Research into human decision-making has often sidestepped the question of search despite its importance across a wide range of domains such as search for food, mates, allies, visual targets or information. Recently, research on decisions from experience has made progress in finding out how individual characteristics shape search for information.…

A key factor in legal and moral judgments is intent. Intent differentiates, for instance, murder from manslaughter. Is this true for all moral judgments? People deliver moral judgments of many kinds of actions, including harmful actions (e.g., assault) and purity violations (e.g., incest, consuming taboo substances). We show that intent is a key…

Individuals tend to select again alternatives about which they have positive impressions and to avoid alternatives about which they have negative impressions. Here we show how this sequential sampling feature of the information acquisition process leads to the emergence of an illusory correlation between estimates of the attributes of…

Evolutionary theories of morality, beginning with Darwin, have focused on explanations for altruism. More generally, these accounts have concentrated on conscience (self-regulatory mechanisms) to the neglect of condemnation (mechanisms for punishing others). As a result, few theoretical tools are available for understanding the rapidly…

Reorientation tasks, in which disoriented participants attempt to relocate objects using different visual cues, have previously been understood to depend on representing aspects of the global organisation of the space, for example its major axis for judgements based on geometry. Careful analysis of the visual information available for these tasks…