Brian A.M. Clark
Ph.D. Student
clark13 ‘at’ uoregon.edu (replace ‘at’ with @)
Curriculum Vitae
M.A. in Psychology, Wake Forest University, 2009.
B.A. in Psychology, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2007.
B.A. in Philosophy, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2007.
Brian is a doctoral student broadly interested in all things relevant to morality. Brian is currently studying moral hypocrisy from two angles: 1) understanding how and why adhering to moral intuitions conflicts with self-interest and other moral intuitions (basically, what makes people hypocrites) and 2) understanding how and why people attribute hypocrisy as an explanation of others’ behavior (basically, what makes people call other people hypocrites). Other interests include: the etymology of “moral psychology,” social psychology’s “little man syndrome,” perspective-taking, social emotions, cultural evolution, trolleyology, war, religion, wars about religion, statistics, philosophy of science, bass-playing, movies and tv shows that flip moral intuitions around and make you seriously question them.
Research
Doing right because it’s right, doing right to appear right, and doing wrong but feeling right: Impression management and self-deception in fairness-relevant decisions: Most empirical work on moral hypocrisy is classically social, in that it is lopsidedly focused on situational forces that drive behavior. As a consequence, little attention is devoted to understanding how persons interact with situations. Taking a truly hybrid social-personality approach to this literature, I will show how individual differences in the social desirability constructs of impression management and self-deception interact with private and public situations to influence fairness-relevant decisions. In particular, participants allocated two experimental tasks, which differed in terms of desirability, between themselves and a future participant. They had the options of behaving fairly, by randomly assigning the tasks, selfishly, by directly self-assigning the more desirable task, or altruistically, by directly self-assigning the less desirable task. Only a very small subset acted altruistically. Of the other two options, impression management and self-deception differentially predicted choice and their predictive power was dependent on context. Brown Bag Presentation here.