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Funded Projects
Early Career, Track 1 - Mechanisms
Adam Hodge
Adam S. Hodge, Ph.D., is an Active-Duty Licensed Clinical Psychologist at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Clinically, Adam specializes in trauma therapy and works from an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy framework. His research interests lie at the intersection of positive psychology and the psychology of religion and spirituality, with specific interests in the virtues of grace, humility, forgiveness, and gratitude.
Wright-Patterson Medical Center, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base
Project
Exploring an Emotional Regulation Intervention as a Means of Developing Political IH
Political polarization is a growing cultural concern, both globally and in the United States. Given the significant distress and challenges individuals face when engaging in challenging political discourse, it is necessary to identify motivating factors that could help individuals engage with political contrarians. The virtue of intellectual humility (IH) likely serves as one such motivator. Prior research has demonstrated that intellectual humility improves relationships and enhances learning strategies. Research on political IH, more specifically, indicates political IH is positively related to favorable attitudes toward opposing political views, and forgiveness toward those who committed a political hurt or offense against them. The current project aims to expand the field of research on IH (general) by exploring how empirically-supported principles of change might assist individuals’ in obtaining and improving emotion regulation strategies for the specific goal of improving IH when discussing politics (domain-specific). This project will utilize a randomized controlled trial experimental design to explore whether a modified, empirically-supported, transdiagnostic group therapy protocol based on third-wave Cognitive behavioral Therapy principles can serve to increase political IH compared to a knowledge-acquisition based intervention (i.e., reading balanced positions on various political topics) and a waitlist control condition. Emotion regulation skills pertaining to emotion identification, mindful-emotion awareness, cognitive restructuring, and exposure practices will be taught in the main group therapy treatment condition with an emphasis on using these skills to work towards the virtue of IH. Overall, 150 undergraduate students will be recruited at two different universities in the Southwest United States and randomly assigned to one of the three treatment conditions. We hypothesize the group-therapy treatment condition will report greater improvements in IH, mindfulness, and well-being, and less experiential avoidance, compared to the knowledge-acquisition and waitlist conditions, immediately following the intervention, as well as at three-months and six-months post intervention.
Courtney Moore
Courtney is currently a fifth year Ph.D. candidate in social psychology at The Ohio State University, working primarily with Dr. Russell Fazio. She is broadly interested in studying means of increasing – and occasionally, decreasing – one’s openness to new information, people, and experiences. One line of work assesses how individuals come to endorse misinformation and conspiracy theories, with a particular focus on both decreasing susceptibility to falsehoods and increasing acceptance of correct information. A second line focuses on how one’s sensitivity to rejection might influence willingness to engage in and perceptions of interpersonal interactions, including how individuals interpret ambiguous facial expressions of potential interaction partners. Courtney is additionally invested in improving the experiences of underrepresented groups. These projects include assessing the wellbeing and academic success of underrepresented undergraduates in engineering, increasing girls’ perceptions of fit in STEM fields, and improving social support provided to targets of discrimination. Across her varied interests, she aims to utilize social psychological findings in interventions to enhance assessments of information accuracy, improve interpersonal interactions, and increase representation and wellbeing of historically underrepresented groups.
The Ohio State University
Project
Intellectual Humility and Truth Detection: A Feedback
Intervention
We aim to assess whether offering immediate, concentrated feedback about the accuracy of one’s knowledge might affect performance – and perceptions of one’s own performance – on a subsequent, unrelated task. The proposed project includes 5 studies aimed at addressing different potential outcomes of our intervention: decreased overestimation of one’s knowledge, increased accuracy on subsequent tasks, increased willingness to admit to not knowing information, increased information seeking behaviors, mitigation of the illusory truth effect, and decreased ideologically biased evaluations of news headlines. Across studies, participants will begin by taking a shortened, dichotomous version of the Overclaiming Questionnaire (Paulhus & Bruce, 1990) to assess potential individual differences in overclaiming tendencies as a potential moderator of our intervention. This will be followed by our intervention, in which participants will be presented with a set of common urban myths (i.e., false statements which are commonly believed; Sinclair et al., 2020) along with a small selection of true statements. Participants in the intervention condition will receive immediate and objectively accurate feedback about their responses to each item in this task, with the purpose being to increase the salience of one’s intellectual fallibility. All participants will then be presented with a set of true and false general knowledge items, followed by the three key measures of intellectual humility (IH; Leary et al., 2017; Hoyle et al., 2016; Zachry et al., 2018). We hope to find that by taking part in our intervention, participants will be made more aware of their intellectual shortcomings and thus weigh the mere familiarity of a statement less heavily when assessing its truthfulness. Instead, they will rely more on their own or external sources of knowledge. This project could provide not only an easily implementable intervention, but also a better understanding of the ingredients necessary to effectively increase IH and its corresponding behaviors.
Tyrone Sgambati
I am a 5th year Ph.D. student in the Social-Personality Psychology program at the Univeristy of California, Berkeley, where I work primarily in the Relationships and Social Cognition Lab (RASCL) and the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab (BSIL). Before pursruing graduate school, I completed my B.S. in psychology, cognitive science, and philosophy at the University of Michigan. Currently, my research focuses on better understanding drivers of political polarization and identifying protective factors against polarization. I also dabble in work on emotion and emotion-regulation.
