Grants & Collaborators

Funded Projects

Techno-Tribalism: Political Polarization in the Age of AI ($91,695, PPE Research Consortium)
with Victor Kumar (Boston University), Derek Anderson (Boston University), and Rachel McKinney (Suffolk University)

Political tribalism and artificial intelligence are reshaping modern life in democratic states. They’re now colliding. AI may soon join other cutting-edge information technologies in driving political polarization and conflict. LLMs tend to validate users’ perspectives, fostering confirmation bias at scale; users choose systems that affirm their worldview; and AI systems may dramatically lower the cost of producing targeted political propaganda. At the same time, AI is being swept up as an object of partisan conflict. Today, conservatives dismiss safety concerns; progressives exaggerate environmental harms. Soon, AI may reshuffle coalitions as the educated professional classes begin to lose careers and status. If tribalism prevents accurate evaluation of AI, voters and democratic institutions will struggle to cope rationally with it. Techno-Tribalism will blend philosophical analysis and social science to investigate how political tribalism, motivated reasoning, and partisan identity interact with AI and related information technologies. This project will bridge philosophy, political science, and psychology. It will be carried out under the auspices of the interdisciplinary and collaborative Mind and Morality Lab at Boston University, pioneering a new research model: lab-based adversarial collaboration. Primary authors team up with “dissenters” whose role is to stress-test ideas and arguments. Techno-Tribalism is also a project in public-facing PPE. This is vital as society deals with explosive political and technological challenges. The lab will produce essays for newspapers, magazines, and Substack—changing how the public understands AI and politics. By thinking aloud with ideologically and politically diverse interlocutors, we’ll enact the very norms of pluralist inquiry that the project defends.

Academic Cross-Training Fellowship ($207,088, John Templeton Foundation)
Our understanding of the brain is limited but rapidly improving, yet issues in neuroethics are in special need of rigorous philosophical analysis. Ethics is controversial enough; combined with the highly technical language of neuroscience, superficial and alarmist reactions will likely abound. Questions I’ll address include: How does moral learning and development work at the neurobiological level? As a result, should we be skeptical about virtuous character? Can we use brain stimulation, neurosurgery, and psychedelics to become more virtuous? To address such questions, I need broad knowledge of neuroscience and related work in psychology. Assisting with cross-training will be my mentor, Dr. Rajesh Kana (Professor of Psychology), an expert in social cognition and neuroimaging.

Emulating Moral Exemplars ($28,402.50, Duke University/JTF)
with Hyemin Han, Clifford Workman, and Andrea Glenn

Some stories of moral exemplars motivate people to emulate the exemplars’ moral behavior. But why do some stories motivate better than others? Current evidence suggests that people are more moved by an exemplar who is similar to themselves and whose good deeds aren’t extraordinary. Our project aims to dig deeper into understanding this phenomenon by extending previous behavioral results and probing deeper into the underlying psychological and neurocognitive mechanisms.

Responsibility and Mental Disorder ($9,987, UAB’s Faculty Development Grant Program)
with Matt King

Our project is to explore when and how the possession of a mental illness (such as autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Tourette syndrome, or depression) mitigates or otherwise affects one’s responsibility for the actions that result from one’s psychopathology (e.g. impolite remarks, assault, failure to pick up one’s daughter from school). Do only some disorders excuse morally inappropriate behavior? Or is there nothing about having a disorder as such that affects whether we ought to praise or blame someone for their moral success or failure? We will host a small conference of nationally recognized scholars presenting original work on the project theme. We aim to bring together established ethicists to address this topic from a diverse set of perspectives.

Collaborators

In some of my work, I have had the privilege of collaborating with some excellent scientists and philosophers, including:

Labs