Introduction of Bjørn Gunnar Hallsson
New Postdoc at CEPDISC
Bjørn Gunnar Hallsson is a new postdoc as CEPDISC. Bjørn did his MSc in psychology and his PhD in philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, and most of his work is in the intersection of these two fields. His primary research interests are motivated cognition, collective reasoning, social epistemology, and how social identity influences information processing, for example in the context science communication.
At CEPDISC, Bjørn will broadly speaking be studying why people think discrimination is morally wrong, when they do. One line of research will investigate which of the features identified by moral philosophers as the key wrong-making features of discrimination laypeople are most sensitive to. Another line of research will investigate the extent to which particular features of the parties involved in a case of discrimination matter when people judge how wrong that instance of discrimination is. Bjørn is also interested in how people justify the judgments they make about the wrongness of particular cases of discrimination to themselves and others, and how these judgments might be influenced by social identity or other factors. He will mainly study these topics using experiments embedded in surveys.