What I Find Most Fascinating About Human Development Is the Evolving Recognition of And

J. Wright Research Statement

What I find most fascinating about human development is our evolving recognition of and obedience towards norms. From early in life, our daily social interaction is imbued with an (at times implicit) understanding that certain attitudes, practices, and behaviors are expected of us, while others are prohibited. Many of these norms are culturally negotiated and determined, while others strike even young children as transcending culture, their authority grounded instead in the nature of people and the world we live in. Such norms are central to the moral domain. My interdisciplinary research program focuses on such norms and their influence on the development of social cognition and interpersonal behavior. Specifically, I am interested in how (and why) children, adolescents, and adults come to view attitudes, practices, and behaviors as moral and how these views, once formed, influence their attitudes and behaviors towards themselves and others. I have pursued four distinct lines of research consistent with this general theme. My first line of research concerns the developing recognition and understanding of the moral domain. Using an in-depth analysis of at-home family conversations, I examined two young children’s (2.5 – 5.0 years) awareness of moral issues as revealed during conversations with their parents. These analyses, forthcoming in Merrill & Palmer Quarterly (Wright & Bartsch, in press), revealed that while there were substantive differences between the two children, they both demonstrated an early awareness of moral issues and took active part in moral discussions. Currently, I am investigating the types of issues children, adolescents, and adults classify as moral, as well as the reasons they give for this classification. In studies to be reported in Wright (ms in progress, 1), I have found surprising disagreement both within and between age groups about what counts as a moral issue, though there is strong accord with respect to the reasons given for such classification. The results of a linguistic analysis of these reasons, to be reported in Cullum & Wright (ms in progress, 2), suggest that people’s beliefs about moral issues are more emotively and less cognitively grounded, more tied to religious conviction, and more existential (concerned with life and death) than their beliefs about non-moral issues. These analyses may shed light on why simply believing an issue to be moral is sufficient to strongly predict tolerance for divergent attitudes in adults (Wright & Cullum, under review) and in children and adolescents (Wright, ms in progress, 3), regardless of the strength with which the belief is held. I hope to continue exploring people’s developing understanding of the moral domain, as well as how this understanding is influenced by socio-cultural and environmental factors. In a second line of research, I explore the cognitive and emotive processes underlying moral evaluation, with an eye to whether and how they differ from non-moral evaluation. I have approached this issue from three directions. After having conducted an extensive review of the extant cognitive models of moral evaluation (to be reported in Wright, 4), I have employed a reaction time methodology to explore explicit and implicit processing in the evaluation of moral and non-moral issues. Second, I have tested the influence of primed emotional states (e.g., disgust, fear, and happiness) on adults’ evaluation of moral and non-moral issues. The data analysis for these studies should be completed this fall. Third, in a series of studies to be reported in Wright & Cullum (ms in progress, 5), my co-author and I found that differences in dispositional disgust sensitivity significantly influenced participants’ moral classification of issues and their response to morally dissimilar others. This was not found for non-moral issues. A separate study, in which participants were asked to discuss the wrongness of moral and non-moral issues, may suggest a reason for this: preliminary analyses of the data, to be reported in Wright & Sawyer (ms in progress, 6), suggest that disgust reactions have a significant influence on moral evaluation not simply because of an emotional reaction, but also because of an associative link between something being disgusting (contaminating) and it being harmful to self or others. J. Wright Research Statement

