February 2023
We had a great time presenting our findings, meeting old friends and new collaborators, and exploring the beautiful city of Atlanta for the SPSP (Society for Personality and Social Psychology) annual conference! A special shout-out to undergraduate RA Helen Padilla Fong, who received a Diversity Undergraduate Registration Award, and to graduate student Isaac Handley-Miner, who was a runner-up for the Graduate Student Poster Awards!
December 2022
The Morality Lab and the Social Influence and Social Change (SISC) Lab celebrated the end of a great semester with bowling at Ron’s Gourmet Ice Cream and Bowling in Hyde Park! The competition was fierce, and the ice cream was delicious.
November 2022
The lab hosted a kickoff event at the Schiller Institute to bring together scholars involved with the “Exploring the Impact of Social Norms on Virtue” John Templeton Foundation grant. This one-day conference included blitz talks, a workshop about field partnerships, and lunchtime conversations between lab members, collaborators, and community members!
October 2022
We’re so excited that our former lab coordinator Aditi Kodipady’s first-authored paper titled “Beyond Virtue Signaling: Perceived Motivations for Pronoun Sharing” was accepted to the Journal of Applied Psychology! Read a preprint of their paper here.
September 2022
The lab enjoyed the beautiful weather during an apple-picking outing at Honey Pot Hill Orchards—many honeycrisps and cider donuts were shared!
Lab photo from Fall 2022!
August 2022
Professor Lily Tsoi, first-ever lab manager and grad student alum of Morality Lab, and now Best Professor Ever™, teaches her first week of classes in the School of Psychology and Counseling at Caldwell University, and rocks it!!!
July 2022
To say goodbye to our lab manager Aditi and our research analyst Tony, and to welcome Lizy and Nathan to Boston, the lab grabbed dinner together and went axe throwing before sending off Aditi and Tony with some surprise gifts!
Congratulations to our research analyst Sunny for winning the axe-throwing tournament!
May 2022
The lab got together for an end-of-semester lunch on a warm day!
April 2022
We had a lot of wins to celebrate this month!
Congratulations to our full time research analyst Tony Chen, who will be starting a Ph.D. program in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences department at MIT with Josh Tenenbaum!
Congratulations also to our undergraduate RAs Kayla Carew and Blair Hu for their admission to the PsyD program at William James College and the Master’s of Social Work program at Boston College, respectively!
And finally, congratulations to our grad student Isaac Handley-Miner, who was accepted to the Max Planck Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality!
March 2022
The lab went on a hike in the Blue Hills Reservation on one of the first warm days of spring!
December 2021
The lab went rock climbing together to celebrate the end of the semester!
November 2021
The lab hosted our final Reason workshop to share findings from our lab and the labs of Fiery Cushman, Katie McAuliffe, and Dave Rand, funded by our Templeton grant on “Reasoning in moral thought and action.” The workshop was attended by members of the four labs, as well as our consultants on this grant who supported our research!
A photo of all of our lab members back in person (sans Liane!). Reports say Tony brought homemade pecan pie, and it was delicious 🙂
October 2021
Congratulations to two of our grad students, Ryan and Isaac, who were awarded SPSP Graduate Student Travel Awards to present their work at the 2022 Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference!
The lab went on a wonderful day hike in the White Mountains and got to see some peak fall foliage. We also stopped by an apple orchard on the way home and recharged with fresh apples and cider donuts!
September 2021
The Morality Lab had a wonderful dinner at Barcelona Wine Bar to kick off the fall semester! Although Liane was sorely missed, the rest of us toasted to her health and a good year ahead.
July 2021
To say goodbye to our research analyst Kevin (who’s off to start his MFA in creative writing at the University of Syracuse this fall!), and to welcome Sunny and Tony (back) to Boston, the lab engaged in some good old-fashioned creative bonding at a pottery painting studio. We discovered who had been lying about their lack of artistic talent (spoiler: everybody), and ended the afternoon with burritos and donuts at the park!
In other news, lab alum Josh Rottman was granted tenure at Franklin & Marshall College! Congratulations, Josh!
June 2021
The lab went strawberry picking at Ward’s Berry Farm on a sunny early summer morning! We see many smoothies, jams and compotes in our near future…
We also welcomed our lab’s newest member, Sunny Liu, to Boston this month and can’t wait to start working with him!
Congratulations to Ryan and our RA Jordyn on their new paper getting accepted at the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology! You can read the paper, titled “Re-examining the role of family relationships in structuring perceived helping obligations, and their impact on moral evaluation,” here.
