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ABOUT

  • Moral Intuitions Lab (the MINT Lab) is a psychology research laboratory led by Dr. Onurcan Yılmaz at Kadir Has University, Istanbul. Our group consists of senior researchers, graduate, and undergraduate students. Generally speaking, we study the intersection between morality, politics, religion, and decision making. More specifically, we use a cognitive science perspective to study the influences of intuitive and reflective decision making processes on various belief systems. Our lines of research include, but not limited to:
     

  1. The content of morality
    —What are the universal (and culture-specific) characteristics of our moral judgment?
    —We set out to determine the structure of morality from an evolutionary and cultural perspective. 
     

  2. The cognitive roots of moral judgment and behavior
    —Are people intuitively selfish or cooperative?
    —Why and when would people help someone else if there is a possibility of incurring a cost by helping?
    —Are we liberals or conservatives at heart?
    —We try to understand the cognitive underpinnings of moral judgments and try to determine which moral foundations are more core (primary), and which ones are more peripheral (secondary).
    —We also try to understand the cognitive roots of cooperative behavior from a dual-process perspective.
     

  3. The consequences of resource scarcity
    —Is cooperation under resource scarcity possible?
    —How to promote cooperation under resource scarcity?
    —Does scarcity (i.e. poverty) impair our decision-making abilities?
    —We study the psychological consequences of resource scarcity on moral judgment and behavior as well as on decision making.
     

  4. The consequences of moral intuitions
    —What are the consequences of endorsing different moral intuitions?
    —Does subjectivism lead to increased intergroup tolerance?
    —Does subjectivism decrease parochialism?
    —We try to explore whether activating subjectivism increases tolerance and decreases partisan bias in social dilemma situations.
     

  5. Morality and religion
    —When and how does religion promote cooperation and conflict?
    —Is religious prosociality parochial or generalized to out-groups?
    —We broadly study the intersection between different types of morality (prosociality, cooperation, normative and meta-ethics) and religious belief.

 

  • We try to do our best to be good citizens of science, and strongly advocate the open science movement in psychological science. We also use preregistration and replication attempts as the main outlet of our research.

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