Stephanie Brown ’20

Crockett Lab, New Haven, CT

At the Crockett Lab.

My time at the Crockett Lab at Yale University was nothing short of exceptional. The path leading me to the lab began last fall, when I took a social psychology class at Williams and was introduced to evolutionary psychology. A quick Google search of topics in evolutionary psychology brought me to the field of moral psychology, and all of a sudden my passion for philosophy and psychology finally seemed to have merged into one field of study. Interning in the Crockett Lab as a research assistant only increased my excitement about moral psychology and its ability to provide answers to some of my most pressing intellectual questions.

In the Crockett Lab, research questions were tackled with a three-pronged approach that I had not come across in any other psychology research I had done. First, questions were looked at in vivo, by going out into the world and examining phenomena as they occurred. An example of this from recent years is when the lab sent a group of researchers to the Burning Man Festival in Nevada to research LSD-induced psychologically transforming experiences. Next, the lab investigated their research interests by trying to simulate them in the lab, by bringing participants in and trying to replicate the phenomenon. Finally, the research question is approached on a neurological level, using the lab’s MRI equipment to find correlations between neurological activity and the psychological phenomenon being examined.

During my time in the lab, I primarily worked on the first two approaches: examining research questions in how they happen outside the lab and then trying to replicate them within. I assisted in a variety of different projects over the summer, including, but not limited to: how concrete/abstract language implicates moral guilt, the tracking of moral outrage online, the relationship between empathy and moral intuitions, and how differences in moral judgements can be used to diagnose borderline personality disorder. I assisted in these projects, and more, from the comfort of my desk at Hill House Avenue, said to be one of the prettiest roads in the country, in a local coffee shop, or one of Yale’s many libraries. This was a stark adjustment to me from my previous research positions that required me to be in the lab all day running participants—since almost all of the studies in the Crockett Lab occurred online, I could work on them from almost anywhere.

With the other Crockett Lab Interns.

I had no idea before this internship how a day in the life of a social psychology graduate student could look. Nor did I know how long the path to being a tenure-track social psychology professor was. It was hugely beneficial to me to hear from graduate students and postdocs in the lab about what path they had taken to arrive where they are now. All of them had taken time in between college and graduate school—some had taken up to five years—mostly working as research assistants or lab managers to get enough work experience (and maybe more importantly, publications) to add to their CVs. This, I learned, was a critical aspect to getting admitted into a graduate program in the first place. Hearing about the lives of postdocs at the lab also helped me understand what my life would look like after graduate school—one to three years of being a postdoc in a different psychology lab. Before this summer, I vacillated between my desire to go to medical school to become a psychiatrist, or go to graduate school for social psychology. I had viewed graduate school as a shorter route to becoming a working professional, but this summer showed me that, in fact, the paths were equally as long. So I’ve picked back up studying for the MCAT, with the intention of applying to medical school within the next two years.

Working at the Yale Libraries.

My desire to pursue an MD not a Ph.D. doesn’t mean that I didn’t enjoy my time at the Crockett Lab. In fact, I loved it. My favorite experience at the lab was one that I sort of fell into. While getting lunch with Dr. Hongbo, one of the postdocs, I expressed my interest in the impact of empathy on moral decision-making and philosophical belief. I had an inkling that how someone experiences empathy might be related to how they formed their philosophical opinions, simply from my time as a philosophy major interacting with various people within the philosophy department at Williams. Talking about this at lunch, it reminded Dr. Hongbo about a study that had been conducted at the lab a few years back. In this study, they looked at two different groups—people affiliated with a movement called “effective altruism,” and people who weren’t. Effective altruism is a movement that urges people to practice a utilitarian approach when it comes to donating money and helping others. The intent of this study was to examine how, and if, these groups differed in empathy levels, and if this impacted their levels of utilitarianism, or how they solved moral thought experiments. However, after the data for the study was collected online, it was never analyzed. Thus, the data was a goldmine for me, fresh to analyze! Analyzing the data occupied me for days, and every analysis that I ran gave me novel information. Information, that I am now using to guide my psychology thesis—where I examine the impact of empathy (and how it can be manipulated) on our moral decision-making.

I am so thankful for the opportunity at the Crockett Lab that the Alumni Sponsored Internship Program allowed me to have. This summer has helped me tremendously in both bettering me as a researcher, and clarifying my future—immediate and long term—and I have the Kraft Family and the ’68 Center to thank for that.