Online discussions about politics and current events play a growing role in public life, they can foster positive outcomes (e.g., civic engagement political participation) negative hostility polarization). The present research examines how the use of doubtful (vs. confident) language influences behavior online events. We examine effects on comment popularity (i.e., recommendations from other us...

Beyond reasonable doubt represents a probability value that acts as the criterion for conviction in criminal trials. I introduce the membership function (MF) method as a new tool for measuring quantitative interpretations of reasonable doubt. Experiment 1 demonstrated that three different methods (i.e., direct rating, decision theory based, and MF) provided significantly different and uncorrela...

Effective software safety standards will contribute to confidence, or assurance, in the safety of the systems in which the software is used. It is infeasible to demonstrate a correlation between standards and accidents, but there is an alternative view that makes standards “testable”. Software projects are subject to uncertainty; good standards reduce uncertainty more than poor ones. Similarly ...