Search in an environment with an uncertain distribution of resources involves a trade-off between exploitation of past discoveries and further exploration. This extends to information foraging, where a knowledge-seeker shifts between reading in depth and studying new domains. To study this decision-making process, we examine the reading choices made by one of the most celebrated scientists of the modern era: Charles Darwin. From the full-text of books listed in his chronologically-organized reading journals, we generate topic models to quantify his local (...) (text-to-text) and global (text-to-past) reading decisions using Kullback-Liebler Divergence, a cognitively-validated, information-theoretic measure of relative surprise. Rather than a pattern of surprise-minimization, corresponding to a pure exploitation strategy, Darwin’s behavior shifts from early exploitation to later exploration, seeking unusually high levels of cognitive surprise relative to previous eras. These shifts, detected by an unsupervised Bayesian model, correlate with major intellectual epochs of his career as identified both by qualitative scholarship and Darwin’s own self-commentary. Our methods allow us to compare his consumption of texts with their publication order. We find Darwin’s consumption more exploratory than the culture’s production, suggesting that underneath gradual societal changes are the explorations of individual synthesis and discovery. Our quantitative methods advance the study of cognitive search through a framework for testing interactions between individual and collective behavior and between short- and long-term consumption choices. This novel application of topic modeling to characterize individual reading complements widespread studies of collective scientific behavior. (shrink)

We show how faceted search using a combination of traditional classification systems and mixed-membership topic models can go beyond keyword search to inform resource discovery, hypothesis formulation, and argument extraction for interdisciplinary research. Our test domain is the history and philosophy of scientific work on animal mind and cognition. The methods can be generalized to other research areas and ultimately support a system for semi-automatic identification of argument structures. We provide a case study for the application of the methods to (...) the problem of identifying and extracting arguments about anthropomorphism during a critical period in the development of comparative psychology. We show how a combination of classification systems and mixed-membership models trained over large digital libraries can inform resource discovery in this domain. Through a novel approach of “drill-down” topic modeling—simultaneously reducing both the size of the corpus and the unit of analysis—we are able to reduce a large collection of fulltext volumes to a much smaller set of pages within six focal volumes containing arguments of interest to historians and philosophers of comparative psychology. The volumes identified in this way did not appear among the first ten results of the keyword search in the HathiTrust digital library and the pages bear the kind of “close reading” needed to generate original interpretations that is the heart of scholarly work in the humanities. Zooming back out, we provide a way to place the books onto a map of science originally constructed from very different data and for different purposes. The multilevel approach advances understanding of the intellectual and societal contexts in which writings are interpreted. (shrink)

In our global neocolonial and neoliberal present, so-called solutions to settler-Indigenous conflict are often framed as a reconciliation achieved through a multicultural democratic society. However, this conception of resolution frequently adopts a superficial understanding of culture that ultimately understands cultural difference as reconcilable in the sense that other cultures can be folded into or made compatible with dominant cultural norms. On Turtle Island (North America), especially within the settler colonial context, such reconciliation as resolution becomes a differently fashioned form of (...) domination as assimilation especially from the vantage points of Indigenous nations and Afro-descended peoples. This essay explores the ontological incommensurabilities of cultural difference that resist assimilation or translation into dominant Euro-Western cultural frameworks. It does this through examining the way culture and ontological orientation, or world-senses, are made and live on through various modes of cultural preservation and practice. I examine these ideas through Indigenous practices of orality, origin stories, ceremony, and cultural revitalization. (shrink)

In the target article, we presented the hypothesis that parasite-stress variation was a causal factor in the variation of in-group assortative sociality, cross-nationally and across the United States, which we indexed with variables that measured different aspects of the strength of family ties and religiosity. We presented evidence supportive of our hypothesis in the form of analyses that controlled for variation in freedom, wealth resources, and wealth inequality across nations and the states of the USA. Here, we respond to criticisms (...) from commentators and attempt to clarify and expand the parasite-stress theory of sociality used to fuel our research presented in the target article. (shrink)

In contemporary culture, existing audiovisual recordings are constantly reused and repurposed for various ends, raising questions regarding the ethics of such appropriations, particularly when the recording depicts actual people and events. Every reuse of a preexisting recording is, on some level, a misuse in that it was not intended or at least anticipated by the original maker, but not all misuses are necessarily unethical. In fact, there are many instances of productive misuse that seem justified. At the same time, there (...) are other instances in which the misuse shades into abuse. Documentary scholars have long engaged with the question of the ethical responsibility of documentary makers in relation to their subjects. But what happens when this responsibility is set at a remove, when the recording already exists for the taking and repurposing? Reuse, Misuse and Abuse surveys a range of contemporary films and videos that appropriate preexisting footage and attempts to theorize their ethical implications. (shrink)