My third line of research concerns the influence of people’s moral evaluation on their attitudes and behavior towards themselves and others. As a part of my dissertation, I have investigated the effects of children’s, adolescents’, and adults’ moral evaluation on interpersonal responses towards dissimilar others. In a series of studies reported in Wright & Cullum (under review) and Wright (ms in progress, 7), I found that believing an issue to be moral (rather than non-moral) resulted in greater intolerance for and less willingness to interact with/help dissimilar others across a wide range of issues. It also led to less sharing with and greater physical distancing from others thought to have divergent attitudes. In another series of studies, I have examined the effect of adults’ judgments about others’ moral responsibility on their judgments about others’ actions. The results, reported in Wright & Bengson (under review), suggest that people’s judgments about another person’s responsibility (in particular, his/her blameworthiness or praiseworthiness) for performing a particular action influenced their judgments about whether that person acted intentionally. This suggests that moral evaluations have far-reaching effects on people’s attitudes and behaviors towards others – something that is of interest to those working in such seemingly disparate areas as juror reasoning (which often concerns the mens rea, or intentionality, of the actor), moral psychology, education, and the philosophy of action. I am also interested in exploring how developing moral beliefs influence self-evaluation and identity development. In a fourth line of research, I am exploring from an interdisciplinary perspective the development of moral expertise (i.e., expert moral evaluation) and wisdom. Specifically, I am interested in employing both empirical and philosophical insights to explore how moral perception, know-how, and context sensitivity influence the development of moral expertise. In a paper forthcoming in an anthology on moral perception (Wright, in press), I cite recent empirical work to argue that much insight into the development of moral expertise can be gained by studying the role that refined perception plays in the development of expertise generally. Much work on expertise has also focused on “know-how”. In a series of studies (Bengson, Moffett, & Wright, in press), my co-authors and I found that people do not equate know-how with mere ability, but link it instead to understanding. I believe that such understanding enables the robust intuitive capacity that distinguishes experts from non-experts. In a commentary published in Brain and Behavioral Sciences (Bartsch & Wright, 2005), my co-author and I speculate that such a robust intuitive capacity allows experts in the moral domain to be much more sensitive to contextual factors than non-experts. And in a recent series of studies, to be reported in (Wright, ms in progress, 8), I have found that context sensitivity is indeed a surprisingly central component of adult’s moral evaluations. Other projects. In addition to my own research program, I have been fortunate enough to head up a 4-year research project with my mentor, Karen Bartsch, on young children’s persuasion in family conversations (Bartsch, Wright, & Estes, under review). In addition, I have mentored two undergraduate research projects: one examining the accessibility of moral and non-moral attitudes and the other examining an aspect of terror management theory: specifically, the moderating effect of intrinsic religiosity on helping behavior towards in-group and out-group members following mortality salience. Summary. I plan to continue pursuing these four lines of research, maintaining an interdisciplinary life-span perspective, in order to better understand moral development. The program will also contribute more generally to our understanding of social and cognitive development and to pragmatic efforts to improve moral education, training in tolerance and diversity, mediation, and so forth. With that in mind, I am hopeful of securing external funding to support my program and look forward to collaborating with colleagues representing a variety of disciplinary perspectives. J. Wright Research Statement

Refereed Publications Wright, J.C. (in press). The role of moral perception in mature moral agency. In J. Winewski (Ed.), Moral Perception, Cambridge Scholars Publishing: Cambridge, MA. Wright, J.C., & Bartsch, K. (in press). Portraits of early moral sensibility in two children's everyday conversation. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly. Bengson, J., Moffett, M., & Wright, J.C. (in press). The folk on knowing how. Philosophical Studies. Bartsch, K., & Wright, J.C. (2005). Towards an intuitionist account of moral development. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28, 531-573. [commentary] Invited Publications Wright, J.C. (2004). Gilligan's theory of feminine morality. N. J. Salkind (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Human Development, SAGE Publications: Thousand Oaks, CA. Manuscripts under Review Wright, J.C., & Cullum, J. Moral conviction: The role of belief type and strength on tolerance and other interpersonal behavior. Wright, J.C., & Bengson, J. Asymmetries in judgments of responsibility and intentional action. Bartsch, K., Wright, J.C., & Estes, D. Young children's psychologically attuned persuasion in everyday conversation. Manuscripts in Progress (1) Wright, J.C. Exploring the moral domain: Moral classification in children, adolescents, and adults. (2) Cullum, J. & Wright, J. C. The structural differences between moral vs. non-moral beliefs. (3) Wright, J.C. Social-cognitive domain theory: New implications, new horizons. (4) Wright, J.C. The role of reasoning and intuition in moral judgments: A review. (5) Wright, J.C. & Cullum, J. Individual difference in disgust sensitivity: Implications for moral judgments. (6) Wright, J.C., & Sawyer, J. Expanding the moral domain? Issues of harm and purity. (7) Wright, J.C. Child and adolescent conceptions of personal, social, and moral issues: Implications for diversity, tolerance, and education (8) Wright, J.C. Context sensitivity in moral judgments: A case for holism.