Mentor: Dr. Jennifer Stellar
Associate Professor
Project Description
Our lab studies prosociality and morality. We are interested in what makes people care about others and how having moral values helps us live in cooperative large societies. For this project specificially, I am interested in exploring what I am calling personal morality. Most notions of morality suggest if you believe something is moral, you think people shouldn’t be able to do it (even if it’s not codified in law), so it has a prescriptive element to it. But, I believe there there times when people believe something is immoral, but they also don’t believe everyone has to follow their moral world view? For example, a vegetarian that doesn’t feel that everyone has to be a vegetarian, but feels that for themselves, it would go against their moral values to eat meat. I’ve been calling this personal morality because the ideas is that the person accepts that people have different view sand doesn’t try and legislate it. This kind of personal morality challenges notions of morality in psychology and I wonder if this could be a solution to our moral polarization as a society.
Mentorship Statement
When it comes to mentorship, I value open communication, providing support and guidance, and helping students reach their full potential. I would expect to meet every week or every other week (this could be on Zoom) so that we could communicate about all aspects of the research process. I would also give you tasks to work on to move the research forward, which you would complete independently. You would receive training on understanding moral psychological concepts, designing a study, shadowing me as I run analyses to learn why and how we do them, and presenting the work. I chose to be involved in this program because I believe there are a lot of people who may not have considered academia as a path for themselves, but have important perspectives to contribute. I believe we are stronger as a field when we include voices from many different communities. Although it can feel hard to change entire systems, I see mentorship as my own small way to contribute to change.