Theory of mind requires beliefand desire-understanding. Event-related brain potential (ERP) research on beliefand desirereasoning in adults found mid-frontal activations for both desires and beliefs, and selective right-posterior activations only for beliefs. Developmentally, children understand desires before beliefs; thus, a critical question concerns whether neural specialization for belief-...

Sometimes it is easy to do the right thing. But often, people act morally only after overcoming competing immoral desires. How does learning about someone's inner moral conflict influence children's and adults' moral judgments about that person? Across four studies, we discovered a striking developmental difference: When the outcome is held constant, 3- to 8-year-old children judge someone who ...

Organizations need quality information for control and coordination of their operations. Yet, despite the resources expended on data production, data often proves to be unreliable or inadequate when used in practice. To understand this puzzle, I conducted an ethnographic study of the production of a database system within one organization. Database systems provide the scaffolding to hold the da...

The use of rational agents for modelling real world problems has both been heavily investigated and become well accepted, with BDI (Beliefs, Desires, and Intentions) Logic being a widely used architecture to represent and reason about rational agency. However, in the real world, we often have to deal with different levels of confidence in the beliefs we hold, desires we have, and intentions tha...

Satisfying one’s desires is typically a pleasurable experience and thus a source of momentary happiness. Getting happy in the here and now, however, may be more complicated when people yield to temptations—desires that conflict with personal self-regulatory goals so that they have reason to resist them. Using data from a large experience sampling study on everyday desire, we show that people re...

In this paper, I show that we should understand the direction of fit of beliefs and desires in normative terms. After rehearsing a standard objection to Smith’s analysis of direction of fit, I raise a similar problem for Humberstone’s analysis. I go on to offer my own account, according to which the difference between beliefs and desires is determined by the normative relations such states stan...

5 In standard decision theory, rational agents are objective, keeping their beliefs independent from their 6 desires. Such agents are the basis for current computational models of Theory of Mind (ToM), but the 7 accuracy of these models are unknown. Do people really think that others do not let their desires color 8 their beliefs? In two experiments we test whether people think that others enga...