Hyperlink cinema is an emergent film genre that seeks to push the boundaries of the medium in order to mirror contemporary life in the globalized community. Films in the genre thus create an interacting network across space and time in such a way as to suggest that people’s lives can intersect on scales that would not have been possible without modern technologies of travel and communication. This allows us to test the hypothesis that new kinds of media might permit us (...) to break through the natural cognitive constraints that limit the number and quality of social relationships we can manage in the conventional face-to-face world. We used network analysis to test this hypothesis with data from 12 hyperlink films, using 10 motion pictures from a more conventional film genre as a control. We found few differences between hyperlink cinema films and the control genre, and few differences between hyperlink cinema films and either the real world or classical drama (e.g., Shakespeare’s plays). Conversation group size seems to be especially resilient to alteration. It seems that, despite many efficiency advantages, modern media are unable to circumvent the constraints imposed by our evolved psychology. (shrink)

Van Lange et al. argue that variations in climate explain cross-societal variations in violence. We suggest that any approach seeking to understand cross-cultural variation in human behavior via an ecological framework must consider a wider array of ecological variables, and we find that income inequality and sex ratio are better predictors than climate of cross-societal variations in violence.

Smith, Glass, and Miller have reported a meta-analysis of over 500 studies comparing some form of psychological therapy with a control condition. They report that when averaged over all dependent measures of outcome, psychological therapy is. 85 standard deviations better than the control treatment. We examined the subset of studies included in the Smith et al. metaanalysis that contained a psychotherapy and a placebo treatment. The median of the mean effect sizes for these 32 studies was. 15. There was a (...) nonsignificant inverse relationship between mean outcome and the following: sample size, duration of therapy, use of measures of outcome other than undisguised self-report, measurement of outcome at follow-up, and use of real patients rather than subjects solicited for the purposes of participation in a research study. A qualitative analysis of the studies in terms of the type of patient involved indicates that those using psychiatric outpatients had essentially zero effect sizes and that none using psychiatric inpaticnts provide convincing evidence for psychotherapeutic effectiveness. The onty studies clearly demonstrating significant effects of psychotherapy were the ones that did not use real patients. For the most part, these studies involved small samples of subjects and brief treatments, occasionally described in quasibeliavioristic language. It was concluded that for real patients there is no evidence that the benefits of psychotherapy are greater than those of placebo treatment. (shrink)

'Political reconciliation' refers to processes for establishing right relations between groups that are emerging from a history coloured by violent relations. However, dominant Western, euro-descendent philosophies of political reconciliation rarely focus on ecological forms of harm or consider practices of ecological violence as constitutive of the violent relations that reconciliation hopes to repair. This article argues that the exclusion of ecological dimensions of harm from dominant Western models of political reconciliation is one way of understanding Indigenous claims of dissatisfaction with (...) such reconciliation projects. This article analyses and contextualises these claims of dissatisfaction by focusing on how dominant Western, euro-descendent models of reconciliation in the North American context import settler-colonial commitments that obscure the primacy of ecological violence in settler-Indigenous land-based conflicts. Furthermore, this article posits that settler-colonial commitments in reconciliation models pose an obstacle to deeper forms of reconciliation, partly because these models uphold dominant euro-descendent cosmologies and conceptions of land over and above Indigenous ones. Finally, this article suggests that that the possibility of deep reconciliation exists, and requires engaging with Indigenous philosophies that place land and relations to land at the centre of right relations, thus working toward decolonising settler-colonial-infused forms of reconciliation. (shrink)

We surveyed 223 APA members to investigate the roles of therapists' sex, theoretical orientation, interpersonal boundaries, and clients' sex in predicting therapists' assessments of the ethicality of nonerotic dual relationships with their clients. Results indicated that therapists' sex, interpersonal boundaries, and theoretical orientation influenced ethical judgments of these relationships. Theoretical and practical implications of our findings are discussed.

Transitional justice is positioned as an emergent discourse to grapple with the aim, and subsequent practices, of moving societies mired in violent political relations to more stable, democratic political relations. Increasingly, precepts of transitional justice are being applied to political reconciliatory processes in so- called liberal democratic states. This article examines limitations to transitional justice paradigms especially when applied to Indigenous-state reconciliatory processes by centering Indigenous scholarly discourse critical of both transitional justice and reconciliation processes that position Indigenous peoples, Indigenous (...) lands, and the landed violence of colonialism as fixed in the past. The article offers an analysis of the limitations of neoliberal transitional justice and reconciliation processes that do not realize justice for Indigenous peoples and Indigenous lands by highlighting Indigenous-centered accounts of justice that promote collective capacities of Indigenous nations rooted in the ability of Indigenous peoples to experience themselves in the world in ways that center relations to land, world, and relatives (human and non-human). (shrink)

