moral science lab

Department of Philosophy I

Cartuja Campus

Granada, Spain 18009

Welcome to our website! The Moral Science Lab is an interdisciplinary research lab based in the Department of Philosophy I at the University of Granada. We combine experimental and observational research methods to investigate issues in:

philosophy: Our research has examined the cognitive processes that subserve people’s reasoning about various philosophical questions, such as the compatibility between free will and determinism or what it means to be self-deceived or to consent.
psychology: Our ongoing studies examine how people reason about the moral status of non-human species, how we perceive non-native and migrant individuals. We have also documented generational or cohort differences in moral judgment.
jurisprudence: Some of our studies examine what people consider to be law, how they interpret rules, and how law and morality are related.

You can learn more about our research on the projects page. And also take one of our studies here!

The Moral Science Lab is generously funded by a 2023 Research Consolidation Project (Legal Interpretation and Moral Reasoning; CNS2023.144543), funded the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033) and the European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR.

selected publications

PNAS

Coordination and expertise foster legal textualism

Ivar R Hannikainen, Kevin P Tobia, Guilherme da FCF Almeida, and 8 more authors

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2022

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In a complete theory there is an element corresponding to each element of reality. A sufficient condition for the reality of a physical quantity is the possibility of predicting it with certainty, without disturbing the system. In quantum mechanics in the case of two physical quantities described by non-commuting operators, the knowledge of one precludes the knowledge of the other. Then either (1) the description of reality given by the wave function in quantum mechanics is not complete or (2) these two quantities cannot have simultaneous reality. Consideration of the problem of making predictions concerning a system on the basis of measurements made on another system that had previously interacted with it leads to the result that if (1) is false then (2) is also false. One is thus led to conclude that the description of reality as given by a wave function is not complete.
Is utilitarian sacrifice becoming more morally permissible?

Ivar R Hannikainen, Edouard Machery, and Fiery A Cushman

Cognition, 2018

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Bad actions or bad outcomes? Differentiating affective contributions to the moral condemnation of harm

Ryan M Miller, Ivar A Hannikainen, and Fiery A Cushman

Emotion, 2014