My research asks the question: how do people decide what is right and wrong? My hope is to approach this question from four complimentary directions. First, by what cognitive mechanisms do people make decisions about right and wrong? Second, what are the developmental courses of these cognitive mechanisms? Third, to what extent are these mechanisms share with non-human animals? Fourth, what is the evolutionary history of these mechanisms?

Research into the mechanisms of moral cognition is still in its infancy. Among the unanswered questions are: what moral principles do we employ? How widely shared are these principles across cultures? Are these principles stored as explicit knowledge or intuitive gut feelings? Along with a number of collaborators, I am investigating these questions in an online project called the Moral Sense Test. The basic methodology is to administer a set of carefully constructed moral dilemmas to subjects from diverse cultural backgrounds.

The Moral Sense Test can also be used to answer certain basic questions about the development of our "moral sense". For instance, by testing subjects of different ages we can ask whether moral principles change over the course of development. By testing subjects from diverse cultural backgrounds we can begin to understand the relative contributions of innate and learned factors on our moral psychology. I am currently pursuing several developmental projects at Harvard's Laboratory for Developmental Studies.

Questions about the evolutionary history of moral cognition and moral behavior require a very different research program. Working with the Primate Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, I have conducted research with several species of nonhuman primate. By investigating our primate cousins, we can determine which aspects of cooperative and moral behavior are evolutionarily ancient, and which constitute truely unique human adaptations.

If you'd like to learn more about my research, please e-mail me! I am also available to advise undergraduate research projects at Harvard.