The naturalistic fallacy and Hume’s ‘law’ are frequently appealed to for the purpose of drawing limits around the scope of scientific inquiry into ethics and morality. These two objections are shown to be without force. Thus two highly influential obstacles are removed from naturalizing ethics. The relative merits of moral skepticism and moral realism are compared. Moral skepticism and some for...

Naturalistic environments have been demonstrated to promote relaxation and wellbeing. We assess opposing theoretical accounts for these effects through investigation of autonomic arousal and alterations of activation and functional connectivity within the default mode network (DMN) of the brain while participants listened to sounds from artificial and natural environments. We found no evidence ...

AIMS To study the functionality of alcohol expectancies in predicting drinking behaviour in existing peer groups of young adults in a 'naturalistic' setting. DESIGN AND SETTING Young adults were invited to join an experiment with their peer group in a bar annex laboratory. During a 'break' of 50 minutes in this experiment, their activities, social behaviour and drinking behaviour were observe...

According to so-called saliency-based attention models, attention during free viewing of visual scenes is particularly allocated to physically salient image regions. In the present study, we assumed that social features in complex naturalistic scenes would be processed preferentially irrespective of their physical saliency. Therefore, we expected worse prediction of gazing behavior by saliency-...

OBJECTIVE This article describes the origins and contributions of the naturalistic decision making (NDM) research approach. BACKGROUND NDM research emerged in the 1980s to study how people make decisions in real-world settings. METHOD The findings and methods used by NDM researchers are presented along with their implications. RESULTS The NDM framework emphasizes the role of experience in...