
Ryan is a 5th-year PhD student in the Morality Lab (see his personal website). He will be applying for academic and non-academic jobs to start in 2023. He is broadly interested in our beliefs about what people ought to do and how these beliefs influence our subsequent inferences of their moral character. He is also interested in understanding important meta-science issues, such as how to make appropriate statistical and theoretical inferences. Currently, he has three lines of research in the Morality Lab:
- Is there a theory-method gap in (moral) cognition research? (See this working paper).
- What are the determinants and consequences of believing that people have obligations to help others, and what can this tell us about how helping might occur in the real world? (See these two published papers: M, KW, & Y (2020) and M, M, & Y (2021)).
- Why do people believe, on the one hand, that overcoming temptation is sometimes virtuous, whereas on the other hand, being tempted in the first place is sometimes non-virtuous?