A main line of my research has sought to better understand what people are curious to learn about in the moral domain and why. Curiosity plays such a pivotal role in learning and memory outside of the moral domain. But do those same links show up for moral curiosity? So far, we have found that moral badness and atypicality are particularly interesting, an effect which is linked to expected learning (see Wylie & Gantman, 2023; 2022). This work will also be featured in Psyche.

This research also serves as the basis of a recently awarded NSF SBE postdoctoral fellowship. We will be taking a deeper dive into what moral curiosity is, and what cognitive and neural mechanisms support it.

Another primary line of my research focuses on rules and personal values. In this work, I have been motivated to understand the discrepancies between moral intuitions and established norms, particularly in legal and policy contexts.

In the legal context, we have identified rules where signals about what one should do conflict. We call these rules phantom rules—they are rules where what the literal text says and the descriptive norms of enforcement diverge. This kind of ambiguous rule is particularly susceptible to motivated punishment (Wylie & Gantman, 2023). We also find that racial bias influences who tends to have these rules punished in the real world (Wylie et al., 2024). This work has also played a pivotal role in how I think about third-party punishment more broadly. In a recent paper, we explore the twin functions of third-party punishment: cooperation and domination (Wylie & Gantman, 2024).

In the policy context, my work has explored the role played by a different sense of rules in moral cognition—our personal moral values. We find that personal moral values influence judgments of harm reduction policies. Specifically, we find that people who see a behavior as morally wrong to do are less likely to support harm reduction policy aimed at reducing the harm associated with that very issue (Wylie, Sharma, & Gantman, 2022). The latter research was also featured in Scientific American.

I also spend a lot of time thinking about when breaking rules actually seems like a good thing. One place where I think this is true is in the aesthetic domain. There, breaking rules can make you seem autonomous and even trailblazing. In this line of work, I explore whether moral excellence dominates aesthetic excellence (it doesn’t; Wylie et al., in prep). Critically, we find that breaking rules and conventions mediates this relationship.

In another line of research, we examine how state emotions and morality influence cognitive and perceptual processes. I am particularly interested in how/when emotions like fear and disgust are similar and how/when they are different in their influence on cognitive and perceptual processes. This work has tested how emotional states enhance object recognition (Wylie, MA Thesis) and working memory performance (Storbeck, Wylie, & Chapman, R&R).

We have also tested how moral information influences these lower-level processes. To do this, we are using a visual discrimination task to see whether moral relevance enhances perception (Wylie et al., Stage 1 Acceptance). We are also using computational methods to investigate how moral motivations influence moral perception. Initial findings (presented at SPSP 2021) suggest that active moral motivations enhance perceptual evidence accumulation relative to satiated moral motivations.

Another area of interest concerns questions surrounding the perception of faces. What can patterns in the perception of faces reveal insights into how the mind works? In this work, my collaborators and I examine how degraded face information affects configural and featural face processing and ascriptions of humanness (Tracy, Wylie, & Young, under review), affects the categorization of facial emotional expressions (Wylie, Tracy, & Young, 2022), and the perceptual recognizing of individuals’ humanness. The aim of this series of studies is to better understand how the eyes integrate social information in suboptimal viewing conditions—conditions which often resemble everyday life.

Lastly, In a collaboration with Hanah Chapman and Matthew Vanaman, I merge my interests in emotion and morality by testing the causal role of emotions in the moral reasoning process. This research question aims to address some of the larger theoretical questions that have persisted within the study of morality for decades. We are using a novel application of a widely utilized pharmacological intervention to investigate this question. More information about our approach is available on the project’s OSF page.

I’m currently collecting data in a project with Kerstin Unger that seeks to understand how children structure moral (vs. non-moral) rules. This aim of this project is to better understand whether there are structural differences in the way children represent moral vs. social conventional rules.