May 2021
On one of the first gorgeously warm days this year, the lab went kayaking to celebrate our postdoc Justin’s time in the lab! Next month, Justin will be joining JPMorgan as a senior associate data scientist. While he’s sad to leave the lab, he’s excited to stay in touch with everyone and looking forward to using his skills in industry. He’s also moving to Chicago and is very excited to host his old colleagues for pizza, steaks and amazing tiki bars whenever they visit!
Congratulations to our four graduating seniors—Emma, Jamie, Jordyn, and Julianna—who have been wonderful RAs in their time at the lab! Emma will be working to provide healthcare and other resources to people experiencing homelessness in Pittsburgh while applying to med schools. Jamie has accepted a clinical research assistant position at the Butler Hospital’s Neuromodulation Research Facility in Rhode Island, and Jordyn will be pursing an MA in Forensic Psychology. Finally, Julianna will be working as a lab coordinator with Massachusetts General Hospital’s Neurology department. We’re so proud of all of you!
April 2021
The lab was joined last month by its newest honorary member, Isaac Cole Todd (our postdoc Gordon had a baby!). Welcome to the world, Isaac—we can’t wait to meet you! Here he is in his Morality Lab swag:
March 2021
Congratulations to our grad student Isaac for receiving a three-year NDSEG fellowship for his work on the psychology of truth!!
In other good news, our Research Analyst Kevin has accepted an admissions offer from Syracuse University’s Creative Writing Program and will start his MFA in the fall!
Paul Bloom covers some of the lab’s work on how intention matters less for moral judgments of taboo violations compared to moral judgments of harms, in this Wall Street Journal article.
The lab got together for a socially-distanced picnic by the Charles to celebrate the first warm days of the year, Liane’s promotion to full Professor, and a few lab birthdays, among other things! This is us trying out our new Morality Lab sweatshirts (and, yes, we are in fact starting a band aimed primarily at a teenage audience, taking suggestions for the name of our first EP).
February 2021
A huge congratulations to Liane, who recently got promoted to Full Professor! We are so excited to eventually celebrate with her in person, but for now we will settle for a long email chain of effusive congratulations :))
December 2020
The Morality Lab hosted a virtual workshop featuring a series of terrific presentations from our lab and the labs of Fiery Cushman, Katie McAuliffe, and Dave Rand, on our project “Reasoning in Moral Thought and Action,” supported by the John Templeton Foundation.
Also check out this video interview with Liane, featuring work by Ryan, Minjae, and BoKyung, created in collaboration with the John Templeton Foundation and Freethink.
October 2020
Congratulations to our undergraduate RAs Jordyn, Jamie, Carol, and Nathan, who each got their posters accepted at SPSP 2021!
July 2020
The lab got together on Zoom to celebrate and say goodbye to our lab coordinator Josh, who will be dearly missed! We played Codenames together and watched Josh get very excited about his farewell gift, a jigsaw puzzle of his brain 🙂
In other news, we were also joined this month by our three new lab members—Isaac, Tony and Aditi. Welcome!
May 2020
In the last couple months, the lab has been settling into a new normal of doing science virtually. We’ve also been playing Zoom games together (we recommend Codenames), and celebrating a lot of birthdays. Word to the wise: surprise Zoom birthday calls eventually lose the element of… well, surprise. Time to get creative…
We also bid farewell to BoKyung, who will be starting an assistant professor position in Psychology at UT Dallas! Congrats BoKyung! We’ll miss you 🙂
February 2020
Members of the lab took a trip to New Orleans to present some of their work at SPSP 2020. While there, they grabbed a bite to eat with one old friend (James Dungan) and one new one (Isaac Handley-Miner).
We are thrilled to announce that Isaac will be joining the lab as a graduate student in the fall of 2020! On top of that, we will also be joined by Aditi Kodipady as our new lab coordinator, and Tony Chen as a joint lab technician with our lab and Stefano Anzellotti’s lab!
In even more wonderful news, Minjae’s theory paper is now published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, in collaboration with BoKyung and Liane.
January 2020
Congrats to Ryan, who got his first Morality Lab paper published in Psychological Science, in collaboration with Max Kleiman-Weiner and Liane! Learn more about the research paper, titled “What We Owe to Family: The Impact of Special Obligations on Moral Judgment,” from this quick summary!
November 2019
The lab goes to Hopewell to celebrate and say farewell to Simon, a visiting scholar who graced us (all too briefly) with his presence. Simon will be returning to Aarhus University in Denmark, where he will be completing his Ph.D. in Management. We’ll miss you, Simon!
