Moral Narratives Workshop 2023

Project Vision:

The Moral Narratives Workshop aims to kickstart and develop an interdisciplinary, empirical study of moral narratives. One might ask: what do you mean by ‘moral narrative’? Broadly, we are referring to stories told about people’s moral actions and characters. Examples include gossiping about someone at work, competing accounts of the same event in court, political scandals, and stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. We all use moral narratives in our own lives. Many scholars are already studying some aspects of this phenomenon. For some, such as writers, artists, and public figures, moral narratives are their bread and butter.

As we (the organizers) are cognitive scientists, the workshop will heavily feature approaches from core fields within cognitive science, such as psychology, philosophy, and linguistics. However, the goal of this workshop is to expand even wider, to build a community of scholars, writers, and artists who are interested in aspects of moral narratives, to debate, explore, and raise questions about this rich and fascinating phenomenon.

We aspire towards three goals in building this community. First, we seek to understand how narratives have been theorized across disciplines, especially from diverse cultural and political perspectives. Towards this aim, we will invite participants from fields such as sociology, political science, and communications. Second, we want to expand our tools for experimentally studying moralized communication, building on the work of linguists and cognitive scientists who study language and morality. Finally, we turn to writers and artists for insights into how moral narratives shape individuals and societies in practice. Our broad vision is to braid theoretical, empirical, and creative discoveries across disciplines into fresh insights about what moral narratives are for and how they are made.

Key questions posed by the workshop concern the format, function, and mechanisms of moral narratives. What are moral narratives and what form do they typically take? How do narrators decide what to say? When and why are narratives told in the first place? We foresee discussing specific topics such as the goals of narrators; pragmatic inferences about audience perception; the role of power, identity, and culture in how narratives are told; moral narratives as explanations about people; interpersonal, public, and self narratives; learning from and learning to tell moral narratives; and the cognitive processes involved in moral narrative construction. We will hear speakers talk about how narratives are studied in different fields, as well as about specific cases of moral narratives in the world (e.g., those about gender, addiction, crime, climate change).

In building this community, we are also experimenting with new modes of scholarly interaction afforded by virtual spaces. We are planning a mix of formal talks and panel discussions, curated to encourage interactions between participants with different expertise and experiences. We will meet approximately every two weeks, and the schedule will be on this website when it is finalized.

Workshop #1

Introduction: Why study moral narratives?

Molly Crockett, PhD

Associate Professor of Psychology and UCHV, Princeton University

Speaker

Dr. Molly Crockett is an Associate Professor at Princeton University’s Department of Psychology and University Center for Human Values. Prior to joining Princeton, Dr. Crockett was an Associate Professor of Psychology at Yale University, Associate Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Jesus College. They hold a BSc in Psychobiology from UCLA and a PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Cambridge, and completed a Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Fellowship with economists and neuroscientists at the University of Zürich and University College London.

Judy Kim, PhD

Postdoctoral Research Associate in UCHV, Princeton University

Speaker

Judy Sein Kim is a cognitive scientist studying how people understand, structure, and communicate their experiences, particularly through language. Her research examines, on the one hand, how people with vastly different experiences (e.g., blind and sighted individuals) come to understand each other. Recently, she has also been interested in how different people, or even the same person, can end up with divergent “narratives” about the same reality. Broadly, she wants to understand what it means to understand, not merely know, and how we communicate what we understand, especially at the level of discourse. They hold a B.A. in Psychology and Linguistics from Georgetown University and a Ph.D in Psychology from Johns Hopkins University.

Website

Kate McLean, PhD

Professor of Psychology, Western Washington University

Speaker

Kate C. McLean is a Professor of Psychology at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. Her research centers on narrative identity development in adolescence and emerging adulthood. Her recent work emphasizes the social and cultural contexts of narrative identity development, as well as the relation between identity processes and personality and well-being.She is the author of The Co-Authored Self: Family Stories and Construction of Personal Identity.She is an Associate Editor for the Journal Personality and Social Psychology: PPID, and on the Editorial Board or Emerging Adulthood and Qualitative Psychology. She is co-Editor (with Moin Syed) of the Oxford Handbook of Identity Development, and the editor of Cultural Methods in Psychology: Describing and Transforming Cultures. She is the recent recipient of the 2022 Henry A. Murray Award.

