Giulio Vidotto

An aggregation procedure may include everyone and remain democratically defective. The defect need not lie in exclusion from the input profile, or in an aggregation rule sensitive to individual identities. It may lie in what the count receives: expressions that fail to convey the judgments individuals effectively hold, or judgments that differ from those individuals would hold under conditions of autonomy. This paper formalizes that possibility by representing a decision procedure as a function from expression profiles to collective outcomes or rules, under universal representation and anonymity. It then moves the analysis inside the input, where public expression, effective internal judgment, and the autonomous judgment benchmark must be kept distinct. In that space, expressive distortion and lack of autonomy in judgment formation can be separated, and their logical independence can be shown across admissible autonomy standards. The result concerns the individual contribution to the count. At the level of the procedure it establishes only a possibility: an aggregation procedure may preserve inclusion and anonymity while the inputs it counts no longer bear the democratic interpretation normally attached to them.

The use of assistance systems aimed at reducing road fatalities is spreading, especially for car drivers, but less effort has been devoted to developing and testing similar systems for powered two-wheelers. Considering that over speeding represents one of the main causal factors in road crashes and that riders are more vulnerable than drivers, in the present study we investigated the effectiveness of an assistance system which signaled speed limit violations during a simulated moped-driving task, in optimal and poor visibility conditions. Participants performed four conditions of simulated riding: one baseline condition without Feedback, one Fog condition in which visual feedback was provided so as to indicate to the participants when a speed limit was exceeded, and two post-Feedback conditions with and without Fog, respectively, in which no feedback was delivered. Results showed that participants make fewer speeding violations when the feedback is not provided, after 1 month, and regardless of the visibility condition. Finally, the feedback has been proven effective in reducing speed violations in participants with an aggressive riding style, as measured in the baseline session.

Measurement is a crucial issue in psychological assessment. In this paper a contribution to this task is provided by means of the implementation of an adaptive algorithm for the assessment of depression. More specifically, the Adaptive Testing System for Psychological Disorders (ATS-PD) version of the Qualitative-Quantitative Evaluation of Depressive Symptomatology questionnaire (QuEDS) is introduced. Such implementation refers to the theoretical background of Formal Psychological Assessment (FPA) with respect to both its deterministic and probabilistic issues. Three models (one for each sub-scale of the QuEDS) are fitted on a sample of 383 individuals. The obtained estimates are then used to calibrate the adaptive procedure whose performance is tested in terms of both efficiency and accuracy by means of a simulation study. Results indicate that the ATS-PD version of the QuEDS allows for both obtaining an accurate description of the patient in terms of symptomatology, and reducing the number of items asked by 40%. Further developments of the adaptive procedure are then discussed.