This book explains how scientific research is conducted. The leading-edge essays focus on the emerging inter/transdisciplinary dimensions of research. They use an approach grounded in the sciences of complexity to counteract the disciplinary fragmentation and decontextualization created by a reductionist approach. The underlying theme throughout is a practical focus on improving the way practitioners conduct and educate for scientific research. By rejecting the reductionistic approach to science, the book proposes research platforms that offer a broader perspective on the nature and practice of research, and the implications thereof for more complex and productive research environments. While the book is essential reading for all those involved in planning scientific research projects, the arguments put forward for the conduct of research have broader implications and applications for the social sciences and education.

Research on Scientific Research: A Transdisciplinary Study

Science & Math

Maldonato, Mauro

Research

Liverpool University Press

Since the dawn of time human beings have had to make decisions. Wise or foolish, thoughtful or instinctive, altruistic or selfish, decision-making  from the most simple to the most complex  enables people to confront and overcome constant environmental challenges. Yet, despite the momentousness of decision-making in adaptability terms, men and women ignore the actual process that takes place in their minds when, for example, they invest in the stock market, buy a car, trust a person they just met, or simply decide to go to the movies. While some decisions are taken in a few seconds (when we act impulsively without time to evaluate the process), other decisions require considerable cognitive effort and accurate cost-benefit analysis. But is it only the optimal decision that deserves to be called rational? If this is the case, how then can we explain the wisdom of our instincts, of our emotions, of our sixth sense’? Moreover, what is the role of subjectivity, free will, desire, culture in the decision-making process?  Research on decision-making has had a long and controversial history. The idea of a perfect rationality has more recently given way to the idea of a rationality conscious of its incompleteness  to a process that cannot be expressed or conceived in logical or rational terms. In this ground-breaking book, Mauro Maldonato reinterprets the secular controversy about the nature of human decision-making in light of recent discoveries in cognitive neurosciences and new research (neuroeconomics and neuroethics). At the end of this literary excursion along a stunning archipelago of rationality, morality, emotion and consciousness, the reader is provided with the means to view and assess personal decision-making and resultant action in a completely different way  a way that impacts positively on human interaction and psychological wholeness.

Decision Making: Towards an Evolutionary Psychology of Rationality

Business & Money

Management & Leadership

Sussex Academic Press

This book considers the importance of intuition and natural logic in decision-making. In everyday life, people frequently make judgments and decisions without explicitly using all the relevant information that is available. Moreover, even when people are aware of details and circumstances, they do not necessarily analyze the information at their disposal on a deeper level, nor consider this information in an explicit and logical way before making a decision. On the contrary, people often follow the very first response that comes to mind, which is usually an immediate feeling, a spontaneous idea, or a sudden emergence of a sense of "I know what to do" or "This is the best choice." This intuitive, immediate response process typically takes place without any apparent effort. If questioned, people often cannot say why they responded in this fashion. People tend to trust their intuition so frequently, simply because they are successful with it. Intuition seems to satisfy decision-making needs in many situations. In addition, there is scientific evidence that people's intuition can outperform deliberate thinking processes under specific conditions. In Natural Logic, authors Mauro Maldonato and Silvia Dell'Orco address the integration of decision-making across diverse fields, including economics, medicine, and management. They consider the concepts of heuristics and biases through which the psychology of decision-making clarifies how strategies, models, and "cognitive shortcuts," to which people resort in assessing situations, are exposed to frequent and substantive errors. Such analysis leads to a hypothesis of a "regularity of error."

Natural Logic: Exploring Decision and Intuition

Dell'Orco, Silvia

<p>During the lengthy and complex process of human evolution our ancestors had to adapt to testing situations in which survival depended on making rapid choices that subjected muscles and body to extreme tension. In order to seize a prey travelling at 36 km per hour Homo sapiens had just thousandths of a second in which to prepare the appropriate gesture. While we are no longer faced with such an environment, our brain continues to use the adaptive mechanisms, enabling us to avoid danger and sense interlocutor intentions. This book sets out to show that our brain is not only a reactive mechanism, reacting to external stimuli, but is pro-active -- allowing us to make hypotheses, anticipate consequences, and formulate expectations: in short, to wrong foot an adversary. The body and its movements are at the origin of all abstract modes of behaviour, starting from language. The evolution of motor modes of behaviour (e.g the ability to construct and manipulate instruments) has given rise to an "embodied logic" underpinning not only action and prediction but also gestures and syllable sequences that are the basis of human communication. Some motor experiences have progressively moulded the nervous infrastructures and led to the development of symbols/metaphors used in language, coming to serve as classes of perceptions, behavioural patterns and universal linguistic conventions. Whether shaking some- one's hand or writing a letter, each executive function -- controlled by nervous structures and mental procedures that process the information -- requires behaviours that are oriented to a specific end. The executive functions imply planning/selecting an action; the process is linked to an embodied cognition supported by consciousness. If consciousness is caused by specific neuronal processes and, therefore, conscious states are causally reducible to neurobiological processes, it is also true that conscious states exist at a higher level than neuron activity. For this reason it is necessary to go beyond a hierarchical idea of levels of consciousness, and to refute the idea according to which the 'mental' sphere is qualitative, subjective, and in the 'first person', while the 'physical' sphere is quantitative, objective and in the 'third person'.</p>

The Predictive Brain: Consciousness, Decision and Embodied Action

Biological Sciences

<p>Few dilemmas in the history of human thought have aroused debates so exciting as that on consciousness. In the past, few scholars recognised scientific dignity to the issue, perhaps because of its subjective nature. Conditioned by limitations of the introspective method and by the unnatural opposition between conscious and unconscious, the study of consciousness has been the exclusive prerogative of philosophy, literature and theology, strengthening the prejudice that separates humanistic and scientific culture. Mauro Maldonato sets out to establish a fruitful dialogue between different disciplines, investigating consciousness from points of view that shape awareness of ourselves and of the world. For every one of us, consciousness is a primary, immediate, permanent fact - the core of life itself. Why, then, are we so far from forming any definitive picture of what it is, and what it means for us? The study of the biological bases for consciousness has shown how physics is incapable of providing credible solutions; the lack of means to describe the interactions between neuronal structures and qualitative experiences leads to an investigative dead end. But this explanatory shortfall does not authorise us to postulate the existence of an inaccessible sancta sanctorum. A scientific project to naturalise consciousness - attempting to ground our relational life and human action in biology - has to recognise issues of complexity, and the irreversibility and historical contingency of our individual phenomenalistic experience. The ground-breaking Archipelago of Consciousness: How Biology invents Culture follows the author's well received writings on Natural Logic, Decision Making and the Predictive Brain.</p>

Archipelago of Consciousness: The Invisible Sovereignty of Life

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Psychology & Counseling