The Consortium on Moral Decision-Making at Penn State recently awarded nine seed grants to support interdisciplinary research related to the conceptual and empirical study of human morality and ethical decision-making.
According to consortium director Daryl Cameron, Sherwin Early Career Professor in the Rock Ethics Institute and associate professor of psychology at Penn State, understanding human morality and ethics requires drawing upon insights from a diverse range of disciplines. “The goal of the seed funding call is to motivate scholars to find such connections in exploring the nature of human morality.”
The 2025 awarded projects are listed below (including abstracts):
“Intergenerational Empathic Effort” - Daryl Cameron, associate professor of psychology, Penn State; and Stylianos Syropoulous, assistant professor, and Kyle Law, postdoctoral scholar, Global Futures School of Sustainability, University of Arizona - This study will use an adapted empathy selection task to examine whether anticipated effort predicts empathy selection, how empathy influences moral obligation, and whether interventions can increase intergenerational concern by virtue of increasing empathy expressed towards future people and decreasing empathy avoidance.
“Climate change natural disasters, risk aversion, and chances of social unrest” - Xun Cao, professor of political science and public policy, Penn State - By exploring individual and collective decision-making processes in the context of global climate change, this project would generate important policy implications to provide better solutions to mediate the negative impacts of climate change and help to achieve ethical distribution of resources to prevent future harm.
“Divided we keep? Evaluating the effect of socioeconomic segregation on generosity” - Gary Adler, associate professor, and Ian Rowe-Nicholls, doctoral student, sociology and criminology, Penn State - The researchers theorize that visible markers of poverty and affluence in one local community affect perceptions of broader societal hardship and resource disparity, as well as socioeconomic privilege and personal sense of moral obligation to give. As a result, they hypothesize that income diversity in one local community affects individuals’ propensity to give differently based on their own socioeconomic status, but mixed-income communities provide more money to charity overall than more socioeconomically segregated communities.
“Geographies of influence: Analyzing Juul Lab’s targeted marketing and youth educational campaigns through internal corporate documents” - Emily Rosenman, assistant professor, and Louisa Holmes, associate professor, geography, Penn State - This project will examine internal corporate documents made public through state and federal lawsuits against Juul Labs, the producer of a leading nicotine e-cigarette product in the U.S. Building on previous work analyzing corporate strategies in the opioid industry, this research aims to understand the development of Juul's educational programs, the specific groups they aimed to influence, and the broader implications for public health interventions.
“Understanding Ethical Decision-Making in Reporting Research Misconduct” - Courtney Karmelita, executive director of ethical research and outreach; Jennifer Nicholas, director of the office of postdoctoral affairs; Jennifer McCormick, associate professor; Leah Hollis, associate dean, access equity and inclusion; and Moriah Szpara, professor of biology, Penn State - This pilot study aims to explore the ethical decision-making process that leads trainees to report misconduct, identify what unethical behaviors they are witnessing, and understand how they evaluate such actions. The findings will inform interventions to promote ethical decision-making and address integrity issues in research.
“New research in moral psychology with applications to technology ethics” - Timothy Kwiatek, assistant teaching professor, and Tim Elmo Feiten, assistant teaching professor, philosophy, Penn State - The main aim of the project will be to consider different models for thinking about blame and especially praise (far less researched) and consider them in relation to internet mediated communication and especially large language models (LLMs.)
“Presenting research” - Sean Laurent, assistant professor; Becca Ruger, graduate student; and WIktoria Pedryc, graduate student, psychology, Penn State - This grant will enable two graduate student consortium members to travel to present their work on moral decision-making at an international, interdisciplinary conference on morality. Attending the conference will allow the students to highlight consortium-supported work and the moral psychology hub at Penn State, while also allowing them to make connections that will foster collaborations with interdisciplinary researchers from other countries.
“Does Moral Outrage Open Minds? Moral outrage and moral information-seeking” - Faruk Yalcin, graduate student, psychology, Penn State - This project investigates whether experiencing moral outrage can motivate people to seek out information that challenges their views on moral issues. Findings from this study could offer us insights as to whether experiencing moral outrage on social media has the potential to bridge moral divisions.
“On the invariance of artificial morality: Using machine learning to map the AI moral domain” - Joshua Wenger, graduate student, psychology, Penn State - Grounded in modern machine learning techniques and psychometrics, the present work proposes a novel methodology for exploring general human conceptions of the moral domain, and how this understanding of morality aligns with AI. Findings contribute to the broader ethical debate of AI morality, and moral psychological debate surrounding the use of AI as an experimental participant.
The consortium is being supported by the Penn State’s Social Science Research Institute and The Rock Ethics Institute in the College of the Liberal Arts, with additional funding from the McCourtney Institute for Democracy, Department of Philosophy, and Department of Psychology.
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