Research

A decade of research spanning moral psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and prosocial behaviour — investigating how humans navigate ethical dilemmas, what drives empathy and helping, how personality shapes moral judgment, and building the statistical tools to study these questions rigorously.

Research Lines

Moral Judgment About Harm: Emotion, Reasoning, and Their Interplay

When facing dilemmas that pit preventing harm against maximising welfare, two competing systems vie for control: emotion-driven harm aversion, and reasoning-based cost-benefit analysis. A decade of research mapped how each operates, when they conflict, and what makes one prevail.

  • Reasoning ability predicts utilitarian choices across eight independent studies — independently of how intensely someone dislikes causing harm
  • Psychopathy's link to utilitarian judgment traces to reduced aversion to performing harmful acts specifically, not reduced concern for victims
  • Emotional immersion in virtual reality closes the gap between what people say they would do and what they actually do, showing that behaviour and stated principles can dissociate
  • Better reasoners more readily forgive accidental harms, redirecting attention from emotional reactions toward the perpetrator's innocent intent
Dual-process theory Moral dilemmas fMRI Virtual reality Behavioural experiments

Empathy, Prosociality, and the Neural Basis of Moral Emotion

Empathic concern for victims shapes not only how harshly we condemn wrongdoers but also whether we step up to help — and both effects have distinct neural signatures.

  • The brain's pain-empathy network encodes outcome severity and drives blame, but is recruited differently for acceptability judgments — a neural dissociation between two outwardly similar moral responses
  • Grey matter volume in the theory-of-mind network predicts willingness to forgive accidents, by supporting representation of innocent intent
  • Individuals who incur costly personal sacrifices to rescue others in a virtual emergency have larger right anterior insula — a region central to empathic motivation
  • Across 24 studies and 21,000+ participants, compensating victims generated stronger reputational gains than punishing perpetrators, because compensation reliably signals genuine prosocial character
fMRI Neuroimaging Prosociality Altruism Third-party punishment Empathy

Individual Differences: Personality, Psychopathology, and Moral Judgment

People differ markedly in their moral judgments, and this variability reflects stable differences in how they process emotional and cognitive information — not inconsistency or ignorance.

  • Alexithymia (difficulty identifying one's own emotions) reduces empathic concern and increases moral acceptance of harmful acts, particularly unintentional ones
  • In adults with autism, autistic and alexithymic traits exert opposing effects — autistic features increase harm aversion while co-occurring alexithymia reduces empathic concern, creating deceptively normal group averages
  • Multiple sclerosis patients condemn third-party violations more harshly than controls, explained by elevated cognitive alexithymia rather than disease-specific neurological changes
  • Anxiety disorder patients maintain intact moral cognition despite pathologically heightened arousal, showing that emotional intensity alone does not distort moral judgment
Alexithymia Psychopathy Autism Multiple sclerosis Anxiety Individual differences

Open-Source Statistical Software

Throughout my academic career I built tools to address methodological gaps in my own research — and those tools grew into widely adopted infrastructure across the sciences.

  • ggstatsplot combines inferential statistics with publication-ready visualisations, reducing the steps between analysis and reporting
  • The easystats ecosystem provides a unified R workflow for model fitting, diagnostics, parameter extraction, comparison, and reporting
  • Contributions to lintr and styler help enforce code quality and style standards across the R community
  • These packages are collectively downloaded tens of millions of times and used across disciplines from ecology to clinical trials
R programming Data visualisation Software engineering easystats ggstatsplot

For the full list of publications, see Publications.

Research Positions

Max Planck Institute for Human Development
2019 - 2021

Postdoctoral Fellow

Max Planck Institute for Human Development

Berlin, Germany

Advisor: Iyad Rahwan

  • Investigated computational models of moral behaviour and moral cognition using large-scale behavioural experiments
  • Applied machine learning approaches and agent-based simulations to model moral judgements
  • Explored how people make moral judgements and how these judgements can be modelled algorithmically
Harvard University
2017 - 2019

Postdoctoral Fellow

Harvard University

Department of Psychology

Cambridge, MA, USA

Advisor: Mina Cikara and Fiery Cushman

  • Studied moral cognition using behavioural experiments, functional neuroimaging (fMRI), and computational modelling
  • Investigated how reasoning supports utilitarian moral judgements
  • Explored the neural basis of empathic blame and reputational benefits of third-party punishment
Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA)
2016

Visiting Researcher

Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA)

Trieste, Italy

Advisor: Giorgia Silani

  • Conducted collaborative research on the neuroanatomical basis of concern-based altruism
  • Used virtual reality paradigms and structural MRI analysis

Academic Background

Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA)
2011 - 2015

Doctor of Philosophy (Neuroscience)

Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA)

Trieste, Italy

Summa cum laude

Advisor: Giorgia Silani

Thesis: A multimodal investigation of moral decision making in harmful contexts

University of Pune
2008 - 2010

Master of Science (Physics)

University of Pune

Pune, India

Thesis: Effect of hypergravity on amylase and total protein content in germinating rice seeds

Fergusson College
2005 - 2008

Bachelor of Science (Physics)

Fergusson College

Pune, India

Satish Bhide Prize for the Best Undergraduate Thesis

Thesis: Theoretical studies of static friction at atomic scale for unlubricated BCC solids

Thesis PDFs are available on the Publications page.