My Research

I have many research interests, most of them concerning issues at the intersection of philosophy and psychology.  At the moment, my research involves fiction in different types of media (books, short stories, television) and cognitive processes: social skills such as theory of mind, emotional understanding, as well as imagination and moral judgment.

Scale development

Starting with my overly long and complex Masters Thesis at Humboldt State University, I have designed several scales. Given the amount of time I spend replying to email requests for permission and how to use these scales, I have decided to post them here.  To anyone who wants to use them: You have my permission!  You also have my permission to translate them (I know that versions of the Moral Identity Questionnaire exist Persian and Indonesian exist and have been used in research already; I believe there is a Spanish version of the Moral Agency Scale). If you do a Spanish translation, please share it with me before using it; I am bilingual and might be able to provide important evaluations.

Here are the four measures that are both validated and tested for invariance:

1. Moral Identity Questionnaire (Black & Reynolds, 2016)
2. Moral Agency Scale (Black, 2016)
3. Imaginative Resistance Scale (Black & Barnes, 2017)
4. Imaginative Engagement Scale (Black, Ruedinger, & Barnes, 2021)

The linked documents include instructions and items. Please email me or message me via ResearchGate if you need the journal articles and cannot find them.

Imaginative Resistance

I am particularly interested in investigating the philosophical “problem” of imaginative resistance, or the reluctance some people feel when asked to buy into a morally deviant fictional world (one such world would be Harry Potter where Voldemort is the good guy and killing all Muggles the right thing to do). Some people are willing and able to engage with immorality in fiction, whereas others are reluctant to even consider that morality could play out differently in some fictional universes.

I’ve written a blogpost for Junkyard of the Mind that describes my  work on imaginative resistance and some associated issues (6 February 2019).

Our understanding of people in the real world also requires imagination. We cannot read people’s minds, but must instead imagine what they may be thinking and feeling, or how we would think and feel in their circumstances. It may be that people feel imaginative resistance to engaging with other minds in the same way they resist engaging with certain fictions. This may be particularly common when it comes to imagining how people with whom we strongly disagree think and feel. Current research is investigating that possibility.

Papers on imaginative resistance:

Our first publication about the topic: Impossible or Improbable: the Difficulty of Imagining Morally Deviant Worlds

My first project with my adviser at OU: Measuring the unimaginable: Imaginative resistance to fiction and related constructs

A book chapter, Can you or will you imagine? Ability and willingness to imagine fictional scenarios depends on the type of imaginary world. (In Creativity and Morality: A volume in Explorations in Creativity Research.)

Morality and the imagination: Real-world moral beliefs interfere with imagining fictional content was published in the journal of Philosophical Psychology.

A publication that began with two undergraduates’ First Year Research project,  Who can resist a villain? Morality, Machiavellianism, imaginative resistance, and liking for dark fictional characters, will be Yomna and Olivia’s first academic publication!

On fiction

The ability to understand the thoughts, intentions, and feelings of other people is referred to as “theory of mind.” Much of research has focused on the effects of fiction, and I began with how it affected theory of mind. One of the first papers I published with my dissertation advisor, Dr. Jennifer Barnes, made a big splash because it suggested that watching award-winning TV could enhance theory of mind ability.

The paper, entitled “Fiction and Social Cognition: The Effect of Viewing Award-Winning Television Dramas on Theory of Mind,” has been covered in many popular press outlets. The first was this piece, which came out the day after our article was published.

It has also led to a recent CNN interview that is in fact mostly unrelated to what I investigate scientifically but has still managed to cause some unrest: Parents, Stop Feeling So Guilty about TV Time

We also published a paper that reported a study where reading fiction (vs. nonfiction) improved theory of mind (and not nonsocial cognition). However, subsequent attempts to replicate prior work on the effects of fiction on theory of mind failed. This paper was the result of collaboration across three labs and seven people: Does reading a single passage of literary fiction really improve theory of mind? An attempt at replication

Other Papers on the effects of fiction:

Our latest paper, Fiction and morality: Investigating the associations between reading exposure, empathy, morality, and moral judgment, is trending on Reddit (as of March 10, 2020).

I have also investigated how exposure to fiction relates to beliefs about moral permissibility and physical possibility. The first paper addressing this topic, “Fiction, Genre Exposure, and Moral Reality,” garnered some attention from the press.

One of my favorite genres to read, science fiction, is also fascinating to study. Recent paper: Pushing the boundaries of reality: Science fiction, creativity, and the moral imagination

I also have my own, personal beliefs about the power of fiction: My Folk Theory of Fiction. Some day I might fgure out

My latest solo author publication: An IRT Analysis of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test.

My anthropology/ primatology publication: Chimpanzee vertebrate consumption.

I’m always collecting data, and usually there are a few surveys that are open to the public.  I’ll post the links to those here, and try to keep it up to date.  If you’ve got an online survey (that has been approved by the relevant IRB if academic research), you are welcome to post a link in the comments, or ask me to post it here.

curriculum vitae

My Open Science Framework profile

More publications:

My Master’s thesis was finally published in 2016. Much of Study 1 in this paper was part of my thesis: Development, Reliability, and Validity of the Moral Identity Questionnaire

A second paper based on my thesis was published in October 2016: An Introduction to the Moral Agency Scale Individual Differences in Moral Agency and Their Relationship to Related Moral Constructs, Free Will, and Blame Attribution