Research

Research from a decade in moral psychology and cognitive neuroscience: how people judge harm, forgive accidents, help strangers, and how statistical tooling can make that work more reproducible.

Some of this work reached readers beyond academic journals, with coverage in outlets such as Time, HuffPost, and Vice, among others. The complete bibliographic record is on the Publications page.

Research Lines

Moral Judgment About Harm: Emotion, Reasoning, and Their Interplay

When facing dilemmas that pit not causing harm against maximising welfare, two systems pull in different directions: emotion-driven harm aversion, and reasoning-based cost-benefit analysis. A decade of research mapped how each operates, when they conflict, and what tips the balance.

  • Reasoning ability predicts utilitarian choices across eight independent studies – independently of how intensely someone dislikes causing harm
  • Psychopathy's link to utilitarian judgement is driven specifically by reduced aversion to performing harmful acts – not by its reduced concern for victims, which is also present but does not account for the effect
  • People who judge sacrificing one to save many as wrong in text nonetheless carry it out in emotionally arousing virtual reality – behaviour and stated principles can dissociate
  • Better reasoners judge accidental harms more leniently – an effect specific to accidents, absent for intentional or attempted harm
Dual-process theoryMoral dilemmasfMRIVirtual realityBehavioural experiments
Relevant Publications (4)

Visit the Publications page for PDFs, supplementary materials, and data.

Virtual reality moral dilemma scene

Empathy, Prosociality, and the Neural Basis of Moral Emotion

Empathic concern for victims shapes not only how harshly we condemn wrongdoers but also whether we step up to help – and both effects have distinct neural signatures.

  • The brain's pain-empathy network encodes outcome severity and drives blame, but is recruited differently for acceptability judgments – a neural dissociation between two outwardly similar moral responses
  • Grey matter volume in a theory-of-mind region (the left anterior STS) – not the temporo-parietal junction prior work emphasised – predicts willingness to forgive accidents
  • Individuals who incur costly personal sacrifices to rescue others in a virtual emergency have larger right anterior insula – a region central to empathic motivation
  • Across 24 studies and 21,000+ participants, compensating victims generated stronger reputational gains than punishing perpetrators, because compensation reliably signals genuine prosocial character
fMRINeuroimagingProsocialityAltruismThird-party punishmentEmpathy
Relevant Publications (4)

Visit the Publications page for PDFs, supplementary materials, and data.

Intent-outcome matrix for moral scenarios

Individual Differences: Personality, Psychopathology, and Moral Judgment

People differ markedly in their moral judgments, and this variability reflects stable differences in how they process emotional and cognitive information – not inconsistency or ignorance.

  • Alexithymia (difficulty identifying one's own emotions) reduces empathic concern and increases moral acceptance of harmful acts, particularly unintentional ones
  • In adults with autism, autistic and alexithymic traits exert opposing effects – autistic features increase harm aversion while co-occurring alexithymia reduces empathic concern, creating deceptively normal group averages
  • Multiple sclerosis patients condemn third-party violations more harshly than controls, explained by elevated cognitive alexithymia rather than disease-specific neurological changes
  • Anxiety-disorder patients show intact moral judgement and – despite the clinical arousal typical of anxiety – report no heightened emotion during the dilemmas themselves, suggesting pathological arousal is distinct from the moral-relevant emotion that shapes judgement
AlexithymiaPsychopathyAutismMultiple sclerosisAnxietyIndividual differences
Relevant Publications (6)

Visit the Publications page for PDFs, supplementary materials, and data.

Alexithymia effects on moral judgments

Open-Source Statistical Software

Throughout my academic career I built tools to address methodological gaps in my own research – and those tools grew into widely adopted infrastructure across the sciences.

  • ggstatsplot combines inferential statistics with publication-ready visualisations, reducing the steps between analysis and reporting
  • The easystats ecosystem provides a unified R workflow for model fitting, diagnostics, parameter extraction, comparison, and reporting
  • Contributions to lintr and styler help enforce code quality and style standards across the R community
  • These packages are collectively downloaded tens of millions of times and used across disciplines from ecology to clinical trials
R programmingData visualisationSoftware engineeringeasystatsggstatsplot
Relevant Publications (10)

Visit the Publications page for PDFs, supplementary materials, and data.

Statistics reporting format from ggstatsplot

Research Positions

Max Planck Institute for Human Development
2019 – 2021

Postdoctoral Fellow

Max Planck Institute for Human Development

Berlin, Germany

Advisor: Iyad Rahwan

Harvard University
2017 – 2019

Postdoctoral Fellow

Harvard University

Department of Psychology

Cambridge, MA, USA

Advisor: Mina Cikara and Fiery Cushman

Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA)
2016

Visiting Researcher

Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA)

Trieste, Italy

Advisor: Giorgia Silani