University of California, Berkeley
Project
Intellectual Humility and Network Heterophily: Identifying Pathways to Increase Intellectual Humility
We aim to assess whether offering immediate, concentrated feedback about the accuracy of one’s knowledge might affect performance – and perceptions of one’s own performance – on a subsequent, unrelated task. The proposed project includes 5 studies aimed at addressing different potential outcomes of our intervention: decreased overestimation of one’s knowledge, increased accuracy on subsequent tasks, increased willingness to admit to not knowing information, increased information seeking behaviors, mitigation of the illusory truth effect, and decreased ideologically biased evaluations of news headlines. Across studies, participants will begin by taking a shortened, dichotomous version of the Overclaiming Questionnaire (Paulhus & Bruce, 1990) to assess potential individual differences in overclaiming tendencies as a potential moderator of our intervention. This will be followed by our intervention, in which participants will be presented with a set of common urban myths (i.e., false statements which are commonly believed; Sinclair et al., 2020) along with a small selection of true statements. Participants in the intervention condition will receive immediate and objectively accurate feedback about their responses to each item in this task, with the purpose being to increase the salience of one’s intellectual fallibility. All participants will then be presented with a set of true and false general knowledge items, followed by the three key measures of intellectual humility (IH; Leary et al., 2017; Hoyle et al., 2016; Zachry et al., 2018). We hope to find that by taking part in our intervention, participants will be made more aware of their intellectual shortcomings and thus weigh the mere familiarity of a statement less heavily when assessing its truthfulness. Instead, they will rely more on their own or external sources of knowledge. This project could provide not only an easily implementable intervention, but also a better understanding of the ingredients necessary to effectively increase IH and its corresponding behaviors.
Early Career, Track 2 - Interventions
Michael Prinzing (Co-PI)
Michael received his PhD in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2022. He is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Psychology and Neuroscience Department at Baylor University. Michael’s research focuses on the good life, encompassing topics like happiness, well-being, virtue, and meaning in life. Much of his work has focused on the questions of what makes life meaningful and how virtue fosters well-being. Previously, Michael was a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University. Prior to his PhD, he received a BPhil in Philosophy from Oxford University and a BA in Philosophy from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Yale
Project
Can Ethics Education Programs Increase Adolescent
Intellectual Humility?
Our project investigates the role of philosophical extracurricular programs in cultivating intellectual humility (IH) among adolescents. Specifically, we will be testing whether participation in the National High School Ethics Bowl (NHSEB) fosters IH about ethical and political questions. NHSEB is an extracurricular program headquartered at the Parr Center for Ethics at UNC-CH in which students engage in discussions about real-world ethical and political issues. The program aims to provide students with opportunities to discuss ethical and political questions and encourages students to engage in perspective-taking and to show openness to diverse beliefs and values.
The project consists of two studies conducted in real-world educational settings. Study 1 is a longitudinal observational (quasi-experimental) study comparing NHSEB students with their non-NHSEB peers, and assessing changes in IH over three months. Study 2 is a within-person (waitlist control) experiment that will examine the effects of workshops that are designed to emulate the NHSEB. The workshops will be hosted at middle and high schools, and focus on key ethical concepts and dilemmas. Participants will complete surveys assessing IH both after the workshops and after regular class sessions.
In brief, the project contributes to applied research on IH and seeks to unify diverse perspectives by integrating the expertise of both philosophers and psychologists. The project has the potential to provide valuable insights into promoting IH in high-stakes contexts and contribute to the development of strategies for fostering intellectual and civic virtues during the schooling years.
Michael Vazquez (Co-PI)
Michael is Teaching Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Director of Outreach at the Parr Center for Ethics at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is also a lecturer and program leader in the Mid-Career Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. Michael is an advocate for empirically- and publicly-engaged philosophy. He collaborates with departments across the university and with community partners across the country to promote philosophical and ethical reflection in K-12 schools, community colleges, libraries, prisons, museums, professional organizations, retirement communities, and other community spaces. He is actively working on several research projects aimed at assessing the impact of philosophy instruction on the cultivation of intellectual virtues such as humility and open-mindedness in learners across the lifespan. Michael received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania in 2020.
UNC-Chapel Hill
Project
Can Ethics Education Programs Increase Adolescent
Intellectual Humility?
Our project investigates the role of philosophical extracurricular programs in cultivating intellectual humility (IH) among adolescents. Specifically, we will be testing whether participation in the National High School Ethics Bowl (NHSEB) fosters IH about ethical and political questions. NHSEB is an extracurricular program headquartered at the Parr Center for Ethics at UNC-CH in which students engage in discussions about real-world ethical and political issues. The program aims to provide students with opportunities to discuss ethical and political questions and encourages students to engage in perspective-taking and to show openness to diverse beliefs and values.
The project consists of two studies conducted in real-world educational settings. Study 1 is a longitudinal observational (quasi-experimental) study comparing NHSEB students with their non-NHSEB peers, and assessing changes in IH over three months. Study 2 is a within-person (waitlist control) experiment that will examine the effects of workshops that are designed to emulate the NHSEB. The workshops will be hosted at middle and high schools, and focus on key ethical concepts and dilemmas. Participants will complete surveys assessing IH both after the workshops and after regular class sessions.
In brief, the project contributes to applied research on IH and seeks to unify diverse perspectives by integrating the expertise of both philosophers and psychologists. The project has the potential to provide valuable insights into promoting IH in high-stakes contexts and contribute to the development of strategies for fostering intellectual and civic virtues during the schooling years.