Mind and Morality Lab
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The Mind & Morality Lab is a developmental psychology lab at Brown University in the Cognitive & Psychological Sciences Department run by Dr. Julia Marshall.
Check out https://linktr.ee/mindmoralitylab to get involved!
Meet Allie Montenegro, our new Lab Manager! Allie (she/her) is joining the Mind and Morality Lab, helping run our studies and keep things moving as we kick off the new semester. Fun fact: she’s currently training for a half marathon!
We’ve got an exciting semester ahead with seven active studies and an international trip to Venezuela! As always, huge thanks to the families and children who make this research possible.
Want to learn more or get involved? Click the link in our bio!
That’s a wrap! Our summer UTRA students presented their research this past week at a poster presentation—the culmination of weeks of hard work and discovery.
This summer, our lab hosted four undergraduates through Brown’s Undergraduate Teaching and Research Awards (UTRA) program, and they dove deep into questions about how children develop moral concern, fairness judgments, and social understanding across different cultural contexts. From designing experiments to analyzing data to crafting their poster presentations, these students got a real taste of what research in developmental psychology looks like.
A huge thank you to all the families who participated in our studies this summer. Your involvement is what makes this research possible—we genuinely couldn’t do this work without you.
Want to learn more about UTRA or our specific research projects? Check out the link in our bio or DM us! And huge congratulations to our amazing UTRA cohort. 🎓
Learn more about UTRA: utra.brown.edu
08/06/2026
As we are wrapping up our summer activities, we wanted to look back on the Mind and Morality Lab’s work at the Workshop in Social Cognitive Development (WISCD)! Vivian Liu, Sam Reisman, and Amy Lu gave talks, along with Virginia Cano presenting a poster. Thanks so much to BC Cooperation Lab and Laboratory for Developmental Studies at Harvard University for hosting this wonderful workshop! See the full details of the Lab’s work below.
Data Blitz:
Amy Lu: Children’s and Adults’ Moral Concern in Context of Social Relationships and Trade-Offs.
Vivian Liu: Children’s Perceptions of (Overt) Discrimination. Workshop in Social Cognitive Development.
Sam Reisman: Early insights into children’s emotional understanding of unfairness.
Posters:
Virginia Cano: Storybooks as a Window into Parent-Child Moral Socialization.
07/30/2026
Meet Vivian Liu! Vivian (she/her) is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Mind and Morality Lab. As a postdoc, she studies how children perceive and react to inequality, particular when they are related to different social categories. Her research is incredibly important because we live in a time of growing inequality and its an issue that affects pretty much every part of the world. Vivian has also lived in five different countries, and once she ate nothing but dessert for three days straight during a trip to Paris!
07/02/2026
Talking kids’ morality on the world stage 🌱 Dr. Julia Marshall, PI of the Mind & Morality Lab, presented “Tracing the Development of Moral Concern” at ISSBD in Incheon this month as part of a symposium — thank you to everyone who joined the conversation 🇰🇷
07/01/2026
Meet Abby McLaughlin! Abby (she/her) is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Mind and Morality Lab. As a postdoc, she designs studies, collects data, and help publish the lab’s research. Abby is involved in the lab’s project on moral concern, which she loves because it addresses philosophical topics through psychological methods. Abby also read over 100 books last year, ran cross country in college, and in her free time she taught herself to knit and crochet!
Does culture shape your child’s moral beliefs? Our lab is traveling the world to find out — and your family can be part of it. We just wrapped our first international data collection trip in the country of Georgia, where we partnered with local elementary schools to study children’s moral development across cultures. By participating in our studies, you’re contributing to a global research program on how culture shapes children’s social and moral development. Follow along to stay updated as we continue collecting data, analyzing results, and expanding to new countries.
Artwork by Victoria Liu. Research supported by the John Templeton Foundation.
Who and what does your child care about, and why? We asked kids a simple but revealing question: if you could only save one person or thing, who would it be? Their answers give us a window into how children’s values and moral thinking grow and change over time. We’re actively studying this in our lab at Brown, and we’d love for your family to be involved. Click this link to sign up: https://sites.brown.edu/mindmoralitylab/for-families/ ! 💛💙
Ever wonder what it’s like to work in a research lab as an undergraduate? Follow along with Matan Lerner, one of our undergraduate research assistants, as he takes us through a real day balancing research and college life. 🔬
Interested in getting involved? Reach out to us at [email protected] — we’d love to hear from you!
A look into the work of Gabi Molinari, a lead undergraduate research assistant and directed reading student at the Mind and Morality Lab!
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