This is your host, Michael Sherman, and you're listening to Science A Lot, a series of conversations

with leading scientists, scholars, and thinkers about the most important issues of our time.

What a cool course you are taking.

Michael sent me the syllabus.

And when I saw this section here, the brain

is a belief engine.

We're looking for patterns.

Once we find the patterns, we search for confirmatory evidence.

This is very much what I do.

I've been studying morality, moral psychology,

since 1987 when I started graduate school. When I started graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, there was a lot of

research on moral psychology, but it was all done from the point of view of studying reasoning,

how children developed their reasoning.

Lawrence Kohlberg was the leading figure in moral psychology,

and he would give children an adolescent's dilemmas

about should a man steal a drug to save his wife's life, pitting various virtues against each other, and then

students would say, the answer always seemed to be yes, you know, they should, he should,

and then they would explain their justifications, and he would code them.

So it was somewhat interesting, but I thought not very interesting.

In fact, when I read, I actually found the whole feel kind of boring.

And it seemed to me that morality is really much more visceral. I grew up with two sisters close to me in age.

We fought all the time, as my children do today, they are 8 and 12. And morality just seemed much more passionate than that and I began looking at the

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