The Directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences offers postdoctoral research fellowships to provide opportunities for recent doctoral graduates to obtain additional training, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden their scientific horizons beyond their undergraduate and graduate training. Postdoctoral fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including at foreign locations. This postdoctoral fellowship trains an interdisciplinary scientist exploring the Psycholinguistics of Morality, which is a fascinating subject at the intersection of social psychology and linguistics.
Research in cognitive science and social-moral psychology indicates that people make lightning fast causal and moral judgments when they encounter information communicating harmful interpersonal events, and that social attitudes factor into judgments of blameworthiness. However, other research in linguistics suggests that representations of causation may be primarily rooted in basic properties of language including verb meaning, and, thus, are largely impervious to social category information and motivation. This research examines the extent to which causal attribution for morally-relevant events -- including violence and coercion -- is determined by a social-cognitive architecture revealed in patterns of language processing. Thus, it bridges a gap between these disciplines and represents the launch of a new interdisciplinary area of concentration: the psycholinguistics of morality. Specifically, this project investigates whether implied gender and race in minimal language sets up implicit causal representations of an event to be biased toward the sentence subject or object before any substantive information about an event is communicated ? a possibility with profound implications for our understanding of everyday judgment and decision-making. Moreover, this project investigates the extent to which information about distinctiveness and mental state capacities shifts implicit causal attributions, and, downstream, explicit causal attributions (i.e., self-compassion and self-blame). Legal arguments, the news media, educational materials, psychotherapeutic interventions, and public health warnings often draw upon people?s intuitive statistical models (e.g., by using statements about distinctiveness, or whether outcomes are likely to affect particular people or groups) and emphasize mental state information (e.g., by using statements about people?s capacities for thinking and planning versus feeling and sensing). Thus, this research has implications for the use of this information in messaging in multiple domains of everyday life. Finally, by determining the extent to which explicit causal attribution can be altered through these cognitive-linguistic pathways, this project also paves the way for potential broader positive impacts, including interventions aimed at attenuating inappropriate blaming and improving day-to-day well-being.
A series of behavioral studies in three phases unites methods from psychology and linguistics in order to track causal processing inaccessible to conscious awareness through patterns in language processing. Phase 1 maps the effects of implied gender and race on linguistic signatures of causal attribution for morally-relevant actions and determines their connections with: a) social attitudes, b) representations of distinctiveness (i.e., intuitive statistical models), and c) representations of mental states. Phase 2 directly tests effects on implicit causality from interventions on two potential cognitive mechanisms: representations of (a) distinctiveness, and (b) mental state capacities. Phase 3 involves determining effects on explicit causal attribution (i.e., self-compassion and self-blame) from interventions on implicit causality. Besides revealing the complexity of causal processing of morally-relevant action in language and thought, the project addresses specific concerns within and across disciplines. For linguistics, these studies aim to inform the critical project of delineating intrinsic properties of the lexicon from extrinsic effects on language from world knowledge. For social-moral psychology, these studies bring new focus to the role of purely linguistic features in moral judgment of human behavior. And, by increasing understanding of the consequences of shifting causal representations in language and thought, this research addresses issues at the intersection of linguistics, cognitive science, and social-moral psychology, including the extent to which explicit causal models are alterable through interventions on implicit causality via general cognitive representations (e.g., models of distinctiveness and/or mental state capacities).
