Jordan Richard Schoenherr

Concordia University Montreal · Department of Psychology

While previous studies of trust in artificial intelligence have focused on perceived user trust, the paper examines how an external agent (e.g., an auditor) assigns responsibility, perceives trustworthiness, and explains the successes and failures of AI. In two experiments, participants (university students) reviewed scenarios about automation fail...

The dark side of AI has been a persistent focus in discussions of popular science and academia (Appendix A), with some claiming that AI is “evil” [1] . Many commentators make compelling arguments for their concerns. Techno-elites have also contributed to the polarization of these discussions, with ultimatums that in this new era of industrialized...

Warcraft Evolves by identifying and adapting the technical and functional affordances of technologies to exploit vulnerabilities in adversaries’ defenses and defend against their attacks [1] . Nowhere is this arms race more apparent than cybersecurity wherein zero-day vulnerabilities are identified and exploited at an ever-growing rate [2] . Cy...

One of the major criticisms of Artificial Intelligence is its lack of explainability. A claim is made by many critics that without knowing how an AI may derive a result or come to a given conclusion, it is impossible to trust in its outcomes. This problem is especially concerning when AI-based systems and applications fail to perform their tasks su...

The present study extends a cybersecurity questionnaire (CSEC) by including items that differentiate cyber hygiene behavior, self-disclosure vulnerability, intrusion vulnerability, and persuasion vulnerability. Using individual difference measures that are related to performance in experimental tasks, the present study provides evidence that indivi...

Trust is necessary for any kind of complex social organization. Whether trust is the result of past exchanges with a specific individual (e.g., direct reciprocity) or the result of norms and conventions within a social network (e.g., indirect reciprocity), understanding the basis for trust is a prerequisite for successful coordination between agent...

Insider threats (InT) are a growing concern for private and public institutions, resulting in a shift of emphasis from perimeter-based defences to internal detection mechanisms. Many approaches that address InT assume that these are pathological behaviors, perpetrated by misanthropic ‘malicious insiders’. We present a novel interdisciplinary fr...

This book offers a unique interdisciplinary perspective on the ethics of 'artificial intelligence' - autonomous, intelligent, (and connected) systems, or AISs, applying principles of social cognition to understand the social and ethical issues associated with the creation, adoption, and implementation of AISs.

This review considers parent–clinician interactions that are associated with vulnerabilities in communication and what we refer to as ‘communication traps’. Communication traps are defined by high-stress situations with affect-laden subject matter that can lead to progressively dysfunctional communications/exchanges that are avoidable. While this f...

bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">We live in an attention economy [1] – [3] . People vie for the attention of allies, customers, followers, and mates [4] with advertisements, memes, and websites acting as proxies [5] . This truth defines the digital age. As Jeff Bezos noted in 19...

bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Ethics in cybersecurity is traditionally considered in terms of computer and information ethics and, more recently, cyber warfare [1] – [4] . Although these remain the dominant paradigms there has been growing dissatisfaction with the adequacy of the...

Explanations are central to understanding the causal relationships between entities within the environment. Instead of examining basic heuristics and schemata that inform the acceptance or rejection of scientific explanations, recent studies have predominantly examined complex explanatory models. In the present study, we examined which essential fe...

Adaptive Instructional Systems (AIS) have the potential to provide students with a flexible, dynamic learning environment in a manner that might not be possible with the limited resources of human instructors. In addition to technical knowledge learning engineering also requires considering the values and ethics associated with the creation, develo...

The present study identifies a number of individual difference traits that are related to cyber hygiene behaviour in order to develop a brief questionnaire. The resulting questionnaire identifies basic vulnerabilities in users’ practices consisting of updating software, changing passwords, and disclosure of information on social media platforms (SM...

The diffusion and adoption of surveillance technologies has increased significant in the past few decades. In addition to reductions in the cost of sensors, data storage, and algorithms, social norms have undoubtedly affected patterns of adoption. In addition to extending human abilities to monitor and regulate behaviour, shared social norms relate...

Surveillance technologies have come to occupy a central position in human affairs, whether in terms of CCT cameras, smart homes, or network security technologies. Due to function creep and the relative invisibility of these technologies, individuals and societies continue to grapple with the potential trade-offs between security, convenience, and p...

