Asthma is the most common childhood chronic illness. Its management requires that caregivers have access to a variety of information. For example, asthma action plans (AAP) are written instructions for responding to escalating asthma symptoms. Icons have been used to facilitate the accessibility of health information and we investigate whether they benefit parents of young children. We conducte...

Social comparison experiments in two different social conditions, competing between friends and between strangers, were carried out with 88 Japanese male undergraduates. Participants were asked to come to the laboratory in friend pairs to participate in the experiment. Two pairs were randomly combined for each experimental session. In the Between-Friends condition, one of the two pairs solved 2...

Fresh water and arable land are essential for agricultural production and food processing. However, managing conflicting demands over water and land can be challenging for business leaders, environmentalists and other stakeholders. This paper characterizes these challenges as wicked problems. Wicked problems are ill-formed, fuzzy, and messy, because they involve many clients and decisions maker...

Much of the government’s health policy in recent years has focused on improving health and wellbeing. There have been numerous strategies, targets, reviews of progress and calls for further efforts to tackle what are widely perceived to be persistent, stubborn, deep-seated and intractable problems. Such problems are sometimes called ‘wicked issues’ in the sense that they defy easy or single bul...