Lab Members

Faculty

		Paul Bloom
		My interests are perversely diverse, but recently I’ve been most excited by questions about morality and how it develops; intuitions about personal identity, free will, and the self; the origin of religious belief; and the strange pleasures we get from fiction and art.

Postdoctoral Associates

Matti Wilks

My research broadly focuses on moral cognition and socio-moral development and I have a range of interests including the moral circle, prosocial behavior, compassion and effective altruism. Currently I am interested in understanding why we moralize certain people and things, and the factors that underpin those intuitions. In one line of research I examine how children think about the moral status of a range of entities and explore factors that may contribute to these beliefs. In this work I also explore the emergence of extreme altruism in children. In another line of work, I explore the moralization of food technology, often employing cultured meat as a case study. Taking a lifespan perspective, I explore intuitions around naturalness, morality and the psychological mechanisms that shape these views.

matti.wilks@yale.edu

Graduate Students

		Madeline “Gracie” Reinecke, 5th year
		I primarily investigate how adults and children evaluate moral standing (e.g., in humans, in non-human animals, in robots). I also examine people’s beliefs about the nature of morality. madeline.reinecke@yale.edu
		Emily Gerdin, 5th year
		I study ideological reasoning. Specifically, my research considers how our beliefs about belief systems (e.g., religious doctrines, political ideologies) are shaped during development, and the role early moral thinking plays in this process. emily.gerdin@yale.edu

Summer 2021 [Remote] Interns:

Jess Stephenson
Ashley Missimo
Ari Meyer
Rachel Calcott
Honor Thompson

Lab Alumni & Where they are now:

Former lab managers, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers:


		Katie Vasquez Graduate Student University of Chicago	Alexa Sacchi Graduate Student University of Toronto

Julia Marshall Postdoctoral Fellow Boston College	Gordon Kraft-Todd Postdoctoral Fellow Boston College	Nick Stagnaro Postdoctoral Fellow MIT	Matthias Forstmann

Jillian Jordan Postdoctoral Fellow Northwestern University	Adam Bear Postdoctoral Fellow Harvard	Christina Starmans Assistant Professor University of Toronto	Koni Banerjee Senior Scientist Unilever

Jonathan Phillips Postdoctoral Fellow Harvard University	Lily Guillot Analyst Yale University	Mark Sheskin Assistant Professor Minerva Schools at KGI	Thalia Goldstein Assistant Professor Pace University

Jennifer Barnes Assistant Professor University of Oklahoma	Kiley Hamlin Associate Professor University of British Columbia	Izzat Jarudi Consultant Tufts Health Plan	Jane Erickson Exectutive Director Leport Schools

Louisa Egan Brad Visiting Assistant Prof. Bryn Mawr College	Koleen McCrink Assistant Professor Barnard College	Erik Cheries Assistant Professor UMass Amherst	Erika Nurmsoo Lecturer University of Kent

Deena Weisberg Senior Fellow University of Pennsylvania	Candice Mills Associate Professor University of Texas at Dallas	Judith Danovitch Assistant Professor University of Louisville	Nicholaus Noles Assistant Professor University of Louisville

Melissa Allen Preissler Senior Lecturer Lancaster University	Susan Birch Associate Professor Universty of British Columbia	Gil Diesendruck Associate Professor Bar-Ilan University	Valerie Kuhlmeier Associate Professor Queen’s University


Kristy van Marle Assistant Professor University of Missouri	David Pizarro Associate Professor Cornell University	Lori Markson Associate Professor Washington University St. Louis	Deborah Kelemen Professor Boston University