Field
Psychology
Project Description
Our project examines how learning from experience can enhance people’s moral concern for distant others, thereby promoting kindness, compassion, and altruism. Our experiments focus on how people learn from the interpersonal consequences of past decisions. We hypothesize that people’s moral circle can expand when they learn from how their actions have affected distant others, provided they attend to those consequences and empathize with the people who were affected by them.
Team
Glen Spiteri, Falk Lieder
Glen Spiteri is a PhD student in Cognitive Psychology at UCLA, where he works with Prof. Falk Lieder in the Rational Altruism Lab. His research investigates how people learn to make moral decisions, with a focus on the role of attention in the process of moral learning. He is interested in how these phenomena influence altruism, kindness, and moral circle expansion.
Falk Lieder is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at UCLA, where he directs the Rational Altruism Lab. His current research combines behavioral experiments and computational modeling to investigate the cognitive mechanisms of decision-making in social dilemmas and how these mechanisms are shaped by learning from experience. He is especially interested in the mechanisms of moral learning and systematic moral reflection.