While international humanitarian law (IHL) serves as the legal framework regulating the conduct of hostilities in order to limit civilian harm in armed conflict, it does not necessarily prescribe how parties to conflict should implement their obligations in practice. Militaries must create frameworks and tools suitable to avoiding, or in any event minimizing, harm in their operations so that those making decisions about the use of lethal force can do so on the basis of informed judgements in a good-faith effort to comply with their legal obligations.

Informed by operational lessons and detailed studies illuminating repeating patterns of civilian harm, US civilian harm mitigation and response (CHMR) policy entails a significant effort to develop upstream capabilities and procedures to better mitigate civilian harm in military operations. Civilian harm risk in armed conflict cannot be reduced to zero, and there will never be a perfect information environment leading up to and during an armed conflict. However, the premise of CHMR is that patterns of harm are often knowable and foreseeable, as are the factors contributing to harm, and therefore some civilian harm can be avoided or at least minimized.

This article examines the key elements of CHMR, particularly how increasing and improving information on the civilian environment, projected risks to civilians and the impact of operations on civilians stands to aid in command decision-making and risk management. It also reflects on fundamental gaps in the formulation and implementation of the CHMR policy framework – notably, the lack of measures of performance and the failure to specifically connect CHMR capabilities to the fulfilment of IHL obligations in the conduct of hostilities. It closes with a discussion on tailoring CHMR to match the challenges of large-scale combat and multinational operations and offers potential approaches for national militaries to develop their own capabilities and procedures for effective CHMR.

Recent studies have highlighted divergent change as a more common outcome of language contact than previously thought. While convergent change is often attributed to bilingual cognitive pressures, divergent change has usually been explained by appealing to sociocultural factors. We argue that the effects of social pressures on linguistic systems must nevertheless be realized in how language is processed in the individual bilingual speaker and, therefore, that divergent change is also ultimately rooted in bilingual cognition. Since lexical forms are most susceptible to contact-induced divergent change we focus on their production. We begin by developing a cognitive model that combines Grosjean's language mode with a later output-monitoring stage. The parameters to the model are then fit to the results of an experiment in which bilinguals are seen to avoid shared lexical items. These best-fit parameters form the basis of a series of multi-agent simulations that show rapid divergence in the lexica of languages with large proportions of bilinguals. We consider the implications of these findings for the psycholinguistic study of bilingual lexical selection, the construction of phylogenies, and the reconstruction of language family histories.

Case C-646/22 Compass Banca SpA v Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato (AGCM) Judgment of the Court (Fifth Chamber) of 14 November 2024.

In Compass Banca, the CJEU was asked by the referring Italian court if the concept of the average consumer should extend beyond the traditional notion of homo economicus in light of growing awareness of bounded rationality and the risk of cognitive influence in modern market dynamics. The case was eagerly awaited amid increasingly scholarly criticism of the average consumer concept, particularly in digital contexts, where the model of a rational, informed decision-maker would often fail to account for power imbalances embedded in digital architectures. Whereas the court did not fundamentally alter the benchmark, it added a cautious clarification, acknowledging that cognitive biases may constitute one of many constraints impairing the average consumer’s decision-making capacity. However, the influence of cognitive biases alone on the decision-making capacity would be insufficient to render a commercial practice unfair unless it is ‘duly established’ that ‘in the particular circumstances of a specific situation’, the average consumer’s behaviour has been materially distorted.

The recent phenomenon of anthropomorphizing artificial intelligences (AIs) is uniquely provocative for philosophy of religion because of its tendency to place AIs in an analogous position to divinity vis-à-vis humans in spite of AIs being human artefacts. In the case of divinity, intelligent mental capacities are, and in the case of AIs are sometimes presented as inevitably becoming, not just equivalent but in fact superior to their realization in humans. Philosophers of religion would do well to learn from discussions of anthropomorphism in AI, in conversation with the historical debates over anthropomorphizing divinity, and to remember that evolved cognitive biases may lose their adaptive functions as the cultural context shifts, and even become maladaptive.

Manipulation and deception were not born with AI: online architecture of choice can be harmful when it contains dark patterns or deceptive designs. These techniques deceive or manipulate users through interfaces that have the substantial effect of subverting or altering users’ agency, decision-making, or choice as part of their online activities. But AI has the potential to further enhance this manipulation increase its sophistication and scale. This article presents the principle of ‘Fairness by Design’ as a potential solution as well as a set of interface prototypes inspired by it and developed within Amurabi’s R&D Lab. These solution prototypes are called ‘Fair Patterns’. Fair patterns make it possible to implement the principles of transparency, trust, and autonomy by providing the right level of information at the right moment in the user journey, in clear language and without cognitive overload.