Workshop #2

Point of view and co-creation by narrators and audiences

Website

Greg Currie, PhD

Professor of Philosophy, University of York

Speaker

Dr. Currie teaches Philosophy at the University of York where he researches on the arts and cognition. He was educated at the London School of Economics and at the University of California, Berkeley. At the moment, he is thinking about the relation between art and social cognition. He hopes that a book, Signs of Agency, on this will appear with Oxford in 2023. Dr. Currie also writes about film, empathy, and the emotions, irony, the philosophy of poetry, and about fiction and knowledge. He has held visiting positions at the LSE, St. Andrews, University of Maryland, Bristol, Cambridge, Oxford and L’Ecole Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. In 2021, Dr. Currie was a visiting professor of philosophy at the University of Turin. He is editor-in-chief of Mind & Language, a fellow of the British Academy, and of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

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Monisha Pasupathi, PhD

Professor of Psychology, University of Utah

Speaker

Monisha Pasupathi received her PhD in 1997 from Stanford University, and subsequently did a post-doctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. Afterwards, she moved to Utah to take a position as an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Utah – the state flagship. Dr. Pasupathi studies the role of narrative in self and emotion regulation from childhood through late life. She is especially interested in issues of how children and adults integrate experiences within their sense of self via narrating, and how listeners (parents, friends, and romantic partners) can help to shape stories towards more adaptive emotional and self-related outcomes. She has pursued these issues within the specific context of interpersonal conflict and harm, and have begun to include psychophysiological methods as a complement to narrative, observational, and experimental work. Her most recent project has been an examination of college student narratives around the covid pandemic, and associations between those narratives and identity development.

Much of her work is done in collaboration with Cecilia Wainryb, here at the University of Utah; Dr. Pasupathi also has long-standing collaborations with Kate McLean, at Western Washington University, among many others – she has been deeply fortunate in my research networks. She also holds an Associate Dean position in the Honors College, where she gets to put some of her thinking around conversation, identity, and young adult development into more applied contexts, focusing on student success and peer support programs. This kind of administrative work has become a real passion of hers.

On a personal note, Dr. Pasupathi was born in Pittsburgh, PA, but spent most of her childhood in Grove City, Ohio (near Columbus). She is an unrepentant nerd who loves the original Star Trek, all of Asimov (despite his less-than-stellar personal behavior), the original Cosmos series, and Octavia Butler's collected works. (You should google her. Really.) Though she is not from Utah, she has fallen in love the mountain west. The photo above was taken in Yellowstone on a cross-country skiing trip – but she also loves hiking, kayaking, and used to love bicycling and running, but unfortunately, they didn’t love her joints so much. She is married and has two daughters, and is the shortest person in her family by a half foot. She loves to ferment things and bake things, is working on understanding how to grow bonsai trees, improve her painting and sketching, and finding time for some creative writing.

Workshop #3

Deception

Website

Gail Heyman, PhD

Professor of Psychology, University of California San Diego

Speaker

Gail Heyman has a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Illinois and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan. Since that time, she has been on the faculty at the University of California, San Diego in the Department of Psychology where she collaborates with researchers around the world to investigate topics that are at the intersection of social and cognitive development, including how children make sense of the social world, and the factors that affect their moral behavior.

Website

Hannah Rohde, PhD

Reader in Linguistics and English Language, University of Edinburgh

Speaker

Hannah Rohde is a Reader in Linguistics & English Language at the University of Edinburgh. She works in experimental pragmatics, using psycholinguistic techniques to investigate questions in areas such as inference, ambiguity, deception, and the establishment of discourse coherence. Her background includes an undergraduate degree in Computer Science & Linguistics from Brown University, followed by a PhD in Linguistics at the University of California San Diego, with postdoctoral fellowships at Northwestern and Stanford.

