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Katherine McAuliffe

Project Co-Leader

Katherine McAuliffe is an assistant professor of psychology at Boston College where she directs the Cooperation Lab and co-directs the Boston College Virtue Project. Her past work has focused on how children across societies acquire and enforce norms of cooperation, with a particular focus on children’s emerging understanding of fairness. More recently she has begun to study the psychology of virtue from a developmental and cross-cultural perspective, specifically investigating the mechanisms that promote honesty, fairness, forgiveness and trustworthiness in children and adults alike. She complements these lines of work with a comparative approach, examining how nonhuman animals solve cooperative dilemmas. She received a BSc in Marine Biology from Dalhousie University, an MPhil in Biological Anthropology from Cambridge University and a PhD in Human Evolutionary Biology from Harvard University.

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Liane Young

Project Co-Leader

Having majored in philosophy with an interest in bioethics as an undergraduate, Liane became a student of moral psychology in graduate school. She has always been curious about how people make moral decisions, and how people judge others. Currently, Liane uses methods from social psychology and neuroscience (i.e., functional neuroimaging and transcranial magnetic stimulation) to explore questions about human virtue and the role of reason and social cognition in moral thinking.

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Rick Ahl

Postdoctoral Researcher

Rick received his B.A. from Brown University and his Ph.D. in Psychology from Yale University. His previous research explored children’s intuitive theories about the human-made and social worlds.  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. In collaboration with Dorsa Amir, he also studies cross-cultural and developmental variation in children’s virtuous behavior.  

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Dorsa Amir

Postdoctoral Researcher

Dorsa is an evolutionary anthropologist interested in the plasticity of human behavior across diverse contexts. She received her B.S. in Anthropology from UCLA, and her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Yale University. Her research adopts a cross-cultural and developmental perspective to explore the role of the local environment in adaptively shaping behavior and preferences. Currently, she is investigating cross-cultural variation in the development of preferences, early life socioeconomic effects on behavior, and the role of scarcity in cognitive development. 

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Shalini Gautam

POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCHER

Shalini received her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Queensland, Australia, under the supervision of Professor Thomas Suddendorf. She is particularly interested in how children’s understanding of possibilities in the past, present and future may influence their moral judgements and behaviours. For example, can young children reflect on how things might have gone differently in the past? Are they able to imagine and prepare for the future? How, and in what way, do children make moral judgements if they cannot yet imagine such possibilities? What moral exemplars influence children’s virtuous behaviour? In her postdoc, and as part of the Virtue Team, she wants to explore such questions both in the U.S. and cross-culturally.

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Gordon Kraft-Todd

Postdoctoral Researcher

Gordon is interested in how our social perceptions affect the spread of prosociality. Specifically, he investigates how observers’ judgments of actors’ speech, behavior, motivations, and character influences observers’ moral and normative beliefs as well as their prosocial behavior. He uses survey, economic game, computational modelling, and field experiment methods to examine how these processes can help us to understand ideas such as “actions speak louder than words”, “virtue signaling”, and “algorithmic fairness.” He is a co-founder of the Applied Cooperation Team at MIT which partners with firms in the non-profit, for-profit, and government sectors to test the ecological validity of his laboratory findings in the real world by conducting interventions promoting contributions to public goods (including charitable donations, voting, energy conservation, compliance with smoking bans, and antibiotic adherence). He received his BA with a self-designed major in Leadership from Harvard College in 2007, and his PhD in Psychology from Yale University in 2019. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Morality Lab at Boston College..

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Julia Marshall

POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCHER

Julia received her B.A. in psychology from Emory University and her PhD in psychology from Yale University under the supervision of Dr. Paul Bloom. She is broadly interested in social cognitive development, intergroup cognition, and cooperation. For the Virtue project, Julia is working on a variety of projects on related topics. For example, one project involves investigating the factors that promote fair behavior in children, and another addresses how children may take social group membership into account when predicting others' cooperative behavior, such as punishment.

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Isaac Handley-Miner

Graduate Student

Isaac is interested in how we generate explanations and how that process might color our judgments, beliefs, and predictions in moral contexts. Before joining the Morality Lab, Isaac received his B.A. in economics from Hamilton College and worked as a lab manager at the Mind & Body Lab at Stanford University.

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Minjae Kim

Graduate Student

Minjae is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Morality Lab. She is interested in how we update our moral trait inferences of other people when their behaviors violate our predictions, and which properties of moral behaviors are tracked by the neural regions for person perception. She received her B.A. in neuroscience from Swarthmore College, and worked as a research assistant in the NeuroCognition of Language Lab at Tufts, before joining the Morality Lab as a graduate student in Fall 2017.

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Abigail McLaughlin

Graduate Student

Abby received her BA in Neuroscience from Columbia University and is now a first-year graduate student in the Cooperation Lab. She is interested in the development of religious beliefs and the ways in which these beliefs affect children's social behavior. She is also interested in the motivations underlying punitive behavior and forgiveness.

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Ryan McManus

Graduate Student

Ryan received his B.A. in Psychology from California University of Pennsylvania in 2012, and after taking a hiatus from academia, he returned to graduate school and received his M.A. in Experimental Psychology from California State University, Northridge in 2018 (a completely different California on the opposite side of the country!). He is broadly interested in how we make judgments of what people ought to do, and how these judgments influence our subsequent inferences of others’ moral character. He is also interested in understanding important meta-science issues, such as how to make appropriate statistical and theoretical inferences. Currently, he has two lines of research in the Morality Lab: 1) What are the determinants and consequences of believing that people have obligations to help others, and what can this tell us about how helping might occur in the real world? 2) Why do people believe, on the one hand, that overcoming temptation is sometimes morally praiseworthy, whereas on the other hand, being tempted in the first place is sometimes morally blameworthy?

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Shangzan (Sunny) Liu

RESEARCH ANALYST

Sunny graduated from the University of Rochester in May 2021, where he studied Brain & Cognitive Science, Psychology, and minored in Computer Science and Statistics. He is broadly interested in how the brain represents different aspects of human morality. He joined the lab in the summer of 2021.

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Tony Chen

RESEARCH TECHNICIAN

Tony graduated from Boston College in May 2020, where he studied psychology, mathematics, and minored in computer science. He is broadly interested in how humans encode abstract or perceptual information, and what neural mechanisms underlie the embedding and retrieval of these representations. His research interests also lie in the intersection of machine learning and psychology/neuroscience, where he hopes that studying how humans learn will lead to better and more efficient models for representation learning and meta learning. He joined the lab in the summer of 2020.

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Sophie Riddick

Lab Manager; senior research assistant

Sophie received her B.A. in Psychology from Providence College in December 2021 and is now a full-time lab coordinator for the Cooperation Lab. She is intrigued by children’s developing social cognition, particularly as it relates to their reasoning about resource acquisition. More specifically, she is curious about (1) when in development children start to distinguish between differing means of acquiring resources (i.e., windfall vs. effortful gain), (2) whether children differentially value resources as a function of how those resources are acquired, and (3) whether this consequently results in distinctive patterns of sharing.