Previous studies support a link between moral disgust and impurity, whereas anger is linked to harm. We challenged these strict correspondences by showing that disgust is activated in response to information about moral character, even for harm violations. By contrast, anger is activated in response to information about actions, including their moral...

The most salient dimension of men’s sexual orientation is gender: attraction to males versus females. A second dimension is sexual maturity: attraction to children versus adults. A less appreciated dimension is location: attraction to other individuals versus the sexual fantasy of being one of those individuals. Men sexually aroused by the idea or fantasy...

Understanding how human populations naturally respond to and cope with risk is important for fields ranging from psychology to public health. We used geophysical and individual-level mobile-phone data (mobile-apps, telecommunications, and Web usage) of 157,358 victims of the 2013 Ya’an earthquake to diagnose the effects of the disaster and investigate...

The efficiency of averaging properties of sets without encoding redundant details is analogous to gestalt proposals that perception is parsimoniously organized as a function of recurrent order in the world. This similarity suggests that grouping and averaging are part of a broader set of strategies allowing the visual system to circumvent capacity limitations....

In two experiments, we explored the effects of noticing and remembering change in the misinformation paradigm. People watched slide shows, read narratives containing misinformation about the events depicted in the slide shows, and took a recognition test on which they reported whether any details had changed between the slides and the narratives. As...

Scholars have argued that opposition to welfare is, in part, driven by stereotypes of African Americans. This argument assumes that when individuals think about welfare, they spontaneously think about Black recipients. We investigated people’s mental representations of welfare recipients. In Studies 1 and 2, we used a perceptual task to visually estimate...