Broadly, her work emphasizes the value of studying human language through the lens of computational models of information transfer and game-theoretic models of cooperative interaction. More specifically, she studies phenomena like pronoun interpretation and discourse coherence, domains encompassing the unspoken meanings that underlie coherent conversation and the links that listeners infer to hold between sentences. The premise of her work in these areas is that listeners not only identify these links retroactively but that they use cues to make guesses about where a discourse is going and what questions upcoming sentences will answer. She is a recipient of the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Languages and Literatures.

Workshop #4

Framing and epistemic dependence

Website

Rachel Fraser, PhD

Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Oxford

Speaker

Rachel Fraser is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford and a Tutorial Fellow at Exeter College. She did her graduate work in philosophy at Oxford before spending two years as a JRF at Peterhouse, in Cambridge. She won the 2021 Marc Sanders Prize in epistemology, and Autumn 2022 she took up a British Academy Wolfson Fellowship to work on a project on the epistemology of narrative. Outside epistemology, her main interests are in feminism and the philosophy of language.

Website

Jessica Bennett

Contributing Editor, The New York Times
Adjunct Faculty, New York University School of Journalism

Panelist

Jessica Bennett has spent her award-winning journalism career focusing a gender lens on social issues and culture — from the persistence of workplace inequality to the ripple effects of #MeToo. She was the first-ever gender editor of The New York Times, where she is now a Contributing Editor, and is the author of two bestselling books, Feminist Fight Club: A Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace, and This Is 18: Girls’ Lives Through Girls’ Eyes. She teaches a class called “Reporting the Zeitgeist” at the Arthur L. Carter Graduate School of Journalism at NYU.

Workshop #5

Testimony, criminal justice, and victim narratives

Website

Jennifer Lackey, PhD

Professor of Philosophy, Northwestern University

Speaker

Jennifer Lackey is the Wayne and Elizabeth Jones Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University, the Founding Director of the Northwestern Prison Education Program, Professor of Law (courtesy), and Past President of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association. Most of her research is in the area of social epistemology, with a focus on issues at the intersection of epistemology and the United States criminal legal system. Lackey is the winner of the Dr. Martin R. Lebowitz and Eve Lewellis Lebowitz Prize for Philosophical Achievement and Contribution, and she has received grants and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Website

Jillian Jordan, PhD

Assistant Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School

Speaker

Jillian Jordan is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Negotiation, Organizations & Markets Unit at Harvard Business School. Her research investigates moral behavior and the psychology that surrounds it, with a focus on the role of reputation. When and why do people make personal sacrifices for moral causes, including through acts of prosociality and expressions of moral outrage? And how are the answers to these questions shaped by the powerful human drive to be seen positively by others? To address these questions, Dr. Jordan explore the ways that reputation motives create hidden incentives that shape moral behavior, emotions, and cognition—often without people's conscious awareness. Her work integrates methods from psychology, behavioral economics, and evolutionary game theory. Prior to joining HBS, she received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Yale University and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Dispute Resolution Research Center at Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University.