Lands and bodies are often conceptualized as exhaustible objects and property within settler-colonial and neoliberal ideologies. These conceptualizations lead to underdevelopment of understandings of lands and bodies that fall outside of these ascriptions, and also attempt to actively obscure the pervasive ways in which settler colonialism violently reinscribes itself on the North American landscape through the murder and disappearance of Black and Brown women's bodies. In this article, I will argue that the continual murder and disappearance of Black and Brown (...) women in North America facilitate the successful functioning of ongoing settler-colonial systems and projects. This violence creates and reinforces the functionality of Black/Brown bodies as the territory upon which settler identity and futurity gains traction, indeed, requires. (shrink)

When engaging in community-based research, it is important to consider ethical research practices throughout the project. While current research practices require many investigators to obtain approval from an ethics review board before starting a project, more is required to ensure that ethical principles are applied once the investigations begin and after the investigations are complete. In response to this concern, as expressed by workers at a feminist non-profit during a community placement, we developed a tool to foster both greater ethical (...) and feminist research practice in community-based research. Using feminist theories, methodologies, and concepts such as epistemic justice, epistemic trust, and coauthorship, a tool was developed to support researchers and other collaborators in building relationships of reciprocity. This tool, called the Research Responsibility Agreement (RRA) invites all members of a research project to explicitly reflect on their role in the research, their relationships with other collaborators, their responsibility to contributing meaningfully in the project, and their plans to remain accountable to one another. In doing so, the RRA adds to existing tools that support ethical research by sharing explicit reflections from all collaborators on how to prevent harm and by asking them to reflect on ethical practices beyond the initial stages of the project. The RRA also encourages greater engagement from researchers and collaborators toward building meaningful relationships with each other, and with participants, to work together in advancing social change. As a practical tool that promotes reflection, that builds relationships, and that holds all parties accountable to ethical and feminist research practices, the RRA has the potential to generate impactful change in community-based research projects and beyond. While the RRA is tailored to community-based research, it can be applied widely to any research project and has the potential to revolutionize how research relationships are built across disciplines. (shrink)

This article proceeds from the thesis proposed by Frantz Fanon that colonialism, specifically settler colonialism, is a world-destroying structure that the colonized witness as a “veritable apocalypse.” Settler colonialism is apocalyptic not only in the sense that it attempts to permanently destroy and make irretrievable various other Indigenous worlds and ways of being-in-the-world, but also in that it builds the settler colonial world in, on, and with Indigenous lands and bodies. I read Fanon as proposing that settler colonialism builds apocalyptic (...) worlds with the murdered worlds of the colonized and then forces the colonized to navigate and embrace these violent and traumatic landscapes, which I call terrortories. I argue this is directly connected to Fanon's revolutionary psychiatric work and practice to decolonize and disalienate colonial medical and psychiatric facilities as structures of disablement, which requires the abolition of settler colonialism altogether. (shrink)

We examine creativity from a qualitative process rather than a quantitative product perspective. Our focus is on “habits of mind” (thinking dispositions) used during the creative process, and the categories we used were those of the eight Studio Habits of Mind observed in visual arts classrooms (Hetland, Winner, Veenema, & Sheridan, 2007, 2013). Our source of data was footage from a popular reality television show, Project Runway, in which nascent fashion designers are given garment design challenges. An entire season of (...) the show (14 episodes) was transcribed and coded for the presence of eight Studio Habits of Mind. We found abundant evidence of all eight of these thinking dispositions in all portions of the show. We argue that the creative thinking occurring during fashion design bears strong resemblances to that which occurs in the art studio-classroom. Qualitatively created frameworks, like those of the Studio Habits of Mind, can be used to inform our understanding of creative behavior in various disciplines. (shrink)

This article examines stakeholder involvement and influence as part of voluntary environmental agreements between regulatory agencies and companies. Ten pilot projects that were part of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Project XL were examined to evaluate process goals and outcome goals. The ten case studies encompass a range of businesses, locations, and ideas for regulatory “reinvention” projects, and they span a spectrum of stakeholder participation processes and outcomes. Although results point to numerous problems in implementation, they also indicate that in (...) several cases, stake holder groups significantly affected the final project agreement and enforceable permit. The evidence suggests that companies can work collaboratively and constructively with residents of local communities, members of national environmental organizations and other interest groups, and government regulatory officials to craft voluntary environmental agreements that are cooperative and environmentally beneficial. (shrink)

This paper explores the tensions between two disparate approaches to addressing hunger worldwide: Food security and food sovereignty. Food security generally focuses on ensuring that people have economic and physical access to safe and nutritious food, while food sovereignty movements prioritize the right of people and communities to determine their agricultural policies and food cultures. As food sovereignty movements grew out of critiques of food security initiatives, they are often framed as conflicting approaches within the wider literature. This paper explores (...) this tension, arguing that food security is based on a particular model of justice, distributive justice, which limits the sovereignty and autonomy of communities as food producers and consumers. In contrast, food sovereignty movements view food security as a necessary part of food sovereignty, but ultimately insufficient for creating food sustainable communities and limiting wider harms. Rather than viewing food security and food sovereignty as in conflict, we argue that food sovereignty’s justice framework both encompasses and entails justice claims that guide food security projects. (shrink)