About Me
I am a PhD student studying social and organizational psychology at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business. I'm a founder and affiliate of the behavioral research team at Darden (BRAD) and a member of the Haidtlab within the social psychology area in the psychology department. My website is here.
My Approach to Ethical Systems
While individual differences in particular traits and motivations matter a great deal to the performance of human groups, notable strategic changes in organization design in the past century (and especially in the last few decades) has meant that individuals now tend not to behave as autonomous, independent agents of production within their organizations.
Whether their work is related to making ethical decisions (or decisions with ethical consequences), managing conflict, generating new ideas, devising corporate strategy, or even performing basic psychomotor tasks, as more and more work is performed in small groups and teams it is crucial to understand how team members and managers interact to perform their work.
Generally speaking, I take a social intuitionist approach to behavioral ethics in organizations (see Haidt, 2001 for a review or read this Wikipedia article). Regarding ethics and team performance, social and organizational context matters a great deal; and since moral decisions are the result of both intuitive and more deliberative cognitive and social processes, my work necessarily spans multiple levels of analysis in order to accommodate multiple contextual domains. This involves lab experiments and field experiments as well as empirical work within organizations.
My Research Interests
My research interests are influenced heavily by my experience as a Sergeant in the United States Marine Corps and background in evolutionary psychology; I study moral conflict, social emotions and social sensitivity, prosocial motivation (in particular, self-sacrificial motivations), and shared affective and behavioral experiences. I'm especially interested in finding ways to increase empathic accuracy to improve the performance of human groups. As a result, most of my work involves finding ways to change the elephant.