Our Research

The MASC Lab is devoted to understanding how people think about and evaluate other people’s minds and behaviors

Some of the topics we investigate include…

  • How people decide whether other people and their behaviors are “good” or “bad”
  • How people think and feel about other people’s mental states (e.g., desires, intentions, goals, foreknowledge) and how this influences and informs evaluations of their character, behavior, and the outcomes their behavior causes (or leads to)
  • How people think and feel about the outcomes people’s behavior causes (or leads to), and how this impacts evaluations of their mental states, character, and behavior
  • How people decide whether others deserve blame or praise for their behaviors, and how these two types of decisions differ
  • How people reason about intentions, goals, and intentionality
  • How people think about and evaluate hypocrites and hypocrisy
  • How trying to get inside others’ heads changes how we feel about them and ourselves
  • What makes some people more accurate mind readers than others

At heart, members of the MASC Lab are interested in anything that involves understanding how people think and feel about other people, particularly in relation to the way people form and revise their moral judgments

Keywords: Morality, Social Cognition, Moral Cognition, Social Psychology, Moral Decision-Making, Person Perception, Intent, Intentionality, Mental States, Knowledge, Foreknowledge, Beliefs, Desire

Check out our publications and members, join our lab, or contact us!