YourMorals.Org

This website is a collaboration among social psychologists who study morality and politics. Our goal was to create a site that would be useful and interesting to users, particularly ethics classes and seminars, and that would also allow us to test a variety of theories about moral psychology. One of our main goals is to foster understanding across the political spectrum. Almost everyone cares about morality, and we want to understand --and to help others understand -- the many different ways that people care.

Back row, L to R: Ravi Iyer, Jonathan Haidt, Sean Wojcik, Matt Motyl, Gary Sherman.
Seated: Jesse Graham, Sena Koleva, Pete Ditto

To learn more about moral psychology, you can find articles we have written on our web pages (below), or you can follow the links that we offer on the feedback pages for each of our studies.

The studies on this site have been approved by the Institutional Review Board at the University of Virginia. (Or, where noted, by the IRB of the University of Southern California or the IRB of the University of California at Irvine). The website was dreamed up and written by Ravi Iyer. If you have questions or comments about this site, please contact our webmasters using webmaster (at) yourmorals dot org. If you have questions or comments about moral psychology more generally, please contact any of us listed below.

We thank you for your interest and your contribution to psychological research.

Peter Ditto is a professor in the Department of Psychology and Social Behavior at the University of California, Irvine.  His research focuses on "hot cognition" ­ how motivation and emotion shape (and often bias) social, moral, political, medical, and legal reasoning. His homepage is here, and his email address is: phditto at uci.edu.

Jesse Graham is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Southern California. His background is in philosophy and theology, which he traded in for science in a desperate attempt to get real-world traction on the big questions of life. His research interests include moral politics, implicit measurement approaches to moral intuitions and ideology, aesthetic emotions, humor, moral education, and the meaning of life. His homepage is here, and his email address is: jesse.graham at usc.edu

Jonathan Haidt is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. He studies the psychological foundations of morality and is working on several projects to help people transcend moralistic divisions and understand each other. (See, for example,  www.civilpolitics.org.) He is currently writing "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion" (Pantheon; due out in January 2012). His homepage is here, and his email address is haidt at virginia.edu.

Ravi Iyer is a graduate student in social psychology at the University of Southern California. He has a particular interest in the applied intersections of moral psychology, happiness research, and politics. He used to be a dot-commer and is constantly thinking up new ideas to bring ideas from social psychology to the non-academic world. He blogs about moral & political psychology and you can read more about him here. His email address is: ravi at aboutmyjob dt com.

Spassena Koleva (Sena) is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Southern California. She received a Ph.D. in personality and social psychology from the University of California - Irvine in 2011. Sena is interested in why people become good or bad, and how they make decisions about right and wrong in their everyday lives. Her research interests include morality, romantic relationships, political ideology, religious beliefs, computer-mediated courtship, and cultural differences. Her homepage is here and her email address is: skoleva at uci.edu.

Matt Motyl is a graduate student in social psychology at the University of Virginia. Matt is interested in the low-level cognitive processes and existential motivations that influence political conflict. His homepage is here, and his email address is motyl at virginia.edu

Gary Sherman is a graduate student in social psychology at the University of Virginia. He is interested in the relationship between morality and purity. This includes a primary interest in the emotion of disgust, purity-related intuitions, and the ways in which disgust and purity influence moral judgment. His homepage is here, and his email address is gsherman at virginia.edu

Sean Wojcik is a graduate student in social and personality psychology at the University of California, Irvine. He is broadly interested moral and political decision making, with a particular emphasis on how affect influences judgments about truth, logic, and political outgroup members. His email address is: swojcik at uci.edu.

If you want to read more about our findings and thoughts, you can read our moral psychology blog.

contact: webmaster at yourmorals dot org