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My research is in the area of moral psychology, broadly conceived. I am currently working on several related projects.

1)    An empirically informed theory of virtue and character

In Character as Moral Fiction (Cambridge 2013), I argue that trait attributions tend to function as self-fulfilling prophecies. Calling someone honest, especially when the attribution is plausible and public, tends to induce honesty. Calling someone stingy, especially then the attribution is plausible and public, tends to induce stinginess. Likewise for intellectual virtues that have a motivational component: calling someone curious tends to induce curiosity, but calling someone a lazy student will make her act as described. When this happens, I call it factitious virtue (or vice).

If the theory of factitious virtue is on the right track, it suggests several ways of rethinking the relation between traits and trait-terms. One option is to argue for a kind of noble lie: even though the evidence from social psychology suggests that most people are not virtuous, we should pretend that they are in order to regulate their behavior in desirable ways. A more palatable option is to apply asymmetric standards of evidence to attributions of virtues and vices. Since falsely attributing a virtue may induce factitious virtue, but falsely attributing a vice may induce factitious vice, we should lower our standards of evidence for permissible attributions of virtue and raise them for permissible attributions of vice. The final option is more revisionary: it might make sense to reconceptualize the metaphysics of character on a social constructionist model. If many people act virtuously only when others call them virtuous or otherwise convey their normative expectations, perhaps these expectations are partially constitutive of virtue. This option can be construed as an application of the extended mind hypothesis in the domain of character.

In addition to my book, I have multiple edited volumes, peer-reviewed papers, and invited articles published or forthcoming on this topic. In more recent work, I’ve started to develop the extended character hypothesis in more detail, and to engage in collaborative empirical work on the nature of specific character traits. For example, I am the principle investigator for a project on intellectual humility; my team recently received $251,745 to conduct several experiments and publish their results in psychology and philosophy journals (most recently a conceptual analysis of the speech act of bragging in Thought).

2)    A project that data-mines obituaries to investigate the nature and distribution of values

Different communities are marked by distinct values and moral codes. One way to determine what people value is to ask them directly, but this straightforward method is prone to various biases. I will expand an ongoing research project involving data-mining of obituaries to map the values and moral priorities of the communities that produced them. Obituaries are well-suited to this task because they are explicitly intended to summarize the primary characteristics of their subjects. Using network-mapping techniques, small-scale work to date has indicated differences in the trait descriptors that are most commonly applied to the deceased, both within communities (especially between men and women) and between communities (Flint, MI, a city marked by industrial disinvestment in the recent past, and Eugene, OR, a university town).

Obituaries represent one of the best candidate corpora for mining value-relevant person-descriptors. For instance, Linda Zagzebski proposed in Virtues of the Mind that “one way to express the depth required for a trait to be a virtue or a vice is to think of it as a quality we would ascribe to a person if asked to describe her after her death.” In a similar vein, according to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), a popular form of clinical psychiatry, one of the primary interventions employed to help patients clarify and connect their values is to ask them to write their own obituary or eulogy.

Current work compares 13,000 lay-authored obituaries related to the University of Oregon with a sample of 30,000 professionally-written entries from The New York Times, the national paper of record. This research program has the potential not only to contribute substantially to research on moral decision-making but also to lay a foundation for research into predicting value judgments and behaviors based on indirect discourse within a community.

3)    A series of edited volumes on the nature and value of the emotions

After a time in the wilderness, the emotions have returned to prominence.  Psychology experienced its “affective revolution” decades ago, Philosophers have begun to connect this empirical work with perennial themes in meta-ethics (e.g., cognitivism versus non-cognitivism), normative ethics (e.g., the empirical adequacy of virtue ethics, the sentimental basis of wellbeing, consequentialist versus deontological decision-making), and applied ethics (e.g., disgust and contempt in the context of genocide, mass atrocities, and oppression).  Much philosophical terrain remains unexplored, however.  For instance, there are obvious but almost entirely unconsidered interfaces with Peter Strawson’s conception of emotions as reactive attitudes, research in embodied, embedded, and extended cognition, and socio-political research on affective contagion and democratic decision-making.

