Matching Items (3)
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- All Subjects: Expertise
- Creators: Brown, Mark B.
- Creators: Bruhis, Noa
Description
Recommendations made by expert groups are pervasive throughout various life domains. Yet not all recommendations--or expert groups--are equally persuasive. This research aims to identify factors that influence the persuasiveness of recommendations. More specifically, this study examined the effects of decisional cohesion (the amount of agreement among the experts in support of the recommendation), framing (whether the message is framed as a loss or gain), and the domain of the recommendation (health vs. financial) on the persuasiveness of the recommendation. The participants consisted of 1,981 undergraduates from Arizona State University. The participants read a vignette including information about the expert group making a recommendation--which varied the amount of expert agreement for the recommendation--and the recommendation, which was framed as either a gain or loss. Participants then responded to questions about the persuasiveness of the recommendation. In this study, there was a linear main effect of decisional cohesion such that the greater the decisional cohesion of the expert group the more persuasive their recommendation. In addition, there was a main effect of domain such that the health recommendation was more persuasive than the financial recommendation. Contrary to predictions, there was no observed interaction between the amount of decisional cohesion and the framing of the recommendation nor was there a main effect of framing. Further analyses show support for a mediation effect indicating that high levels of decisional cohesion increased the perceived entitativity of the expert group--the degree to which the group was perceived as a unified, cohesive group¬--which increased the recommendation's persuasiveness. An implication of this research is that policy makers could increase the persuasiveness of their recommendations by promoting recommendations that are unanimously supported by their experts or at least show higher levels of decisional cohesion.
ContributorsVotruba, Ashley M (Author) / Kwan, Virginia S.Y. (Thesis advisor) / Saks, Michael J. (Committee member) / Demaine, Linda (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Corporations in biomedicine hold significant power and influence, in both political and personal spheres. The decisions these companies make about ethics are critically important, as they help determine what products are developed, how they are developed, how they are promoted, and potentially even how they are regulated. In the last fifteen years, for-profit private companies have been assembling bioethics committees to help resolve dilemmas that require informed deliberation about ethical, legal, scientific, and economic considerations. Private sector bioethics committees represent an important innovation in the governance of emerging technologies, with corporations taking a lead role in deciding what is ethically appropriate or problematic. And yet, we know very little about these committees, including their structures, memberships, mandates, authority, and impact. Drawing on an extensive literature review and qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews with executives, scientists and board members, this dissertation provides an in-depth analysis of the Ethics and Public Policy Board at SmithKline Beecham, the Ethics Advisory Board at Advanced Cell Technology, and the Bioethics Committee at Eli Lilly and offers insights about how ideas of bioethics and governance are currently imagined and enacted within corporations. The SmithKline Beecham board was the first private sector bioethics committee; its mandate was to explore, in a comprehensive and balanced analysis, the ethics of macro trends in science and technology. The Advanced Cell Technology board was created to be like a watchdog for the company, to prevent them from making major errors. The Eli Lilly board is different than the others in that it is made up mostly of internal employees and does research ethics consultations within the company. These private sector bioethics committees evaluate and construct new boundaries between their private interests and the public values they claim to promote. Findings from this dissertation show that criticisms of private sector bioethics that focus narrowly on financial conflicts of interest and a lack of transparency obscure analysis of the ideas about governance (about expertise, credibility and authority) that emerge from these structures and hamper serious debate about the possible impacts of moving ethical deliberation from the public to the private sector.
ContributorsBrian, Jennifer (Author) / Robert, Jason S (Thesis advisor) / Maienschein, Jane (Committee member) / Hurlbut, James B (Committee member) / Sarewitz, Daniel (Committee member) / Brown, Mark B. (Committee member) / Moreno, Jonathan D. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Northeastern Arizona has experienced a recent increase in helium extraction activity. This qualitative case study articulates and explores various sociotechnical imaginaries – or, collectively produced social justifications for technological decisions and systems – that inform this new stage of underground helium extraction. Leveraging two years of interviews, document analysis, and participant observations to understand and interrogate the political and cultural origins of perceptions around helium extraction, I examined how these imaginaries and associated power dynamics influenced communication within and between stakeholder groups. In order to mitigate the power differentials between stakeholder groups, and put these imaginaries in conversation with each other, I led the development of a series of short videos that explain controversial technoscientific concepts from this research. These videos were produced in continuous collaboration with multiple disparate stakeholders, including activists, regulators, and industry members, in order to create a space for a productive conversation and reflection to explore tensions between conflicting points of view between stakeholders. This iterative work used the imaginaries of helium extraction in Arizona to produce a space for collective deliberation that can result in negotiated shared knowledge through brokered dialogue amongst these disparate groups and their competing visions of Arizona’s helium futures.
ContributorsBruhis, Noa (Author) / Jalbert, Kirk (Thesis advisor) / Richter, Jennifer (Thesis advisor) / Williams, Wendy R (Committee member) / Jenkins, Lekelia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022