Principal Investigator
I'm an associate professor of psychology at Kadir Has University, Istanbul, and I lead the MINT lab — a collaborative interdisciplinary laboratory bringing together my diverse, but integrated, research foci covering the psychology of morality, political psychology, cognitive science of religion, and decision-making areas. My research mainly focuses on dual-process accounts of moral judgment and behavior. More specifically, I try to understand how different cognitive styles (reflection vs. intuition) lead people to adopt certain belief systems such as religious and supernatural beliefs, ideological beliefs, conspiracy theories, free will and determinism beliefs, beliefs about climate change, and several other normative and meta-ethical beliefs. I also try to understand (1) why people believe or disbelieve some supernatural deities, (2) how believing (vs. disbelieving) leads to different moral leanings, and (3) cognitive underpinnings and (4) contextual determinants of diverse moral behaviors such as generosity, cooperation, and group bias.
