Research

My primary research centers on morally-relevant traits, judgments, and behaviors. Much of my current research can be loosely grouped under three questions. I apply a variety of approaches to these topics, including experimental and correlational studies, and secondary data analysis (including meta-analysis and integrative data analysis). 


1. How is honesty instantiated in everyday life, how is it perceived by people, and how can we best measure it?

My primary interests at the moment center on how honesty can be conceptualized as a personality trait, including both how it occurs in people (both as a traits ands as momentary manifestations) and how others tend to perceive it. Some things I'm working on right now include developing self-report measures of state and trait honesty for use in ecological momentary assessment studies and estimating rates of academic dishonesty in college.  Much of this work was done as part of the Honesty Project at Wake Forest University.


2. What are the antecedents and consequences of judgments about moral tradeoffs?

My primary doctoral research explored the psychology of moral tradeoffs between avoiding causing harm to others and seeking to optimize outcomes of moral situations (i.e., sacrificial moral dilemmas). In this work, I explored various antecedents to dilemma judgments, such as self- vs. other-focused affect, self-awareness, trait reflectiveness, psychopathic traits, lay utilitarianism, religiosity, and endogenous testosterone and cortisol. I applied a process dissociation approach to such work to examine patterns of judgments invisible to standard dilemma measurement techniques.

My dissertation focused on the perceptual consequences of dilemma judgments, that is, on the social inferences people make when others make dilemma decisions. In this work, I tested whether lay people have accurate expectations of how religious people and atheists respond to dilemmas (they do), how this might color perceptions of religious and nonreligious people who make dilemma judgments (religious people who violate expectations are seen as incompetent, opposite the usual pattern), and whether it depends on how religious the participant is (probably not).


3. How can we best measure things people are extremely motivated to self-present on?

I have a strong overarching interest in how to measure things that participants don't want to (or can't) tell us about. Many of the topics I've focused on center on people's deeply-held values (moral values and judgments, religiosity, meaning in life) or involve behaviors that people are strongly motivated to report or not report (truthfulness, academic dishonesty, questionable research practices, substance misuse). Consequently, I often have to find ways to get around the social desirability (or undesirability) of the thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors I'm interested in. 

Some of the measurement approaches I've used in this vein include process dissociation, informant reports, random response techniques, Bayesian truth serum, and modifications to self-report measures. 

Here's a few examples of measurement issues I've worked on in the past: