Are You Trying to Affect Morality?

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Molly Crockett is a psychologist who studies the orientation of morality. She and her colleagues have been studying how people's moral cognition changes at festivals like Burning Man. They find that with every passing day they spend at an event, their moral circle expands to encompass everyone. The researchers say there are any number of factors that can contribute to moral expansion at multi-day mass gatherings like Burningman.

Most of us strive to be good, moral people. When we are doing that striving, what is happening in our brains? Some of our moral inclinations seem pretty automatic and subconscious. Other times we have to sit down and deploy our full cognitive faculties to reason through a tricky moral dilemma. I talk with psychologist Molly Crockett about where our moral intuitions come from, how they can sometimes serve as cover for bad behaviors, and how morality shapes our self-image.

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Molly J. Crockett received her Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Cambridge. She is currently Associate Professor of Psychology and University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. She is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology.

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