Gordon Kraft-Todd, Ph.D.
Gordon is interested in how our social perceptions affect the spread of prosociality. Specifically, he investigates how observers’ judgments of actors’ speech, behavior, motivations, and character influences observers’ moral and normative beliefs as well as their prosocial behavior. He uses survey, economic games, computational modeling, and field experiment methods to examine how these processes can help us to understand ideas such as “actions speak louder than words,” “virtue signaling,” and “algorithmic fairness.”
He is a co-founder of the Applied Cooperation Team at MIT which partners with firms in the non-profit, for-profit, and government sectors to test the ecological validity of his laboratory findings in the real world by conducting interventions promoting contributions to public goods (including charitable donations, voting, energy conservation, compliance with smoking bans, and antibiotic adherence). He received his B.A. with a self-designed major in Leadership from Harvard College in 2007, and his Ph.D. in Psychology from Yale University in 2019. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Morality Lab at Boston College.