September 2019
The Morality Lab co-hosted the third workshop on Reasoning in Moral Thought and Action at BC, joined by folks from the labs of Fiery Cushman, Katie McAuliffe, and Dave Rand, as well as consultants from far and wide! If you’re interested in learning more about the research we’re doing for this project, check out our brand new website!
The lab is also thrilled to welcome Simon Tobias Karg as a visiting scholar; Simon joins us from Aarhus University in Denmark, where he is pursuing his Ph.D. in Management.
July 2019
The lab merged with Stefano Anzelloti’s social and cognitive computational neuroscience (SCCN) lab for a gorgeous day of kayaking on the Charles! Minjae demonstrates perfect kayaking technique (as advised by resident kayaking expert, Gordon).
May 2019
Dr. Lily Tsoi returns to BC to be officially hooded by Liane in her Ph.D. commencement ceremony! And Liane receives the 2019 GSAS Faculty Teaching/Mentoring Award for her incredible teaching and mentoring of our graduate students!
April 2019
The lab escapes the crowds post-Boston Marathon with a trip to Barcelona (wine bar) to welcome Gordon Kraft Todd (joining as a post-doc in the fall) and Kevin Jiang (our new research analyst)! If you look closely, you’ll see that Josh (trying to embarrass the newbie), accidentally gave himself bunny ears… Not only that, but he completely forgot his birthday was coming up; luckily for him, he was reminded by a chorus of angelic voices and a flan!
February 2019
Members of the Morality Lab attend SPSP in Portland! Liane and Justin gave talks at the Justice and Morality pre-conference, while BoKyung, Minjae, Justin, Ryan, and Josh presented posters. Ryan won an award for being the most visibly excited to present his poster! And lab alums James and Lily were spotted at a hip Portland brewery.
January 2019
The Morality Lab co-hosts a mini-symposium on Reasoning in Moral Thought and Action, in tandem with the labs of Fiery Cushman, Katie McAuliffe, and Dave Rand. The event lasts all day, with over 20 different talks on a wide range of fascinating topics related to moral reasoning!
December 2018
Closing out 2018 with style, the lab hit Kendall Square for some ramen to warm up for an afternoon of intense skating—double toe loops, triple axels, and camel spins, oh my! The word on the rink is that Liane pulled off a triple Lutz, but this may just be hearsay… happy new year!
The lab is awarded a $2.74M grant to support a 3-year project on Reasoning in Moral Thought and Action, funded by the John Templeton Foundation, in collaboration with co-investigators Fiery Cushman, Katie McAuliffe, and Dave Rand.
November 2018
In wonderful news, Liane was one of four scientists to receive the Psychonomic Society Early Career Award, which recognizes the significant scientific contributions of Members and Fellows early in their research career!
June 2018
Congratulations to Lily for successfully defending her dissertation: “Investigating the role of theory of mind in cooperative and competitive behaviors using approaches from cognitive neuroscience and developmental psychology.” Pictured with her committee members Josh Greene, Katherine McAuliffe, Liane Young, and Elizabeth Kensinger.
Lily will be off to start a postdoc with Diana Tamir at the Princeton Social Neuroscience Lab!
Lab and friends celebrated Lily’s wonderful achievements over cake and beer. An impromptu fashion show ensued, in which James and Jordan modeled the lab’s new t-shirts (designed by Lily while she was finishing her dissertation). Lily received a map of the T as a parting gift from the lab ensuring that she’d never get lost in Boston again…
February 2018
The lab and friends of the lab came together to enjoy some dim sum celebrating the Chinese Lunar new year and bringing in the year of the Dog! One particular lab member (Liane) was sorely missed at the event; we presume that her brand new baby (and honorary lab member) Jaelyn asked to celebrate at home this year.
September 2017
The lab joined forces with Sara Cordes’ lab to maximize apple picking at Honey Pot Farms! In reality, intergroup competition seemed to come more naturally to the labs when bushel came to shove… but there’s really nothing quite like hay rides, cider donuts, and cute pigs to bring people together… and to welcome wonderful new lab members Minjae and BoKyung!
August 2017
Cheers to James and Jordan! James will be starting a postdoc at the Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Jordan will be starting a postdoc at Northeastern University with Lisa Feldman-Barrett.
Congratulations to James for successfully defending his dissertation: “Investigating the functional distinction between harm and purity norms”. Pictured with his committee members Jim Russell, Liane Young, Elizabeth Kensinger, and Fiery Cushman.
