Research Interests

Early Research Experience

Under the supervision of philosopher Maria Merritt, I investigated the implications of social psychology research for ethical behavior. As research assistant, I explored the literature concerning situational influences on behavior that challenge traditional virtue-based ethical theories. Independently, I investigated how automatic cognitive processes threaten to unhinge moral behavior by leading to outcomes which would not be consciously endorsed. I then proposed that mindfulness meditation - a technique that emphasizes awareness of the present and disengaging from automatic cognitive processes - would be a useful tool to guide explicit and implicit responses into synchrony. Though this conceptual analysis resulted only in a suggested methodology, it deeply influenced my inter-disciplinary approach to social psychology research.

Concurrently with Dr. Glenn Shean and Emily Bell, I investigated the link between magical ideation - or the inability to distinguish fantasy from reality - and nonverbal facial emotion recognition. Because magical ideation disrupts the ability to ascribe mental states like beliefs and desires to others, it should also disrupt the ability to ascribe emotions. Magical ideation was linked to poor emotion recognition, but only for some of the measures used (specifically the DANVA-2). These investigations into emotion and mind perception have also influenced the direction of my research interests, especially in terms of the processes by which people come to appreciate the minds and moral perspectives of others.

Moral Judgments about Implicit Social Cognition

As an undergraduate, I was interested in the moral implications of implicit social cognition. In my year off before graduate school, I studied with philosopher Paul Davies about what this research implies for normative theories of moral responsibility. Now at UNC, I am investigating a salient test case, implicit race biases. On the one hand, we want to punish discrimination resulting from implicit race biases, yet on the other these biases, by their very nature, contravene the traditional criteria for the ascription of moral responsibility. To test the specific effects of theories of implicit race bias upon judgments of moral responsibility, I collaborated with my advisor Dr. Keith Payne and philosopher Joshua Knobe to create a set of vignettes, each of which represents a prominent theory of implicit race bias. For example, the scenario for the "unconscious theory" presents implicit race bias as something residing outside awareness which leads to discriminatory behavior, whereas that for the "automatic theory" presents implicit race bias as something which is conscious but very difficult to control. In addition, a third "folk theory" presents a hypocritical agent who says he is not racist and then discriminates. In two studies, we found that whereas the automatic theory has no impact on judgments of responsibility compared to the folk theory, the unconscious theory significantly reduces responsibility judgments as compared to the other two theories. In addition, this effect was not mediated by 1) lower judgments of intent or 2) lower judgments of "true self" (whether the bias reflected who the agent really was), but rather by 3) negative emotions. So it appears that the unconscious theory of implicit race bias influences people's ordinary moral judgments. Given that this theory is itself still under conceptual scrutiny, we are left with a bundle of normative questions.

To answer these questions, we intend to continue this inter-disciplinary collaboration. Currently, we are exploring why lack of awareness influences negative emotions and moral judgments, beyond the typical appeals to intent or character. We will also explore whether implicit moral reactions to these kinds of scenarios diverge from the explicit self-reports, as measured by the Affect Misattribution Procedure in combination with other techniques. Finally, we intend to examine whether receiving negative feedback on a test of implicit race bias influences subsequent judgments of moral responsibility about implicit race bias in others.

The Social Cognition of Moral Judgment

1) Processing Facts and Values

Though there has been much research on how people make moral judgments, and on how people are naive realists about their own viewpoints, there has been little work which integrates the two. Specifically, what are the processes that underlie people's ability to distinguish between facts and values, and how does this relate to the inability to appreciate the moral perspectives of others?

Before delving into the moral domain with its numerous complexities, Dr. Payne and I are investigating how people distinguish between statements of fact and statements of opinion. We hypothesize that making this distinction requires cognitive control. Furthermore, we think that people have an automatic gut reaction of agreement or disagreement when they read statements of any kind. Under ideal conditions, these processes can be kept separate. Under stressful conditions, however, the gut reaction of agree/disagree will bias the fact/opinion judgment. These stressful conditions will be created by having people make the fact/opinion judgment with only one second to respond. We hypothesize that this will lead people to make systematic errors in fact-opinion judgments such that they will take matters of fact with which they disagree to be matters of opinion, and matters of opinion with which they agree to be matters of fact.

If this initial study turns out well, we will include moral statements among the stimuli and ask people whether they believe these statements are objective or subjective. If agreement promotes objectivist tendencies under stress even for non-moral issues, we expect a starker effect for moral issues. Yet affect plays a key role in making moral statements feel objective, so an investigation of moral objectivity must also explore the role of affect. Whereas on the one hand the time manipulation should increase people's tendency to call the moral statements with which they agree objective (and those with which they disagree as subjective), we might expect the exact opposite for a manipulation that decreases levels of affect.

Finally, I will be initiating a study with Dr. Melanie Green to investigate how the induction of a rational v. intuitive mindset influences judgments about the objectivity v. subjectivity of ethical statements. Furthermore, we will investigate whether this breaks down along political boundaries. If intuitive mindset induction works in this regard, this provides minimal justification for the incorporation of an emotion-based manipulation into the studies of lay moral objectivism.

2) Affective Capacity and Moral Reasoning

Dr. Payne is currently developing a theory of affective capacity limitation, such that multiple simultaneous sources of affect have diminishing influence upon an individual. We are currently testing to see whether inducing "affective load" interferes with the capacity to make deontological (or rights-based) moral judgments. Past research suggests that a cognitive load manipulation would instead interfere with utilitarian judgments. Using a between-subjects design, we will attempt to dissociate the effects of affective and cognitive load on moral judgment, which would advance Dr. Payne's theory, extend prior work in the moral cognition literature, and suggest specific process-oriented questions about how affect is implicated in moral judgment.

3) Long-Term Agenda

More broadly, the foregoing two categories are intended to be subsumed into a theory of the processes underlying moral agency. Once a clearer understanding of the specific factors involved in a moral decision is established, we can then fine-tune those factors and understand the limiting conditions for a moral agent who is able to maximize cognitive control while minimizing inappropriate affective responses.