This paper introduces the concept of self-fulfilling testimonial injustice: a distinctive form of epistemic injustice whereby credibility deficits become true by shaping the very conditions that sustain them. Much of the literature on testimonial injustice has rightly emphasized cases in which credibility deficits are rooted in false beliefs, themselves underwritten by ethically bad affective investments. Yet such a focus risks obscuring a structurally significant variant: namely, those credibility deficits that are rendered true through self-fulfilling mechanisms. Drawing on insights from economics and psychology, I distinguish between motivated cognition-based and cognitive bias-based testimonial injustice, which together furnish the background conditions under which self-fulfilling testimonial injustice can take hold. I develop this account by drawing on both theoretical and experimental work on labor market discrimination, which illuminates the ways in which credibility deficits may become self-fulfillingly entrenched. Finally, I explore the distinctive harms of this form of injustice, focusing on its corrosive effects on epistemic self-confidence or self-trust and epistemic self-esteem, and suggest that its insidiousness and relative invisibility render it both difficult to detect and potentially more pervasive than has hitherto been acknowledged.

In this study, professional engineers and designers (n = 30) participated in a 1-hour-long design activity in which they brainstormed a list of ideas for two design problems (a smart grill and a smart laundry machine), created a sketched concept for each design problem, filled out a survey about their perceptions of the market for the concept they developed, participated in a bias mitigation intervention and then repeated the pre-intervention steps. The design problems were intended to trigger availability bias based on the participants’ occupations (engineers and designers at a kitchen appliance company) as well as conflict between the gender of the participants and the gender-stereotyping of the household tasks fulfilled by the smart machines. Based on correlations in the market survey, the participants, who were mostly men, displayed availability bias toward the smart laundry machine design problem. A key marker of availability bias – an association between participants’ personal enjoyment of the product and the belief that the product would be commercially successful – was eliminated after the bias mitigation intervention. Qualitative analysis of participants’ reflections indicated that the intervention primarily assisted designers in making additional considerations for users, such as increasing accessibility and building awareness of excluded user groups.

Pigs (Sus scrofa domesticus) and most other farmed species are social animals for whom social isolation is known to cause stress. However, their social nature is commonly ignored in behavioural and cognitive tasks, on which they are trained and tested individually, which may impact their welfare and the validity of test results. We chose the Judgement Bias Task (JBT), a promising proxy measure of affective states, to compare training duration, task performance and behaviour of pigs trained and tested in social isolation (ISO; n = 12) with pigs trained and tested with physical and visual contact to social companions through an opening covered with wire mesh (SOC; n = 12). Eleven SOC pigs and eight ISO pigs learned the task, but SOC and ISO pigs did not differ in training duration or task performance when tested. However, ISO pigs showed a higher frequency of all behavioural measures indicative of stress, i.e. high-pitched vocalisation, freezing, exit-approaching behaviour, heavy escape attempts, defaecation and urination compared to SOC pigs. Future research should replicate our study, additionally in combination with other treatments like different housing conditions, to investigate potential interacting effects on learning and task performance. Several open questions remain, but the unambiguous behavioural differences we found strongly advocate for more research to decrease the stress and thus improve the welfare of pigs and other social animals used in behavioural and cognitive tasks.

Decision-makers rely on intelligence to make targeting decisions that comply with international humanitarian law (IHL), yet the relationship between intelligence and the law is not frequently discussed. This article explores crucial elements of intelligence and intelligence analysis that decision-makers should understand to increase their compliance with IHL, focusing on three crucial decision points: (1) the determination of whether a potential target is a military objective, (2) proportionality in attack analysis, and (3) the taking of effective precautions.

We report on the results of an experiment with a statistical choice task involving the toss of a fair coin. In our experiment, participants had to decide whether they were willing to pay a price to switch from betting on the future performance of one player to betting on that of another player. The switch was from a player who had been previously less successful in betting on five coin flips to another one who had been more successful in the same task. We conducted a treatment with the Becker–DeGroot–Marschak mechanism and one in which participants were faced with a fixed price. In both cases, participants exhibit a strong bias towards placing their bets on players with a good guessing history in the coin toss task. Participants’ behaviour is compatible with prescriptive luck beliefs, that is, the idea that luck is a somehow deterministic and personal attribute.