Insight experiences are powerful: They feel true, they are remembered, and they can shift our decisions and our beliefs. Feelings of insight are also accurate most of the time. However, recent work shows that it is possible to systematically induce false insights and even misattribute our Aha! moments to make false facts seem true. Insights, therefore, seem to be adaptive on average but error prone. This chapter suggests that these results can be integrated by thinking of insights as a metacognitive heuristic for selecting ideas from the stream of consciousness (dubbed the “Eureka heuristic”), reviews key findings about the accuracy of insights and where and why insights go wrong, and discusses implications for our understanding of the development of delusions, false beliefs, and misinformation. Ultimately, understanding the role that feelings of insight play in human cognition may make us better decision-makers in an uncertain world.

Malala Yousafzai won the Nobel Peace Prize when she was seventeen. In part, the world knows about her because when the Taliban prohibited girls from attending school in Afghanistan, she spoke up about it, writing articles and giving talks. As is clear by her writing, Malala has strong values that include justice and equality for women as well as a love of learning and education. She also values safety. In making her choice to speak up and criticize her government’s decision, Malala was aware that she was increasing risks to herself and her family. In response, the Taliban shot (then fifteen-year-old) Malala in the head while she was on a school bus. Thankfully, she survived and continues to advocate for a future where girls are free to learn and lead.

Malala made decisions based on trade-offs among her values, even when the priority she placed on equality and justice made her vulnerable to Taliban hostility and increased her own risk of death.

Decisions are doors that provide people of all ages with opportunities to express who they are and to learn about who they want to become. Sometimes the young people in your life may choose the wrong door and, while that can make for a good learning experience, you probably want to help them make good decisions and avoid the bad ones. You did, after all, decide to open up this book. While we cannot program kids with the answers they need to live healthy and fulfilling lives, we can support kids in learning and using a common-sense approach to understanding and organizing their feelings and thoughts as they make their own decisions.

This chapter examines individual, social, and environmental factors associated with judicial decisions in juvenile dependency and juvenile justice cases. The structure and process of juvenile justice decisions are described along with a brief comparison to the adult courts. Current models and recommended guidance on juvenile dependency and juvenile justice cases are explored. Factors reviewed include, but are not limited to, legal considerations (e.g., removal, reunification, transfer/waiver, pleas, and placements), judicial education and expertise (e.g., formal training and judicial stress), bias (e.g., racial and socioeconomic prejudice), parent and youth characteristics (e.g., age and gender), family dynamics (e.g., parental engagement, child and parent attachment, and exposure to substances use and abuse), trauma, hearing practice, and representation. The chapter synthesizes the body of current research, discusses limitations in the current juvenile dependency and juvenile justice literature, and provides recommendations for future directions in both basic and applied research as well as policy implications for the legal decision-making field.

This chapter focuses on the interplay of health policy and politics at a national level, and:

• explores the process by which health policy is created and the context in which it is developed and influenced;

• considers the interplay between policy and its implementation; and

• offers a narrative of the evolution of national health policy and politics in England over the last 30 years.

How do people judge the sizes of things? What determines people’s evaluations of quantities such as prices or wages? People’s judgements and evaluations are typically relative; the same quantity will be judged or evaluated differently when it appears in different comparison samples. This chapter describes a simple psychological account – the Decision by Sampling model – of how sample-based judgements and evaluations are made. According to the model, what matters is the relative ranked position of an item within a comparison sample. For example, an income of $50,000 a year will be evaluated more favourably within a context of four lower and two higher incomes than in relation to one higher and five lower incomes. According to Decision by Sampling, estimates of the relative ranked position of items within comparison contexts are made by simple sampling and ordinal comparison processes. These estimates are assumed to underpin choice and valuation. The chapter reviews the Decision by Sampling model, relates it to other models such as Adaptation Level Theory and Range Frequency Theory, and shows how it can explain the shape of utility curves and probability weighting functions. The relation of coding efficiency to rank-based models is also discussed.

Computational work on morality has emerged from two major sources – empirical moral science and philosophical ethics.Moral science has revealed a diversity of moral phenomena: moral behavior (including moral decision making), moral judgments, moral emotions, moral sanctions, moral communication.Philosophical ethics has long focused on moral decision making, and this is where most of the computational work has emerged. Much of it uses rule-based systems rooted in formal logic but is complemented by connectionist, case-based, and other approaches, and more recently by reinforcement learning models.Computational work on moral judgments is sparser, in part because moral judgments build on numerous complex mental capacities, such as causal and counterfactual reasoning and theory of mind. Nonetheless, some models of blame judgments have emerged that draw on information processing approaches from empirical moral science. Even less work has tackled moral emotions, sanctions, and communication – phenomena that present vast challenges and opportunities for future work.

