overview

Our work is constantly evolving. Many of our current projects investigate topics in feminist social epistemology, such as the nature of epistemic injustice and oppression, what we can learn from testimony and experience, and how descriptive understandings of the world carry a normative force. We use a variety of methods in our research, including behavioral experiments in the lab and online, field studies, computational modeling, and natural language processing. We are especially interested in bridging quantitative and qualitative methods for understanding human experience. Throughout our work, we strive to stay aware of how culture and power shape what kinds of questions are valued and what kinds of methods are legitimized. 

While our publications give a sense of our past work, we are presently exploring the following themes:

knowing ourselves

Accurate self-knowledge is essential for well-being: we can’t make good decisions if we don’t know what we want. The orthodox view in psychology is that we are “strangers to ourselves”, lacking introspective access to our desires, goals and values. This view has had a major impact on the methods we use to study the mind, privileging implicit, behavioral and neural measures and casting suspicion on self-reports of lived experience. We are using recent advances in computational modeling to unsettle the orthodox view. Preliminary findings suggest self-awareness of decision processes can be far more accurate than previously thought. At the same time, however, some aspects of our self-knowledge can be constrained by societal ideals of how we ought to be, such as stereotypes about gender or social roles. This insight suggests that self-knowledge can be a matter of social justice, especially if some social groups are systematically denied epistemic resources for understanding themselves. We are exploring how social norms and stereotypes can help or hinder authentic self-discovery and expression, and how transformative experiences can radically alter how we see ourselves and our relationships with others. 

the value of subjective experience

Trusting people’s introspective reports means taking lived experience seriously. Experience can provide new kinds of knowledge and change core aspects of the self, including our moral values. We are interested in understanding the nature of subjectivity, with a particular focus on how experience informs value-based decision-making and social understanding. What does experience teach us that we can’t learn from listening to others’ testimony? How does our social position impact what we are able to know about the social world? What are our cultural beliefs about the value of experience, testimony, and data for learning and knowledge? And how do these beliefs shape our scientific and ethical practices? We are interested in understanding why quantitative data is so often privileged over qualitative evidence, and the limits of quantitative approaches to ethical decision-making that seek to establish “common currencies” of value as a foundation for interpersonal utility comparisons.

narrative testimony and epistemic power

One of the main ways we share knowledge is through narrative testimony: we tell stories about our experiences in order to make sense of the world and persuade others. While these narrative practices are often collaborative, some narrators receive more credibility and respect than others. We are studying narrative exchange as an epistemic power game, where narrators seek to “control the narrative”, establishing their own perspective as the only game in town. Preliminary evidence suggests that narrators balance multiple communicative goals: to be informative, to strategically shape audiences’ moral impressions, and to be trusted as narrators. We are interested in how power relations between narrators and audiences influence which goals narrators prioritize and their success in achieving them, how culturally dominant narratives reproduce themselves, and how artificial intelligence can amplify certain ways of knowing at the expense of others. Our goal is to illuminate how narrative exchange can stealthily embed particular modes of reasoning, from individual minds to collective consciousness, in ways that tend to reinforce existing power structures – but not inevitably.

Key publications:
Kim, J.S., Colombatto, C., & Crockett, M.J. (2024). Goal inference in moral narratives. Cognition.
Kim, J., & Crockett, M. J. (2022). Narrating the "what" and "why" of our moral actions. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 44, No. 44).
Messeri, L., & Crockett, M.J. (2024). Artificial intelligence and illusions of understanding in scientific research. Nature.

cultural evolution of morality

Moral cognition is a uniquely human capability that enables us to reason about what is morally appropriate, allowed, required or forbidden. Many scholars believe that moral cognition can only evolve on the timescale of genetic evolution, and think that a variety of social problems can be explained by outdated moral instincts better adapted for the Pleistocene than the present. We are exploring the alternative possibility that cultural evolution is the principal architect of moral cognition, where new ways of thinking about moral problems can rapidly evolve via social learning. We are building on evidence that social learning shapes moral expressions on social media and algorithmic amplification exploits social learning biases that evolved to promote cooperation, resulting in distorted beliefs about collective moral values. How does the structure of social networks influence moral learning? How do power and prestige shape the cultural transmission of moral reasoning? Understanding the cultural evolution of morality will reveal the potential for education and mass communication to shape not just what we think, but how we think about moral problems. 

Key publications:
Crockett, M.J., Kim, J.S., & Shin, Y.S. (2024). Intuitive theories and the cultural evolution of morality. Current Directions in Psychological Science.
Brady, W.J., Jackson, J.C., Lindstrom, B., & Crockett, M.J. (2023) Algorithm-mediated social learning in online social networks. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
Brady, W.J., McLoughlin, K., Nguyen, T., & Crockett, M.J. (2021) How social learning amplifies moral outrage in online networks. Science Advances.

cognitive science as a normative practice

Despite Hume’s famous dictum that “ought” cannot be derived from “is”, people do this all the time. Descriptive beliefs about what people are like influence normative judgments about how they ought to be. This has important implications for the work we do as cognitive scientists. Because our work contributes to the public’s understanding of human cognition and behavior, the questions we ask, findings we report and language we use can all have social consequences that extend beyond the lab. We are interested in understanding how scientific culture elevates certain research questions and methodological approaches over others, and how these biases might distort understanding of human cognition and behavior among scientists, policymakers, and the general public in ways that perpetuate epistemic injustice. As part of this work we seek to raise awareness of cultural influences on scientific knowledge production and prefigure more diverse, equitable and inclusive scientific practices.