The existence of physical and financial barriers in the provision of healthcare leads to an increasing recognition that alternative sources of information are being used to supplement or replace the advice of healthcare professionals. Internet search engines are a common means to obtain health information. However, information, misinformation, and...

Subjective reports have played a central role in the determination of the correspondence of properties of external stimuli and subjective perception. For instance, models of confidence have suggested that participants simply need to rescale stimulus strength onto a confidence scale or rescale stimulus information onto a confidence scale. Concurrent...

Modern black-box artificial intelligence algorithms are computationally powerful yet fallible in unpredictable ways. While much research has gone into developing techniques to interpret these algorithms, less have also integrated the requirement to understand the algorithm as a function of their training data. In addition, few have examined the hum...

Many real-world questions that professionals face occur in complex, dynamic environments where information is often sparse, e.g., clinical decision-making, cyber security, stock market prediction. In many cases, problems are open-ended without a single or optimal solution. Providing effective training in these ill-defined environments presents an i...

Ethical standards are required for any profession. In a time when cybersecurity and cyberwar are growing concerns, information and computer science (ICS) professionals must provide education and training programs that adequately equip learners for the kinds of tasks and environments they will encounter. Following a review of critical ethical issues...

Cognitive uncertainty is evidenced across learning, memory, and decision-making tasks. Uncertainty has also been examined in studies of positive affect and preference by manipulating stimulus presentation frequency. Despite the extensive research in both of these areas, there has been little systematic study into the relationship between affective...

Subjective confidence reports are used in numerous research paradigms to examine the extent to which participants are aware of their performance in a task. By examining the discrepancy between objective performance and subjective confidence ratings, inferences can be made about the conditions in which participants have greater explicit knowledge of...

In the present study, we sought to explain changes in the proportion of men and women working within North American psychological science in terms of a heterarchical social organization defined by norms and conventions of society, the structure of higher-education institutions, as well as scientific communities. Using archival records from psycholo...

Psychological science has flourished in North America since the late 19th century. As laboratories multiplied, professional organizations began to emerge to facilitate communications through journals and conferences. This article examines the development of the moral economy of professional and scientific psychology in Canada. While the general fea...

Medical decision-making requires years of experience in order to develop an adequate level of competence to successfully engage in safe practice. While diagnostic and technical skills are essential, an awareness of the extent and limits of our own knowledge and skills is critical. The present study examines clinicians’ subjective awareness in a dia...

BACKGROUND Although well-designed tools to assess communication during medical interviews and complex encounters exist, valid assessment tools to assess communication during ethically sensitive situations that includes domains such as moral judgment and management of ethical conflicts are needed. In this context, we created an assessment tool that...

Background: Although well-designed instruments to assess communication during medical interviews and complex encounters exist, assessment tools that differentiate between communication, empathy, decision-making, and moral judgment are needed to assess different aspects of communication during situations defined by ethical conflict. To address this...

While behaviour can either be perceived as respectful or disrespectful, incivility reflects relatively minor violations of social norms within a group. In the present study, we used an accumulator-based model of decision-making, assuming that social agents attempt to classify behaviour as respectful or disrespectful based on available social cues a...

Objectives Although lung ultrasound (US) has been shown to have high diagnostic accuracy in patients presenting with acute dyspnea, its precision in critically ill patients is unknown. We investigated common areas of agreement and disagreement by studying 6 experts as they interpreted lung US studies in a cohort of intensive care unit (ICU) patient...

Background: The rapid adoption of point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) has created a need to develop assessment tools to ensure that learners can competently use these technologies. In this study, the authors developed and tested a rating scale to assess the quality of point-of-care thoracic ultrasound studies performed by novices. In Phase 1, the Ass...

Statement: Fidelity has become a ubiquitous feature of discourse in simulation studies. Recent studies have highlighted the often ambiguous and contradictory manner in which fidelity has been defined, with each definition emphasizing different physical and functional features of simulation. We suggest that regarding fidelity as an objective proper...

Purpose: Optimal instruction and assessment of critical care ultrasound (CCUS) skills requires an assessment tool to measure learner competency and changes over time. In this study, a previously published tool was used to monitor the development of critical care echocardiography (CCE) competencies, the attainment of performance plateaus, and the e...