I recently signed a contract to become the editor of a series that aims not merely to connect empirical psychology with philosophy of emotions but to differentiate our analysis and understanding of the emotions.  To date, even the more fine-grained analyses in philosophy have tended to distinguish emotions only by their valence and intensity.  These distinctions are clearly inadequate.  Just to illustrate: the century-old idea that something is morally good (bad) if and only if it’s appropriate to feel some positively- (negatively-)valenced emotion towards it elides more than it captures.  Is something morally bad because it would be appropriate to feel annoyance, rage, resentment, or despair at it, without differentiation?  Surely not.  It makes a moral difference whether a victim of oppression feels annoyance, rage, resentment, or despair.  It makes a moral difference whether someone whose romantic partner has just died feels annoyance, rage, resentment, or despair.  Some emotions, such as disgust, seem to be especially prone to acquiring new targets; this promiscuity has prompted some philosophers (e.g., Kelly, Nussbaum) to argue that disgust-reactions are unreliable, but that other negatively-valenced emotions with differential power might be reliable (e.g., Alfano). 

To some extent, disgust has already been singled out for (mostly unflattering) treatment in philosophical moral psychology. The same level of attention has not been paid to other emotions, and even disgust has not been considered sufficiently.  The volumes in this series will rectify this problem.  By exploring the moral psychology of particular emotions one at a time, they will help to establish the boundary conditions for different emotions in the moral life.  Perhaps disgust is generally unreliable but useful in some contexts.  Perhaps anger is generally reliable but tends to lead to potentially debilitating longitudinal effects in the people who (justifiably) experience it (as Lisa Tessman argues).  Perhaps contempt encourages exceptional achievement (prodding people to activity so that can feel contempt for others, or avoid being its target) but is associated with immense harm in those who don’t succeed (through skill, luck, or some combination of the two).  These evaluative components of particular emotions have not been sufficiently explored; they will be considered in detail in the series. The first four books will be on contempt, anger, disgust, and compassion. Later volumes will include fear, sadness, joy, doubt, pride, guilt, shame, resentment, hope, gratitude, and awe. 

4)    An experimental investigation of folk psychology

The research I’ve done in this context is a natural extension of my other work in moral psychology. To date, my publications in this field include several peer-reviewed articles, invited papers, and an entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on experimental moral philosophy. In ongoing work, I am starting to bring more-sophisticated and better-validated methods to bear in experimental philosophy. For instance, with several collaborators, I’ve begun to apply data-mining techniques to thesauruses and obituaries to extract patterns of evaluative judgments. These patterns inform both conceptual analyses and network-theoretic mappings of concepts.

5)    An exploration of the nature and ethics of the placebo effect

While working on the theory of factitious virtue, I came to think that it closely resembled the placebo effect. When someone acquires factitious generosity, fact tracks expectations: he behaves generously, but only because others expect him to. Likewise in placebo analgesia. When someone experiences pain relief after taking a sugar pill, fact tracks expectations: she feels better, but only because she expects to. Just as I argue that it might be permissible to induce factitious virtue in some cases, so I think that it might be permissible to induce the placebo effect in some cases. This thesis runs counter to the current consensus in the bioethics community, which categorically rejects the prescription of placebos in the clinical context, but I am working on a series of papers that aim to overturn this consensus (the first was recently published in the American Journal of Bioethics).

6)    An interpretation of Nietzsche’s moral psychology

Many of Nietzsche’s insights are borne out by contemporary social and cognitive psychology. I have published several peer-reviewed and invited papers on this topic. Two of the more recent, in the British Journal for the History of Philosophy and the Journal of Nietzsche Studies, argue that Nietzsche is a virtue theorist for whom curiosity is a cardinal virtue, and that he discovered the phenomenon of factitious virtue. I am now synthesizing this work in a monograph, titled Nietzsche’s Socio-Moral Psychology, which is under contract with Cambridge University Press. In upcoming work, I will collaborate with Elliot Berkman, a neuroscientist at the University of Oregon, to test some of the theories and models I’ve extracted from Nietzsche’s writings.