The lab celebrated James and Jordan with cake, brains, and moral dilemmas! Jordan received a house-made, full-scaled, 3D printout of his own brain (each hemisphere took 33 hours to print), and humbly remarked that it looked especially stylish. James got a print from The New Yorker, June 26, 2017, “The little engine that faced a tough moral dilemma.”
July 2017
Congratulations to Jordan for successfully defending his dissertation: “Morality as a scaffold for social prediction!” Pictured with his committee members Sean MacEvoy, Lisa Feldman-Barrett, Jim Russell, Liane Young, and Elizabeth Kensinger.
The lab heads out for a day of kayaking on the Charles to send former lab manager Emily off… and new lab manager Josh kayaks in (metaphorically!) to take her place. And congrats to Emily on having her first first-authored paper published in NeuroImage days after her official departure!
The lab also makes a donation to the Union of Concerned Scientists in Emily’s honor, and gives her some brain coasters.
May 2017
At this year’s meeting of the Association for Psychological Science, Liane was one of five scientists who received the Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions. Congratulations Liane! Liane talks to the APS Observer about what the award means to her.
February 2017
PBS Newshour interviewed Jordan about his recent paper on the impact of terrorism education on students’ attitudes toward terrorists. Article is here. Congrats, Jordan!
January 2017
Alek returned from San Francisco to talk about his experiences as a post-postdoc in Silicon Valley over lunch at El Pelon. In keeping with his research focus on purity violations, the lab awarded Alek a poop hat.
Liane also received a (more important) award: the SAGE Young Scholars Award. Congrats, Liane! Here she is on stage at SPSP, alongside Mina Cikara, Jamil Zaki, Erika Carlson, Jesse Graham, Kurt Gray, and Andrew Todd.
October 2016
We chose to have our Halloween lab meeting outside, at Honey Pot Hill Orchards. Featuring hot cider, a massive hedge maze, and goats.
Time to maze completion: 1:01
August 2016
We bid farewell to our postdocs Larisa, Brendan, and Alek with a lab outing at Sacco’s Bowl Haven in Somerville. Lab alum Josh Rottman joined us for an enchanted evening of flatbreads and candlepin bowling.
As is custom, each departing lab member got a personalized gift. Brendan, a new pool owner, received the giant inflatable flamingo he’d always dreamed of.
Larisa got a customized sign for her new home, Columbia’s Social and Moral Cognition Lab—with balloons! (The sign itself didn’t come in time, so here’s Larisa with a miniature version.)
And Alek got Cards Against Morality—a set of Cards Against Humanity cards in which the black cards have been replaced with prompts inspired by the moral violations in his dissertation. Credit goes to Lily for the idea and Emily for writing the prompts (and cutting out 550 cards).
We’ll miss you!
July 2016
The lab escaped the room on its first ever try! Congrats to Liane, Alek, Laura, James, Jordan, Lily, Emily, and the two strangers who all helped each other find the key.
June 2016
Laura and Liane discussed their work on victim-blaming in a New York Times Gray Matter opinion piece.
The lab was well-represented at the 2016 meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, hosted by Jonathan Phillips and Liane in Austin, TX! Lily and James presented posters, Jordan and Laura gave talks, and Liane delivered the Stanton Prize Address.
May 2016
Thesis student Jin Choi presented his work, done in collaboration with Lily, at BC’s Undergraduate Research Day. Congrats Jin!
April 2016
The lab enjoyed a great trip to SANS in New York City. Among the highlights: three lab members/affiliates (Laura, Jordan, and Emily) presented posters, and Liane gave a talk. Also, James, Liane, and Adam Waytz’s work on fairness-loyalty tradeoffs in whistleblowing was featured in a keynote address by Malcolm Gladwell.
Additionally, Laura’s poster won a SANS poster award. Congratulations, Laura!
March 2016
We are thrilled to announce that Brendan has just accepted an assistant professorship at SUNY Albany! Congratulations, Brendan!
October 2015
Six lab members skip out on work to climb Mt. Monadnock.
August 2015
We bid a fond farewell to Amelia with a homemade card and a special gift: an MBTA sign from Amelia’s favorite bus line.
The lab welcomes Emily as new lab manager (though Amelia will be with us a bit longer!). As a farewell gift, Laura is presented with her own brain—3D-printed by Liane and Lily right here on BC’s campus. She discovers that her right hemisphere is significantly larger than her left.
May/June 2015
Congrats to Josh, Laura, and Alek for obtaining their Ph.D.s! Farewell to Josh! Franklin & Marshall is lucky to have you (and lucky for us, Laura is staying in Boston as an NSF postdoc with Steve Pinker while Alek is staying with us as a postdoc until he moves to Oxford to do Templeton-funded work with Molly Crockett).
