EVENTS
spring 2023 virtue lecture series
Richard Ahl
Rick Ahl is a postdoctoral researcher in Katie McAuliffe’s Cooperation Lab at Boston College. His current research is aimed at uncovering children’s intuitive economic theories about resource valuation and distribution, building off his prior finding that children view high-wealth people as likely to share with others. As part of the Virtue Project team, he leads studies on how moral exemplars can promote fair and honest behavior in adolescents and adults. He also studies cross-cultural and developmental variation in children’s virtuous behavior. During this virtual lab meeting, members of Katie McAuliffe’s group from Boston College and Eranda Jayawickreme's group from Wake Forest University came together to discuss Rick’s adult work on moral exemplars.
Talk: How to be good: Do moral exemplars boost virtuous behavior?
Thursday, April 13th 1:00-2:00PM
Data and Pre-registration Workshop
Wednesday, May 17th 9:00AM-2:00PM
Fall 2022 virtue lecture series
Adam Morris
Adam Morris is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychology at Princeton University working with Molly Crockett. Adam is particularly interested in investigating the “habits of thought” in decision-making — the non-deliberative processes underlying people's choices. His current research explores people’s conscious awareness of their own implicit choice mechanisms, with a focus on the ways that this awareness can be improved through attentional training.
Talk: Introspective Access to Choice Processes
Wednesday, October 5th 4:00-5:30PM
Fall 2021 virtue lecture series
David Melnikoff
David Melnikoff is a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern University working with Lisa Feldman Barrett. David investigates how goals shape cognition. He explores the structure of goal-driven cognition by identifying the processes that goals influence and the conditions under which they do so. He also explores the computational mechanisms of goal-driven cognition using tools from machine learning and AI.
Talk: A Computational Theory of Flow
Tuesday, September 28th 12:00-1:30PM
Arunima Sarin
Arunima is a third-year PhD student in Fiery Cushman’s lab where she explores social and moral decision-making. She is particularly interested in punishment and in developing the simplest model of human punishment that can explain punishment as a concept, both at a mechanistic level and at a functional level.
Talk: Punishment is Organized around Principles of Communicative Inference
Tuesday, November 9th 12:00-1:30PM
Ashley Jordan
Ashley is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Psychology at Princeton University working with Kristina Olson in the Human Diversity Lab. Her work focuses on the mechanisms that underlie our emerging evaluations of social life with a particular emphasis on how messages about similarity guide children’s social preferences and inform their inferences about the structure of groups.
Talk: The Emergent Social Significance of Similarity & Consequences for Intergroup Bias
Tuesday, November 16th 12:00-1:30PM
Mike Rizzo
Mike is broadly interested in children’s social and moral development. In particular, his current research focuses on the developmental predictors of racial bias in early childhood including a range of peer and parental influences, as well as how children’s own developing conceptions of race and status relate to their racial biases.
Talk: Promoting Social Equity and Preempting Racial Bias: A Developmental Science Approach
Tuesday, November 30th 12:00-1:30PM
Building Virtue Workshop
The Building Virtue Workshop was a two-day event devoted to a multidisciplinary exchange of ideas and research centered around the topic of virtue. Hosted as a hybrid event from the Connors Center in Dover, Massachusetts, the workshop welcomed scholars from diverse disciplines and institutions to contribute their projects and perspectives.
Aiming to tackle the domain of virtue–what it is and how it develops–the workshop leveraged the work of psychologists, cultural anthropologists, and philosophers. The event was broken up into four sessions: The development of punishment and forgiveness, Capturing and explaining virtuous behavior, Virtue cultivation across diverse religious and cultural contexts, and Learning from others. Each session was devoted to a unique aspect or subtopic of virtue, and the insights from each were integrated to form a clearer picture of virtue more generally.
Some titles of the talks featured at the workshop include:
Children's and Adults' Perceptions of Forgiveness
The development of virtuous behavior across five diverse societies
Proximate and ultimate explanations for origins of norms
The concept of virtue in Islam
The evolution of teaching and its role in cumulative culture
Fostering prosocial behavior in Rohingya refugee children: Findings from a
preliminary study
Holding speakers accountable: evidence from young children
Fall 2020 virtue lecture series
JAMES DUNLEA
James' research leverages methods from developmental, social, and cognitive psychology to understand how reasoning during childhood lays the foundation for how adults think about topics related to fairness, justice, and morality. Prior to matriculating as a doctoral student at Columbia, James earned a B.S. in Human Development from Cornell University, and a M.S. in Law from Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law.
Wednesday, November 11, 2020
KIRSTEN LESAGE
Kirsten is Postdoctoral Research Associate for the Developing Belief Network and is based out of Dr. Kathleen Corriveau's Social Learning Lab at Boston University. She studies culture and religion, with a specific focus on cultural and religious beliefs themselves (e.g., belief in a supernatural agent or in the efficacy of prayer) and the practices and rituals involved in many religious traditions (e.g., baptism or fire-walking).
Wednesday, October 21, 2020
MARGARET ECHELBARGER
Margaret is a post-doctoral principal researcher at the University of Chicago's Center for Decision Research. She is interested in promoting greater wellbeing across the lifespan. As a part of this, she currently examines the strategies we use to understand the contents of others’ minds, and whether the efficacy of different strategies changes as we age. In a related line of work, she also examines why we may fail to engage in prosocial behaviors, especially in cases where these acts bring about greater wellbeing. Across studies, she takes a developmental approach with the goal of understanding the ontogeny of decision making.
Wednesday, September 30, 2020
HELEN DAVIS
Helen is a postdoctoral researcher in the Culture, Cognition, and Coevolution Lab at Harvard University. Helen uses theoretical perspectives of behavioral ecology and cultural evolution to better understand (1) cognitive development and (2) cognitive decline in humans.
Wednesday, September 9, 2020
Fall 2019 virtue lecture series
MATTI WILKS
Matti discussed a series of studies that track how children grant moral worth to a range of different entities (e.g. humans, animals, robots), the factors that contribute to these intuitions, and how these intuitions may change across development.
Wednesday, October 30, 2019
ASHLEY J. THOMAS
Ashley spoke about how early evaluations of others based on their social rank changes over the first two years of life and if there is time new studies about whether infants differentiate between close and distant social affiliation.
WILLIAM McAULIFFE
William discussed a theory of decision-making that reconciles conflicting perspectives on how to explain anonymous cooperation towards strangers.
P.S. Before you ask, Will and Katie are not related :)
KARA WEISMAN
Kara discussed the development of children's conceptual representations of mental life over early and middle childhood in the US context.
AUDUN DAHL
Audun discussed his recent paper, A New Science of Early Moral Development: on Defining, Constructing, and Studying Morality from Birth.