Ishiguro’s protagonists are notable for their resolution. It is precisely this quality that leads characters such as Ono in An Artist of the Floating World, Stevens in Remains of the Day, Christopher Banks in When We Were Orphans, and Kathy H in Never Let Me Go to make life-defining but ethically dubious decisions. In this sense, irresolution can be seen, paradoxically and not unproblematically, as a key Ishigurian virtue. Indeed, irresolution inheres in Ishiguro’s novels in terms of narrative form as well as ethics and theme: rather than offering epiphany, consolation, redemption, or any final hermeneutic closure or disclosure, the novels are insistent, resolute in their tendency towards thematic, ethical, and structural irresolution. At the same time, however, the desire for resolution is shown to be an understandable one, and to underlie the characters’ efforts to make meaning from the worlds and situations in which they find themselves.

Research in judgment and decision making has made a lot of progress on the front of the identification of biases, and, more recently, on their correction, by suggesting feasible interventions to reduce their prevalence. Despite initial mixed results, more recent research has revealed that training is a promising debiasing tool. One-shot training interventions can reduce the incidence of several cognitive biases up to three months post training. These effects generalize to decisions and problems that were not featured in the training but are susceptible to the same biases. They were also observed in a field setting when trainees were not able to connect the decision problems to the training. Although the complexity of the decision strategies taught and the propensity of trainees to see themselves as immune to bias may pose boundary conditions to the occurrence of these effects, training has notable advantages in comparison to other debiasing tools such as incentives, accountability, and nudges.

This chapter extends the previous ones by examining the constraints that the natural environment imposes on economic development over the long period. The congestion of the (finite-sized) planet Earth is examined, as well as the consequences of environmental damages on the possibilities of long-run economic expansion.

How individuals try to solve problems, from simple to life-threatening ones, has been a central question across the scientific landscape. Not surprisingly, disciplines have offered theories representing their unique perspectives from cost, psychological predispositions, social status, culture, power, and even genetic inheritance. What was common across these explanations, even as larger structures or context were considered to limit or enhance action, was the focus on individuals, the primary assumption of action as decision-making or help-seeking, and an internal cost-benefit mechanism. While providing many insights, this understanding of the basis of human action falls short. The social network perspective suggests a shift to the influence of others on social action and a reconsideration of underlying assumptions. This reflection considers how applying an approach where social networks are the engine of action produced the Social Organization Strategy framework, the Network Episode Model, subsequent revisions, and the multi-level, multi-disciplinary Network Embedded Symbiome. This chapter describes how this social network perspective guides a new research effort on human well-being — the Person-to-Person Health Interview Study — and includes specific measurement batteries for ego-centric data collection.

In this chapter we discuss standards as forms of partial organization. Standards are defined as decided rules for common and voluntary use. Taking the example of CSR and corporate governance standards, we show that the degree of partiality of standards can vary widely – ranging from a single element of organization, i.e. decided rules, to all five elements of organization, i.e. decided rules, hierarchies, membership, monitoring and sanctioning. We demonstrate that in some cases partiality is the result of restrictions in the design of standards, while in other cases it is the result of an explicit choice. We also demonstrate that the degree of partiality of standards can change over time, as there are often pressures for standards to adopt additional organizational elements. Furthermore, we discuss the dispersed nature of many standards, showing how different actors often provide different organizational elements of standards without any central coordination. We close with an outline of an agenda for future research.

Despite strong emotions and a high density of communication, intimacy does not preclude organization. Intimate relationships can often be recognized as partially organized. In this chapter I examine three intimate relationships – families, kinship, and friendship – in order to investigate how the variation in combinations of organizational elements can be explained by the core component of love in each type of relationship.In examining the appearance of organizational elements in intimate relationships, one can see considerable differences among them, not only in their degree of organization, but also in the elements that are present. There is a connection between the elements that appear in a relationship and the emotional content. But there are also differences within the same type of relationship in how much and in which ways they are organized. An investigation of organizational elements in intimate relationships also provides an awareness of the limits of organization and why intimate relationships remain partially organized.A broadening of the analysis examining connections between states and intimate relationships demonstrates why states can use membership as an organizational element only to a limited extent. States are extremely organized in many respects, yet they are only partially organized.