Students Win Awards for Studies based on TMT

This week I'm sharing an article from our CU College of Nursing press office, recognizing two students doing research that's connected to Two Minds Theory: http://www.ucdenver.edu/academics/colleges/nursing/about-us/news/Pages/2019/Poster-presentation-covers-it-all.aspx

Two of my students won awards for their poster presentations at the College's research symposium, one for a study of trauma and chronic pain in patients with opioid use disorders, and the other for a study of Intuitive-level variables that predict medication adherence in patients with HIV. Both are topics that I have posted about previously on the blog (HIV treatment adherence here; opioid use disorders here and here), and each is the focus of ongoing research at the college.

The college posted copies of Linda Driscoll Powers's poster on chronic pain and trauma in patients with opioid use (2nd place winner), and Nasser Al-Salmi's poster on predictors of HIV medication adherence (3rd place winner). Nasser is a PhD student at the college, and Linda is in our BSN Honors program that gives nursing students a chance to conduct original research while getting their undergraduate degrees. Congratulations to them both!

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Prototypes and Willingness: The Theory of Planned Behavior Revisited

You may recall my blog post from last year on the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) , titled "in praise of a failed model." My evaluation of this model was that it accurately describes the Narrative Mind, which does control intentions. But the ultimate goal of the TPB is to predict behavior, and the relationship between intentions and behavior is weak at best -- in fact, it is entirely attributable to the fact that when someone says they don't intend to do something, they probably won't do it. When they say they do intend to do it, their actual results are no better than chance, a result of the intention-behavior gap as described in Two Minds Theory. The full TPB is shown in this diagram: Cognitive constructs like attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control (i.e., self-efficacy) are Narrative-system phenomena, and they do indeed have relationships with each other and with intentions (which are also products of the Narrative Mind). Perceived behavi...

New Study Suggests That Fatigue is Most Detrimental for the Narrative Mind

I'm one of the authors on a new study by Dr. Mustafa Ozkaynak's research team, which looks at how emergency department (ED) nurses change their decision-making process when they become fatigued. In a previous paper , we found that fatigue was common in ED nurses, particularly toward the end of their work shift, and that nurses' fatigue was more often characterized as physical rather than mental or emotional -- in other words, this really represented being physically tired at the end of the day, not being burned-out or depressed. Nevertheless, physical fatigue has important effects on nurses' decision-making in the ED. Based on nurses' qualitative reports, fatigue has mixed effects on their clinical performance. Nurses said that they definitely cut corners when they were tired, for example in terms of documentation in the electronic health record. They felt that they were less careful about double-checking things, and might be more likely to make snap decisions. We...

Is AI Out to Get Us?

I wrote earlier this year about a disturbing report on the prospects of self-improving artificial intelligence (AI) models deciding to take over the world. Much of the fear around AI relates to something called the "alignment problem," which simply means that an AI model might have goals incompatible with human flourishing -- or in some dystopian scenarios, with human life itself. A classic example of this line of thought is the "paper clip problem," in which a superintelligent AI is tasked with making paper clips. Eventually every resource in the world -- including human beings -- becomes just another obstacle for it to overcome in its goal of transforming the entire universe into paper clips. So far, that's not the danger -- AI models don't have that level of direct control over the physical world (yet). But a couple of new developments in the past few months do suggest that AI models are pursuing goals different from what their human designers might w...

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