fidelity social learning – the backbones of cumulative cultural evolution. Third, we highlight how rules of thumb can facilitate efficient decision making by making use of environmental and bodily features. Fourth, we discuss how simple rules of thumb may serve as building blocks for the emergence of more complex cultural patterns. This paper sets a research agenda for studying how simple rules contribute to cultural evolution in the past, the present, and the Anthropocene future.

Causal Attribution and Emotion Expression of Suffering Among Southeast Asian Indigenous Peoples: A Systematic Review Study

Indigenous people, particularly minorities in Southeast Asia (SEA), often face hardships due to colonization, displacement, and deforestation. However, studies on their subjective suffering experiences are sparse. Therefore, the present study aimed to conduct a systemic review of literature concerning SEA indigenous people’s cognition and emotion in suffering events. A rigorous literature search following PRISMA guidelines was conducted on the following databases–Scopus, EbscoHost, Ovid (PsychArticles and PsycInfo), Proquest. Embase, Ovid Medline, and Google Scholar using keyword categories for “SEA,” “cognition” or “emotion,” and “suffering events.” The initial search resulted in 6,383 articles, but only 11 empirical studies (containing qualitative or quantitative original data) were included after careful screening. Next, a thematic synthesis method was used to summarize the findings. Two themes of causal attribution of suffering were identified—supernatural reasons and negative impact of interactions with outsiders. Four themes of emotional expression of suffering were identified—physical actions and gestures, communal practices, somatic symptoms, and behavior adaptations. Our findings correspond with the ecological rationality theory, where indigenous people still function as strong-ties societies that capitalize on external-oriented mental strategies and cognitive styles. The identification of unique forms of cognition and modes of emotional expression holds implications toward building an equitable humanistic psychology.

Heuristics in financial decision-making: the selection of SME financing by advisers in an increasingly diverse market

PurposeIn order to better understand how heuristics are used in practice, the authors explore what type of heuristics is used in the managerial domain of financial advisors to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and what influences the shaping of these heuristics. In doing so, the authors detect possible fast-and-frugal heuristics in day-to-day decision-making of independent financial advisers who help owners of SMEs to acquire capital (e.g. loans, factoring, leasing and equity).Design/methodology/approachThe authors inductively assessed the work of financial advisers of SMEs. Based on group discussions, the authors drew up a semi-structured interview-protocol with descriptive questions about how financial advisers come to a deal for their clients. The interviews of 19 professionals were analysed by relating them to the theory of fast-and-frugal heuristics.FindingsWithin their decision-making, advisers estimate the likelihood of acceptance by a few financial providers they know well in their personal network with a strong bias towards traditional banking products, although there are a large number of alternatives on the Dutch market. “Less is more” seems to be a relevant principle when defined as satisficing. Heuristics help advisers to deal with behavioural and economic limitations. Also, the authors have found that client interaction, previous working experience and the company the adviser is working for influences the shaping of the simple rules the adviser is using.Research limitations/implicationsThe study shows how difficult it is to understand the ecological rationality of a certain group of professionals and to understand the “less is more” principle. Financial advisers to SMEs use cognitive shortcuts and simple rules to advise SME-owners, based on previous experiences, but it is difficult to determine whether that leads to the same or even better solutions for them and their clients than using probability theory and financial optimisation models. Within heuristics, satisficing seems to be a dominant mechanism. Here, heuristics help advisers in recognising possibilities by searching for similarities between a current financing case and previous experiences. The data suggests that if “less is more” is defined as satisficing for one or more stakeholders involved, the principle dominates the decision making of financial advisers of SME's.Practical implicationsThe authors suggest the relevance of a behavioural approach to finance by assessing the day-to-day decisions of financial advisers of SMEs. Also, the authors suggest that financial advisers are guided by previous experiences, and they do not fully assess a wide range of options in their work but need shortcuts to fulfil the needs of their clients.Originality/valueThe study comes close to day-to-day decision-making in finance by assessing how professionals make decisions. The authors try to understand types of heuristics in relation with “ecological rationality” and the less is more principle. The authors assess financial advisers of SME-companies, a group that has gotten little research attention until now. The influence of client interaction and of the company the adviser is working for is remarkable in the shaping of the advisers' simple rules.