Department of PhilosophyMoral Foundations Theory (MFT) posits that the human mind contains modules (or "foundations") that are functionally specialized to moralize unique dimensions of the social world: Authority, Loyalty, Purity, Harm, Fairness, and Liberty. Despite this strong claim about cognitive architecture, it is… read more about this publication »
Episodic counterfactual thoughts (eCFT) consist of imagining alternative outcomes to past experiences. A common sub-class of eCFT-upward eCFT-involves imagining how past negative experiences could have been better, either because one could have done something differently (internal) or because… read more about this publication »
The intrinsic functional organization of the brain changes into older adulthood. Age differences are observed at multiple spatial scales, from global reductions in modularity and segregation of distributed brain systems, to network-specific patterns of dedifferentiation. Whether dedifferentiation… read more about this publication »
Ilya Prigogine's trinomial concept is, he argued, applicable to many complex dissipative systems, from physics to biology and even to social systems. For Prigogine, this trinomial - functions, structure, fluctuations - was intended to capture the feedback-rich relations between upper and lower… read more about this publication »
Although theorists agree that social interactions play a major role in moral development, previous research has not experimentally assessed how specific features of social interactions affect children's moral judgments and reasoning. The current study assessed two features: disagreement and… read more about this publication »
ObjectiveThis study aimed to assess US/UK adults' attitudes towards COVID-19 ventilator and vaccine allocation.DesignOnline survey including US and UK adults, sampled to be representative for sex, age, race, household income and employment. A total of 2580 participated (women=1289, age range=18 to… read more about this publication »
Pretend play is a ubiquitous learning tool in early childhood, enabling children to explore possibilities outside of their current reality. Here, we demonstrate how pretend play can be leveraged to empower girls in scientific domains. American children ages 4 to 7 years (N = 240) played a… read more about this publication »
A common form of moral hypocrisy occurs when people blame others for moral violations that they themselves commit. It is assumed that hypocritical blamers act in this manner to falsely signal that they hold moral standards that they do not really accept. We tested this assumption by investigating… read more about this publication »
The initial waves of the coronavirus pandemic amplified feelings of depression, psychological fatigue and pessimism for the future. Past research suggests that nostalgia helps to repair negative moods by boosting current and future-oriented positive affect, thereby strengthening psychological… read more about this publication »
Morality includes a common ground ranking of values, of which a central theme is that prosocial actions are more justifiable than selfish ones. Learning to distinguish between good versus bad justifications for actions based on a common ground ranking of values is a key aspect of moral development… read more about this publication »
Great apes can discern what others are attending to and even direct others' attention to themselves in flexible ways. But they seemingly do not coordinate their attention with one another recursively-understanding that the other is monitoring their attention just as they are monitoring hers-in acts… read more about this publication »
Reaching agreements in conflicts is an important developmental challenge. Here, German 5-year-olds (N = 284, 49% female, mostly White, mixed socioeconomic backgrounds; data collection: June 2016-November 2017) faced repeated face-to-face bargaining problems in which they chose between… read more about this publication »
Conferralism about race is a version of social constructivism about race, where the agents of construction seem to be individual agents. However, an important aspect of racism is systemic or structural, and seemingly not about the behavior of individual agents. Can conferralism account for that? In… read more about this publication »
Good scientific practice (GSP) refers to both explicit and implicit rules, recommendations, and guidelines that help scientists to produce work that is of the highest quality at any given time, and to efficiently share that work with the community for further scrutiny or utilization. For… read more about this publication »
Choices are influenced by gaze allocation during deliberation, so that fixating an alternative longer leads to increased probability of choosing it. Gaze-dependent evidence accumulation provides a parsimonious account of choices, response times and gaze-behaviour in many simple decision scenarios.… read more about this publication »
Findings demonstrating decision-related neural activity preceding volitional actions have dominated the discussion about how science can inform the free will debate. These discussions have largely ignored studies suggesting that decisions might be influenced or biased by various unconscious… read more about this publication »
Psychologists and philosophers often work hand in hand to investigate many aspects of moral cognition. In this paper, we want to highlight one aspect that to date has been relatively neglected: the stability of moral judgment over time. After explaining why philosophers and psychologists should… read more about this publication »
Imagination is a cognitive process used to generate new ideas from old, not just in the service of creativity and fantasy, but also in our ordinary thoughts about alternatives to current reality. In this article, I argue for the central function of imagination in the development of social cognition… read more about this publication »
When comparing the roles of the lightning strike and the dry climate in causing the forest fire, one might think that the lightning strike is more of a cause than the dry climate, or one might think that the lightning strike completely caused the fire while the dry conditions did not cause it at… read more about this publication »
It is natural to think that social groups are concrete material particulars, but this view faces an important objection. Suppose the chess club and nature club have the same members. Intuitively, these are different clubs even though they have a common material basis. Some philosophers take these… read more about this publication »