I study morality in the real world and ethical decision-making under changing social and technological conditions.

My research examines how individuals make moral choices—especially when new technologies, institutions, and social conditions create dilemmas for which shared norms are constantly in flux. 

My early work asks what extraordinary altruists can teach us about the reach of human concern. By studying individuals who chose to donate kidneys to strangers and engage in other unusually costly forms of helping, I examine why some people place high value on the welfare of distant others. This work investigates empathy, impartiality, trust, cynicism, deservingness, and the beliefs about humanity that enable or constrain prosocial action.

In my more recent work, I primarily study how people infer moral character from behavior—and why perceptions of political and social groups sometimes diverge from how members of those groups actually behave. My work examines not only the behavior of extraordinary altruists, but also how social discounting, close relationships, moral praise, character judgment, and intergenerational concern affect moral decision making.

My broader mission is to develop a psychological science of morality under changing conditions. New technologies and institutions do not merely give people new tools; they create unfamiliar situations in which established values conflict with new moral paradigms. Artificial intelligence, for example, raises societal tradeoffs involving privacy, security, autonomy, and efficiency. It also raises more personal questions about effort, agency, and character. For instance, my current work examines how the manner in which people use AI shapes judgments of their moral character, as well as how intellectual humility influences responses to AI-assisted work. Through this work, I seek to examine when using AI represents initiative and self-improvement, and when it is perceived as intellectual offloading, avoidance, deception, or dependence.

My aim is not to prescribe a single correct answer to these questions. Instead, I want to explain where moral intuitions arise, why people interpret the behavior differently, and how individual judgments become embedded in educational practices, workplaces, public policies, and the ethical foundations of technological innovations.

As institutions and technologies increasingly mediate decisions about care, credibility, competence, privacy, risk, and responsibility, understanding how moral values become judgments—and how judgments become systems—is essential to building a more informed and humane social world.

I am an NIH T32 Postdoctoral Fellow at Pennsylvania State University working with Dr. Daryl Cameron in the Empathy and Moral Psychology Lab. I received my PhD in Psychology at Georgetown University under the mentorship of Dr. Abigail Marsh in the Laboratory on Social and Affective Neuroscience. I received my BA in Psychology from Princeton University, where I completed my undergraduate thesis under the mentorship of Dr. Susan Fiske.