This line of research has sought to better understand what people are curious to learn about in the moral domain and why. Curiosity plays such a pivotal role in learning and memory outside of the moral domain. But do those same links show up for moral curiosity? So far, we have found that moral badness and atypicality are particularly interesting, an effect which is linked to expected learning (see Wylie & Gantman, 2023; 2022). This work was featured in Psyche. Cillian McHugh and I also authored a related chapter in the Encyclopedia of Heroism Studies focused on moral judgments, especially in media, of both heroes and villains.

Currently, we are taking a deeper dive into what moral curiosity is, and what cognitive and neural mechanisms support it.

Another primary line of research in the lab focuses on rules and personal values. In this work, we have been motivated to understand the discrepancies between moral intuitions and established rules or norms, particularly in legal and policy contexts. In a recent paper, we also explore these broad themes by examining what kinds of signals (e.g., codification, moral implications) most influence people’s rule concepts (Wylie, Bostyn, & Gantman, under review).

In the legal context, we have identified a subset of rules where the signals about what one should do are in conflict. We call these rules phantom rules—rules where what the literal text says one should do and the descriptive norms of enforcement diverge. This kind of ambiguous rule is particularly susceptible to motivated punishment (Wylie & Gantman, 2023). We also find that racial bias influences who tends to have these rules punished in the real world (Wylie et al., 2024). This work has also played a pivotal role in how I think about third-party punishment more broadly. In a recent paper, we explore the twin functions of third-party punishment: not only to foster cooperation but also as a means to assert control over others (Wylie & Gantman, 2024; Wylie et al., R&R).

The moral domain is full of rules and obligations, which structure a great deal of people’s everyday lives, values, beliefs, and more. In the policy context, our work has explored the role played by a different sense of rules in moral cognition—one's personal moral values. We find that people who see a behavior as morally wrong are less likely to support harm reduction policy aimed at reducing the harm associated with that very behavior (Wylie, Sharma, & Gantman, 2022). The work was also featured in Scientific American.

We also spend a lot of time thinking about when breaking rules actually seems like a good thing. One place where we think this is true is in the aesthetic domain. There, breaking rules can make you seem autonomous and even trailblazing. In this line of work, we explore whether moral excellence dominates aesthetic excellence (it doesn’t; Wylie et al., under review). Critically, we find that breaking rules and conventions mediates this relationship, and that similar patterns emerge when we look to judgments about career choices (see Wylie, Gantman, & Bailey, in prep).

In collaboration with Kerstin Unger, we are working to better understand how children structure moral (vs. non-moral) rules, and explore whether there are structural differences in the way children represent moral vs. social conventional rules. This is a budding area of inquiry that I'm eager to develop further (including, and primarily, in adults).

In another line of research, I examine how state emotions influence cognitive and perceptual processes. I am particularly interested in how/when emotions like fear and disgust are similar and how/when they are different in their influence on cognitive and perceptual processes. This work has explored when emotional states enhance object recognition (Wylie, MA Thesis), working memory performance (Storbeck, Wylie, & Chapman, R&R), and inhibition (Storbeck, Stewart, & Wylie, 2024).

We have also tested how moral information influences these lower-level processes. To do this, we are using a visual discrimination task to see whether moral relevance enhances perception (Wylie et al., Stage 1 Acceptance). We are also using computational methods to investigate how moral motivations influence moral perception. Initial findings (presented at SPSP 2021) suggest that active moral motivations enhance perceptual evidence accumulation relative to satiated moral motivations.

Another area of interest concerns questions surrounding the perception of faces. What can patterns in the perception of faces reveal insights into how the mind works? In this work, my collaborators and I examine how degraded face information affects configural and featural face processing and ascriptions of humanness (Tracy, Wylie, & Young, under review), affects the categorization of facial emotional expressions (Wylie, Tracy, & Young, 2022), and the perceptual recognizing of individuals’ humanness. The aim of this series of studies is to better understand how the eyes integrate social information in suboptimal viewing conditions—conditions which often resemble everyday life.