April 2015
The lab goes curling with the Kensinger and Cordes labs!
March 2015
Celebrating Liane’s tenure with sushi from Genki-Ya…
Congratulations to Jordan for winning a SANS poster award!
Congratulations to Larisa for accepting a tenure-track position at Columbia!
January 2015
Congratulations to Josh for accepting a tenure-track position at Franklin & Marshall!
We are excited to have Alek join the lab as a post-doc in the spring!
The lab goes to lunch at Korean Garden.
September 2014
Congratulations to James, Jordan, Laura, and Josh, who all received graduate student travel awards from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology this year!
August 2014
Congratulations to Brendan for being awarded a two-year Templeton Science of Prospection Award!
Jordan and Liane discuss their research on WBUR’s CommonHealth program, in a series called ‘Beyond Good and Evil: New Science Casts Light on Morality in the Brain’
June 2014
Congratulations to Larisa for being awarded a two-year National Science Foundation (Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences) Post-Doctoral Fellowship!
April 2014
Congratulations to Larisa Heiphetz for winning the APA Division 7 Dissertation Award in Developmental Psychology!
March 2014
The lab welcomes Adelyn Ai-Lun Gao!
November 2013
John Lutz visits the lab for science and dinner.
October 2013
Congratulations to Lily Tsoi for receiving a Graduate Student Travel Award and to Liane, with Kurt Gray and Adam Waytz, for receiving the Theoretical Innovation Award from the Society of Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP)!
September 2013
The lab goes to brunch at Stephanie’s on Newbury street.
May 2013
Mike, Gabby, and Elizabeth present their theses at the Psychology Undergraduate Research Conference (PURC).
The lab celebrates recent achievements at Josh’s house. Many thanks to Josh and Lysa for the excellent dinner!
April 2013
Jordan and Lily present their posters at SANS and CNS and go sightseeing in San Francisco with folks in Elizabeth Kensinger’s lab.
March 2013
Congratulations to Laura for receiving a research grant from the National Endowment for the Arts!
Congratulations to James and Lily for receiving NSF Graduate Research Fellowships!
January 2013
The lab goes to SPSP in New Orleans. James gives a talk, and Josh, Alek, and Laura present their posters. Larisa, our soon-to-be postdoc, joins us for dinner.
November 2012
The lab goes trampolining and celebrates Alek’s and Josh’s birthdays with some tacky disco lights and birthday singing.
October 2012
James and Jordan talk to undergraduates about research opportunities in the lab.
August 2012
The lab conducts a blind taste test to empirically answer the question of which restaurant (Genki Ya or Fin’s) has better sushi.
July 2012
Jordan experiences his first 4th of July.
June 2012
The whole lab goes to SPP and explores Boulder with the Greene Lab. Three words: Cream. Soda. Trees.
May 2012
The lab bids farewell to our graduating seniors Abby Stemper and Danny Baush.
James and Josh present their work at APS and explored Chicago.
Danny and Abby present their work at the Psychology Undergraduate Research Conference (PURC).
Congratulations to Abby for receiving the Peter Gray Award for creative achievement in psychology! Each year, the award is given to a sophomore, junior, or senior Psychology major who has manifested unusual intellectual curiosity, independence, and creativity in his or her studies.
May birthday celebrations galore (yummy cakes and attempted jello brains)!
April 2012
Congratulations to Jordan for receiving a Postgraduate Scholarship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)!
Lily has agreed to stay in the lab as a graduate student starting 2013 (after finishing up her two-year position as lab manager)!
Both news were celebrated at The Abbey over good food:
February 2012
Congratulations to Liane for being selected as a 2012 Sloan Research Fellow! For more info, click here.
January 2012
The lab begins the new year by going to San Diego for SPSP.
December 2011
The lab bids farewell to Martina, who will be returning to the University of Granada in Spain.
The lab went over to The Publick House to drink merrily and eat hamburgers and mac and cheeses (except for Josh, who wanted to be individualistic).
Lily receives her green badge (first in the lab)!
Congratulations to Liane for being selected as a Dana Neuroscience Scholar by the Dana Foundation!
October 2011
Our first hangout as a group! We had a friendly bowling competition against the Cordes and MacEvoy labs at Sacco’s Bowl Haven (Davis Sq). We have the scoresheet somewhere still (not that it’s something to be proud of). Note: this place has great pizza!
September 2011
Congratulations to Liane for receiving the 2011 Early Career Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Social Neuroscience from the Society for Social Neuroscience! For more info, click here.