Author: Jennifer Cole Wright

Jennifer Cole Wright is Professor of Psychology at the College of Charleston, USA. Her area of research is moral development and moral psychology more generally. She is interested in how moral values and norms develop over time and influence people’s reactions to divergent beliefs and practices in pluralistic societies—and, in particular, the influence of individual and social “liberal vs. conservative” mindsets on those reactions. She is also interested in why we care about being “good people” and how we become them. In particular, she studies humility and the development of virtue, as well as young children’s early moral development. She has published papers on these and other topics in journals like Cognition, Mind and Language, Journal of British Developmental Psychology, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Journal of Moral Education, Philosophical Psychology, Journal of Cognition and Culture, Personality and Individual Differences, Social Development, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and Merrill-Palmer Quarterly. She has published a book, Understanding Virtue: Theory and Measurement, with Nancy Snow and Michael Warren (Oxford, 2020), and edited two interdisciplinary volumes: Humility (Oxford, 2019) and Advances in Experimental Moral Psychology (co-edited with Hagop Sarkissian; Bloomsbury, 2014). When she’s not writing, she is usually busy warping young minds in the classroom, trekking (often with students) across Europe, Southeast Asia, or East Africa—or sometimes just off on an adventure (with the help of a fuel-efficient car) across the US.