What is Morality?
How do people decide between right and wrong, and what roles do emotion and reasoning play? What are the consequences of distinguishing between bad behaviors and bad people? Where are the boundaries of morality, and what does its underlying structure look like in the mind? My work draws from diverse sources — including experimental psychology, philosophy, and complexity science — to answer questions like these.
What Makes A Good Data Analyst?
Data analysis is the backbone of quantitative science. Despite this, there is no universal definition of what it means to be a skilled analyst. My research applies mixed methodological approaches to understanding what I call analytic fluency, or the ability to produce dependable, trustworthy, and useful analyses consistently across contexts.
Media Coverage
Recent Talks
Vanaman, M. E. (2024, October 28). Toward a person-center approach to the study of data analysis. [Invited talk]. Bi-Annual Mini-Symposium on the Theory of Data Science (Virtual). View Slides
Vanaman, M. E. (2024, September 13). Data analysis from the zoo to the wild and back. [Invited talk]. The University of Texas at Austin Statistics and Data Sciences Departmental Seminar Series. Austin, Texas, United States. View Slides (takes a moment to load)
Vanaman, M. E. (2024, August 8). Analytic fluency: What it is, who has it, and how it is learned. [Conference presentation]. In R. D. Peng (Chair), Building Better Data Analyses: Theory, Methods, and Lessons Learned. Symposium conducted at the annual Joint Statistical Meetings of the American Statistical Association. Portland, Oregon, United States. View Slides
Vanaman, M. E. (2024, April 8). What is analytic fluency? [Invited talk]. Bi-Annual Mini-Symposium on the Theory of Data Science (Virtual). View Slides
Vanaman, M. E. (2023, February 16). Purity: Immoral acts or immoral actors? [Conference poster]. Society for Personality and Social Psychology Annual Convention (Virtual).
Selected Publications
Leggett-James, M. P., Vanaman, M. E., Lindner, D., & Askew, R. L. (2021). The development and psychometric evaluation of the Exercise Overvaluation Scale. Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 43(3), 223–233. https://doi.org/10.1123/jsep.2019-0213 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