Workshop #6

Autobiographical memory and forgiveness

Website

Felipe De Brigard, PhD

Associate Professor of Philosophy, Psychology, & Neuroscience, Duke University

Speaker

Felipe De Brigard, PhD is the Fuchsberg-Levine Family Associate Professor of Philosophy, and Associate Professor in the departments of Psychology and Neuroscience, and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University. He is also Principal Investigator of the Imagination and Modal Cognition Laboratory (IMC-Lab) within the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences. He earned a bachelor's degree from the National University of Colombia, where he studied philosophy and neuropsychology. He then earned a master’s degree from Tufts University, where he studied philosophy and cognitive science, and a doctoral degree from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he studied philosophy and cognitive neuroscience. Before arriving to Duke, he spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory Lab and the Center for Brain Science at Harvard University. He has published several articles in philosophy, psychology and neuroscientific venues, and has received a number of awards, including being named Rising Star by the American Psychological Association, the Stanton Prize by the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and the Early Career award by the Psychonomic Society. His research focuses on the nature of memory and its relations to other cognitive faculties, such as perception, imagination, attention and consciousness, but he is also interested in the foundations of neuroscience and moral psychology. He is also co-director of the Summer Seminars in Neuroscience and Philosophy, which have been hosted every year at Duke University since 2016.

Website

Amanda Dennis, PhD

Assisant Professor of English and Comparative Literature, American University of Paris

Novelist

Panelist

Amanda Dennis is the author of the novel, Her Here, and a work of literary criticism, Beckett and Embodiment: Body, Space, Agency. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and Guernica. She lives in Paris, where she is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the American University of Paris.

Workshop #7

Public narratives

Website

Michael Dahlstrom, PhD

Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Iowa State University
Director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication, ISU

Speaker

Michael Dahlstrom is the director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University and holds a Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean's Professorship. His research explores how storytelling impacts the communication of science and the ethical considerations involved. Dahlstrom's work extends across diverse scientific contexts, including risk, health, agricultural and environmental communication and has been published in leading journals, such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PLOS Biology, Communication Research and Science Communication. He is also co-editor of Ethics and Practice in Science Communication, an edited volume focusing on the often-overlooked ethical challenges underlying science communication. Dahlstrom is a Kavli Fellow and is also a past head of the Communicating Science, Health, Environment and Risk Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

Website

Ruth Wodak, PhD

Emeritus Professor of Discourse Studies, Lancaster University

Speaker

Ruth Wodak is Emerita Distinguished Professor of Discourse Studies at Lancaster University, UK, and affiliated to the University of Vienna. Besides various other prizes, she was awarded the Wittgenstein Prize for Elite Researchers in 1996, an Honorary Doctorate from University of Örebro in Sweden in 2010, and an Honorary Doctorate from Warwick University in 2020. She is past-President of the Societas Linguistica Europaea. 2011, she was awarded the Grand Decoration of Honour in Silver for Services to the Republic of Austria, and 2018, the Lebenswerk Preis for her lifetime achievements, from the Austrian Ministry for Women’s Affairs. She is member of the British Academy of Social Sciences and member of the Academia Europaea. In March 2020, she became Honorary Member of the Senate of the University of Vienna. In June 2021, she was awarded the Bruno Kreisky Prize for her lifetime achievements. She is member of the editorial board of a range of linguistic journals and co-editor of the journals Discourse and Society, Critical Discourse Studies, and Language and Politics.

She has held visiting professorships in University of Uppsala, Stanford University, University Minnesota, University of East Anglia, and Georgetown University. 2008, she was awarded the Kerstin Hesselgren Chair of the Swedish Parliament (at University Örebrö). In the spring 2014, Ruth held the Davis Chair for Interdisciplinary Studies at Georgetown University, Washington DC. In the spring 2016, Ruth was Distinguished Schuman Fellow at the Schuman Centre, EUI, Florence. 2017, she held the Willi Brandt Chair at the University of Malmö, Sweden. 2018/2019 and 2021, she was a senior visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna (IWM).

Her research interests focus on discourse studies; gender studies; identity politics and the politics of the past; political communication and populism; prejudice and discrimination; and on ethnographic methods of linguistic field work. Ruth has published 11 monographs, 29 co-authored monographs, over 60 edited volumes and special issues of journals, and ca 420 peer reviewed journal papers and book chapters. Her work has been translated into English, Italian, French, Spanish, Hebrew, Portuguese, German, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Polish, Arabic, Russian, Czech, Bosnian, Greek, Slovenian, and Serbian.