Research Interests

Moral psychology and consumer behavior

I’m interested in consumers’ moral decision-making and how certain products, industries, and practices might become moralized. A few specific research questions:

• How does the knowledge that a product or industry causes suffering come to bear on consumer decision-making? To what extent is perceived suffering essential to moralization in the context of consumer behavior?

• To what extent do we perceive entire industries as moral agents, and how does this inform our attributions of blame and responsibility for immoral industry practices?

• Do consumers conceptualize animal agriculture as a morally relevant practice? How might these industries become moralized?

• How do visual and narrative tropes about farmed animals that are reproduced in marketing materials affect consumers’ attitudes and behavior?

Linguistics/cognitive science

I’m broadly interested in Critical Discourse Analysis, ecolinguistics, lexical feature analysis, corpus methods, cognitive metaphor theory, and semiotics. Questions I’ve worked on/would like to work on include:

• How do cognitive frames (e.g., parent/child) structure our perceptions of human/nonhuman animal interactions and animal agriculture?

• How do farmers of nonhuman animals discursively instantiate their moral and social values as well as their identities as industry insiders?

• Are animal rights activists effectively framing their messaging to appeal to a wide range of moral values?