Our new paper on why conservatives tend to believe in free will more than do liberals, led by Drs. Jim Everett and Cory Clark, is now available at the Journal for Personality and Social Psychology. Preprint available here. Abstract: In 14 studies, we tested whether political conservatives’ stronger free will beliefs were linked to stronger and broader tendencies to moralize and, thus, a greater motivation to assign blame. In Study 1...

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Our new paper, Shifting attributions for poverty motivates opposition to inequality and enhances egalitarianism, led by Drs. Paul Piff and Dylan Wiwad, is now available at Nature Human Behaviour: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0835-8 Abstract: Amidst rising economic inequality and mounting evidence of its pernicious social effects, what motivates opposition to inequality? Five studies (n = 34,442) show that attributing poverty to...

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Working together with Edmond Awad, Sohan Dsouza, Richard Kim, Johnathan Friedemann Schulz, Joseph Henrich, Jean-François Bonnefon, and Iyad Rahwan, Azim published a paper in Nature in October 2018. It reports a worldwide study examining how people think about the moral decisions machines might make in the future. The link to the paper can be found here, and the abstract is included below.With the rapid development of artificial intelligence...

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Brett Mercier, Stephanie Kramer and Azim Shariff have a new paper out in Current Directions in Psychological Science that succinctly reviews the psychology literature on why people believe in God–and why some people don’t.   The paper is available here (free preprint), and the abstract is pasted below: Belief in a god or gods is a central feature in the lives of billions of people and a topic of perennial interest within...

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Starting July 1st, the CaML will move to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Azim will take up appointment as the Canada 150 Research Chair in Moral Psychology, and the Culture and Morality Lab will update its name to the Centre for Applied Moral Psychology. We’ll also be looking for a new lab manager to start this Fall. Details to follow.

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Shankar Vedantam discussed some of our new work looking at how differently people perceive Muslim and non-Muslim mass shooters. Vedantam discusses the work on NPR’s morning edition here. You can read our working paper on the topic here.    

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