Part of the Cognitive Science of Morality seminar series, 2012.
People sometimes wonder what an individual is like ‘deep down’ or ‘at her core.’ In short, it seems that people are drawn to an essentialist picture of the self. But how exactly do they figure out which aspects of the self counts as the essence and which are merely superficial or inessential? A series of experiments examine this question and suggest that people’s moral judgments actually play a role here. In other words, when we are trying to identify the essence of another person’s self, we do so in part by thinking about which ways of life would truly by morally good or bad.