Women in Science and Engineering at Yale (2020 Edition)

Molly Crockett, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Psychology, Department of Psychology

The philosopher Blaise Pascal described human beings as “the glory and scum of the universe." Each of us carries blueprints for an astonishing range of social behaviors, from the heroic to the atrocious. The Crockett lab seeks to understand this paradox by studying the cognitive building blocks of human morality, including social learning, impression formation, empathy, moral judgment, and decision-making. Their approach integrates methods and insights from social psychology, behavioral computational neuroscience, and philosophy. The lab uses behavioral experiments, computational modeling, functional brain imaging, field studies, and "big data" analyses to investigate the social mind.