What Makes A Good Data Analyst?
My main focus is on understanding what exactly analysts get from experience that makes them better at producing trustworthy and well-performing analyses consistently across both familiar and novel contexts.
What is Morality?
My secondary focus is in understanding how people decide between right and wrong. More than that, I am interested in understanding where people’s notions of right and wrong come from. Why is it immoral to eat dog in the United States, but desirable to eat cow? What makes a good person good and a bad person bad? Why do people see harm in harmless behaviors? What are the limits of the morality, and what does its underlying structure look like? I investigate how emotion, thinking, and complexity give way to people’s perceptions that some things are personal, others merely practical, and still others, perverse.
Media Coverage
Recent Publications
Leggett-James, M. P., Vanaman, M. E., Lindner, D., & Askew, R. L. (2021). The Development and Psychometric Evaluation of the Exercise Overvaluation Scale [PDF]. Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 43(3), 223–233. https://doi.org/10.1123/jsep.2019-0213
Tierney, W., Hardy, J. H., Ebersole, C. R., Viganola, D., Clemente, E. G., Gordon, D. M., Hoogeveen, S., Haaf, J., Dreber, A., Johannesson, M., Pfeiffer, T., Huang, J., Vaughn, L., DeMarree, K., Igou, E., Chapman, H., Gantman, A., Vanaman, M., Wylie, J., … Uhlmann, E. L. (2021). A creative destruction approach to replication: Implicit work and sex morality across cultures. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 93. https://doi.org//10.1016/j.jesp.2020.104060 [View PDF]
Vanaman, M. E., & Chapman, H. A. (2020). Disgust and disgust-driven moral concerns predict support for restrictions on transgender bathroom access. Politics and the Life Sciences, 39(2), 200–214. https://doi.org/10.1017/pls.2020.20 [View PDF]
Vanaman, M. E., Leggett, M.-P., Crysel, L., & Askew, R. (2019). A Novel Measure of the Need for Moral Cognition. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 41(1), 20–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/01973533.2018.1531000 [View PDF]