Dr. Ana Gantman studies how people process moral stuff. She’s an assistant professor at Brooklyn College, and she finds that our attention is often drawn more quickly to morally relevant stimuli in our environment. More recently, she’s been looking into how our moral judgments collide with bureaucracy and how we can use moral psychology to address issues surrounding consent and sexual assault. 

Things we mention in this episode:

• The “moral pop-out” effect where moral stuff grabs our attention (Gantman & Van Bavel, 2014; Brady, Gantman, & Van Bavel, 2020)
• Moral pop-out seems to work like a motivational state because it goes away when needs for justice are satisfied (Gantman & Van Bavel, 2016)
• Using EEG to study the time course of moral perception (Gantman et al., 2020)
• The books The Utopia of Rules and Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber
• How “phantom rules” can be selectively enforced when someone’s violated other social norms. 
• Taking “consent pledges” before a party can get college students to moralize consent (The Daily Princetonian)

Check out my new audio course on Knowable: "The Science of Persuasion."

For a transcript of this episode, visit: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episode/moralizing-and-attention-with-ana-gantman/

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