Instruments have become a central feature of psychological science. Their introduction into a research paradigm is typically framed in terms of their practical utility in offering calibration and precision in the presentation, representation, and recording of phenomena. However, a review of early experimental psychology reveals that instruments hav...

Objectives: Increased use of point-of-care ultrasound (US) requires the development of assessment tools that measure the competency of learners. In this study, we developed and tested a tool to assess the quality of point-of-care cardiac US studies performed by novices. Methods: In phase 1, the Rapid Assessment of Competency in Echocardiography...

Academic institutions and research funders have in the last decade devoted considerable effort to developing policies to support academic integrity and prevent misconduct. In this study, we consider the extent to which various initiatives of Canadian federal and provincial (Québec) funders have affected the development of institutional research int...

Recent cases of research misconduct have prompted psychologists to suggest that there is too much vulnerability in the research process (e.g., Simmons et al., 2011; Pashler and Harris, 2012). Regardless of whether this is the case, ensuring the integrity of a discipline requires a clear understanding of what conventions and norms define the researc...

Psychometrics has recently undergone extensive criticism within the medical education literature. The use of quantitative measurement using psychometric instruments such as response scales is thought to emphasize a narrow range of relevant learner skills and competencies. Recent reviews and commentaries suggest that a paradigm shift might be presen...

The apparent increase in research misconduct in the scientific literature has caused considerable alarm in both the biomedical (Benos et al., 2005; Smith, 2006) and psychological research communities (Stroebe et al., 2012). An understanding of research misconduct must be informed by the recognition that the norms of science might be quite general (e...

The uncanny valley (UCV) hypothesis describes a non-linear relationship between perceived human-likeness and affective response. The “uncanny valley” refers to an intermediate level of human-likeness that is associated with strong negative affect. Recent studies have suggested that the uncanny valley might result from the categorical perception of...

The uncanny valley theory (UVT) (Mori, 1970) proposes that when stimuli are defined by a near-perfect resemblance to humans they cause people to experience greater negative affect relative to when they have perfect human likeness (HL) or little to no HL. Empirical research to support this non-linear relationship between negative affect and HL has b...

The category-order effect (COE) is observed when the categorical properties of items within the first half of a given list affect recall performance in an immediate serial-recall task. The present study examines whether this recall advantage is a consequence of categorical properties (e.g., semantic-relatedness and category set-size) or whether the...

Many biases in decision-making and reasoning are a result of ignoring logical rules and relevant information while focusing on irrelevant cues present within an argument. In the present study we examine explanatory schemata – a set of interrelated concepts-that are deemed relevant to participants. Participants were first trained in a syllogistic re...

In the present experiments, failures of selective visual attention were invoked using the B. A. Eriksen and C. W. Eriksen (1974) flanker task. On each trial, a three-letter stimulus array was flashed briefly, followed by a mask. The identity of the two flanking letters was response congruent, neutral, or incongruent with the identity of the middle...

Numerous factors interact to affect a participant's ability to encode and recall information. One example of this interaction is known as the category-order effect (COE; Brooks and Watkins, 1990). The present study models earlier work performed by the authors (Schoenherr & Thompson, 2008) with an oscillator-based model of memory (Brown et al., 2000...

Previous research has demonstrated that recall performance is facilitated by the order of presentation of salient stimuli, referred to as the category-order effect (Brooks & Watkins, 1990; Greene & Lasek, 1994). Specifically, recall is higher on the full list when numbers precede words. To extend and clarify this research, Experiment 1 modified Bro...

Twenty participants made perceptual judgements involving bi-modal, bi- dimensional stimuli under various attentional allocation conditions, both with and without providing confidence judgements. Decreasing attentional allocation to a stimulus modality affected both RTs, accuracy, and confidence calibration measures. Rendering confidence increased b...

Graphical representations of science are an emerging tool at the disposal of science educators. The present study examines such 'maps' in terms of graphical perception and preference ratings. Participants were presented with a set of maps that varied in terms of the represented discipline, and the interconnectivity between paradigms. Following pres...

Many biases in decision-making and reasoning are a result of ignoring logical rules and relevant information while focusing on irrelevant cues present within an argument. In the present study we examine explanatory schemata – a set of interrelated concepts -that are deemed relevant to participants. Participants were first trained in a syllogistic r...