My research focuses on justice and morality.
My work on justice investigates how and when people form a judgment that something is fair or unfair, and the roles that people’s emotions and moral convictions play in shaping their perceptions of fairness and reactions to transgressions. In particular, my work highlights that people’s concerns about fairness are not as ubiquitous as has been assumed. My work on justice also investigates how people work out the complexities of distributing both the benefits and burdens of cooperative living. For example, I have investigated whether people's cultural and political orientations influence what they consider to be a fair allocation of resources. Recently, I have begun investigating third-party responses to injustice. For example, I have investigated how characteristics of perceivers influence their preferences for punishment and compensation following a transgression.
My work on morality has focused on how individuals regulate and evaluate their own and others’ moral behavior. For example, I have investigated how people's feelings about their own morality influence whether they will engage in ethical or unethical behavior. In related work, I have examined the relationship between sacrifice and moral character judgments.