© 2025. Theme based on Hyde
© 2025. Theme based on Hyde
Moral disagreements are common in everyday life and people can respond to them in many ways, from avoidance and terminating interaction, to switching topic and keeping silent, to perspective-taking and seeking common ground. How should these responses be organized, and how can we predict which response an individual will adopt in a particular situation?
In my dissertation, I propose that responses to interpersonal moral disagreements can be understood as emotion regulation processes. According to this framework, responses to disagreements cluster into groups that reflect well-characterized emotion regulation strategies, including situation selection, reappraisal, and suppression. In turn, we can predict which response an individual will choose using both trait-level emotion regulation tendencies and situation-level perception of the cost and benefit of pursuing each strategy.
Preliminary findings from this project were presented at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) 2024 Conference. The preprint will be available soon.
Valuing the welfare of others is a fundamental component of human empathy and prosocial behavior. How do people develop this valuation in the first place?
In a paper that is in press at Psychological Science, I propose that people can learn to value the general welfare of others through a simple associative learning mechanism–Pavlovian conditioning. When another person’s outcomes consistently predict our own outcomes, we can attach reward to the target’s affect, thereby feeling either congruent or incongruent emotions towards the target in new situations.
Social environments present opportunities for connection as well as risks of rejection. How do people learn who will reject or accept them upon entering a new environment?
In a recent preprint, I present evidence that people generalize rejection and acceptance based on their knowledge of the structure of the social environment. Following rejection (acceptance), people avoid (approach) novel targets as a function of their distance from the original rejector (accepter) in the friendship network.