Izzat Jarudi

I'm pursuing a PhD in cognitive and social psychology. My advisor is Paul Bloom and my primary research interest is in understanding moral cognition and behavior.

1. What topics do you have some expertise in and would you be willing to help others learn them? As a first-year student who's only read about complex systems for fun, I'm afraid I don't have that much expertise to brag of; however, I would be happy to discuss psychology with anyone who's interested.

2. What do you want to learn? At the end of the summer school, I hope to have learned enough about complex systems theory and practice, particularly network theory and agent-based modeling, to be able to get started with my own independent research projects on moral behavior.

3. Do you have any projects that would benefit from an interdisciplinary approach? Not at the moment but one thing that drew me to study morality was its interdisciplinary connections with other fields I am interested in like economics, sociology, and philosophy.

4. Do you have any ideas for what sort of project you would like to attack this summer? One specific question I'm interested in is how moral norms emerge and spread in a population. Given some recent work I have seen in computational social science, I think it is a problem that could be approached using an agent-based model of a complex social system.

5. What's your favorite "big problem"? The ultimate goal of my research is to develop a general theory of human morality. Ideally, it would be one that would also integrate the extensive work on morality that has already been done across the fields of psychology, sociology, economics, evolutionary biology, and anthropology.

6. If you were given the opportunity to see where we were in one hundred years with respect to progress on one problem/subject, what would it be? Well, I would be interested in seeing how we're doing on my "favorite big problem" and whether our progress in understanding human morality has led to any progress in human morality itself.