ABOUT
The Moral Intuitions Lab (MINT Lab), directed by Dr. Onurcan Yılmaz at Kadir Has University, explores how human morality, belief systems, and decision-making emerge from the dynamic interaction between our biological predispositions and cultural environments. Combining insights from social psychology, cognitive science, behavioral economics, and evolutionary theory, we employ experimental and cross-cultural research to understand how reflective (analytic) and intuitive (automatic) thinking shape cooperation, ideology, and diverse belief systems.
Our research is grounded in Dual Inheritance Theory, which holds that human cognition and behavior are co-shaped by two interconnected inheritance systems: a biological system, encompassing evolved tendencies such as threat sensitivity, agency detection, and in-group favoritism, and a cultural system, built from socially transmitted norms, institutions, and belief structures.
This integrative perspective moves us beyond single-discipline approaches, enabling us to study morality as both a legacy of our evolutionary past and a product of the cultural and institutional contexts we inhabit.
How Our Research Unites Under Dual Inheritance Theory
The diverse research strands at MINT Lab converge into a single integrative framework through the following dimensions:
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1. Biological Foundations: Core cognitive and emotional mechanisms such as threat sensitivity, agency detection, and group favoritism are products of human evolutionary history.
2. Cultural Transmission: Normative systems like religion, ideology, and conspiracy theories either reinforce or attenuate these biological biases, shaping moral judgments and behaviors across societies.
3. The Role of Reflection: Reflective (analytic) cognition modulates this balance, enabling individuals to either internalize cultural norms or critically distance themselves from them, thus regulating the evolutionary-cultural equilibrium.
4. Contextual Modulation: Environmental and social contexts (including threats, scarcity, and intergroup dynamics) shift the weight of these systems, sometimes amplifying evolutionary biases, but in certain cases prompting reflection-driven prosociality.
All in all, moral decisions, cooperation, and belief systems emerge from the interaction of biological predispositions, cultural learning, and reflection, dynamically modulated by context.
Our Methodological Contributions
MINT Lab is committed to methodological rigor and innovation. We standardize all datasets into a centralized pool, ensuring transparency, reusability, and efficiency. Our experimental paradigms span behavioral games, moral dilemmas, cognitive manipulations, and cross-cultural surveys, allowing us to capture the complexity of human moral cognition. We actively preregister studies, share data, and replicate key findings, ensuring that our work strengthens the credibility and cumulative progress of psychological science.
Future Directions
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Our current research points to several promising avenues for theoretical development:
Dual Function of Reflection: Evidence suggests reflection sometimes serves as decoupling (escaping biases) and sometimes as motivated reasoning (defending identity), depending on the type of reflection and the underlying motivations. Future models must explicitly distinguish these functions and types to clarify when reflection promotes open-mindedness versus bias.
Evolutionary-Cultural Mapping of Beliefs: Most belief systems foster group cohesion but can also exacerbate cognitive biases such as hyperactive agency detection and threat sensitivity. We aim to develop frameworks that capture both their adaptive and maladaptive functions.
Dynamic Models: Using computational modeling and game-theoretic approaches, we plan to explore how environmental shocks (e.g., resource scarcity, collective threats) shift the interaction between biological predispositions and cultural norms.
Institutional Layer: Inspired by scholars like Daron AcemoÄŸlu and Joseph Henrich, we are extending our framework to examine how reflection and moral norms embed into long-term institutions, such as law, science, and religion, affecting cultural evolution at the macro level.
Projects
MINT Lab’s projects reflect this integrative approach. Our ongoing and recent research includes:
Reflection and Intuition: Studying how cognitive styles shape religious belief, ideological alignment, conspiracy thinking, and attitudes toward science.
Threats and Scarcity: Investigating how environmental and social threats including earthquakes, pandemics, and economic scarcity affect cooperation, generosity, and group bias.
Moral Consistency and Evolutionary Roots: Understanding how evolved tendencies and culturally transmitted norms jointly influence prosocial behavior and moral frameworks across WEIRD and non-WEIRD societies.
Commitment to Students
Students in our lab gain hands-on experience across these themes, contributing to study design, data analysis, and publications, while learning to communicate their work to both academic and public audiences. We are deeply committed to mentoring the next generation of scholars. Students in MINT Lab are active collaborators, not passive assistants. They engage in every phase of research, from conceptualization to publication, while receiving structured mentorship from senior members and coordinators. Through this scaffolded system, students quickly acquire the skills needed to thrive as independent researchers while contributing to the lab’s broader mission of advancing a cumulative, interdisciplinary science of morality.