Bertram F. Malle

About

Bertram F. Malle is a Professor in the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences at Brown University. He earned his Master’s degrees in philosophy/linguistics in 1987 and psychology in 1989 at the University of Graz, Austria. After relocating to the United States in 1990, he completed his Ph.D. at Stanford University in 1995 and subsequently joined the University of Oregon Psychology Department. Since 2008, he has been a faculty member at Brown University. His research focuses on higher-level cognition and social psychology, particularly social cognition, the capacity to recognize intentional actions, make inferences about others' mental states, explain behavior, and morally evaluate behavior. His work also encompasses moral psychology, including cognitive and social blame, guilt, and norms, as well as human-robot interaction, specifically moral competence in robots and socially assistive robotics. Malle’s contributions to the field have been recognized through awards such as the Society of Experimental Social Psychology Outstanding Dissertation award and a National Science Foundation CAREER award. He has served as past president of the Society of Philosophy and Psychology and has received research funding from organizations including the NSF, Army, Templeton Foundation, Office of Naval Research, and DARPA. His scholarly output includes over 130 articles and several books on topics related to social cognition, moral psychology, and human-robot…

Research topics

• Data Mining
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science
• Social psychology
• Psychology
• Epistemology
• Knowledge management
• Human–computer interaction
• Engineering

Selected publications

• A multidimensional conception and measure of human-robot trust

  Elsevier eBooks · 2020 · 226 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  DOI

• Moral Judgments

  Annual Review of Psychology · 2020 · 206 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Research on morality has increased rapidly over the past 10 years. At the center of this research are moral judgments-evaluative judgments that a perceiver makes in response to a moral norm violation. But there is substantial diversity in what has been called moral judgment. This article offers a framework that distinguishes, theoretically and empirically, four classes of moral judgment: evaluations, norm judgments, moral wrongness judgments, and blame judgments. These judgments differ in their…

  DOI

• People's judgments of humans and robots in a classic moral dilemma

  Cognition · 2024-10-02 · 17 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• People Dynamically Update Trust When Interactively Teaching Robots

  2023-03-09 · 17 citations

  articleSenior author

  Human-robot trust research often measures people's trust in robots in individual scenarios. However, humans may update their trust dynamically as they continuously interact with a robot. In a well-powered study (n = 220), we investigate the trust updating process across a 15-trial interaction. In a novel paradigm, participants act in the role of teacher to a simulated robot on a smartphone-based platform, and we assess trust at multiple levels (momentary trust feelings, perceptions of trustworth…

  PublisherDOI

• Calibrated Human-Robot Teaching: What People Do When Teaching Norms to Robots^*

  2023-08-28 · 8 citations

  articleSenior author

  Robots deployed in social communities must act according to the communities’ social and moral norms. To acquire the large number of nuanced norms, robots can rely on human teaching. While humans tend to naturally use more than one teaching method when training a novice, current human-in-the-loop teaching frameworks have typically relied on single teaching methods (e.g., instruction or reward). To gain insight into how humans would teach robots to master social and moral norms, we present a novel…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Is there a Hierarchy of Social Inference? Intentionality, Mind, and Morality

  NSF · $204k · 2009–2013

• PFI:BIC - Next Generation Robotic Intelligence that Provides Psycho-Social Support for Older Adults

  NSF · $1000k · 2017–2023

Frequent coauthors

• Matthias Scheutz

  Tufts University

  39 shared

• Vivienne Bihe

  John Brown University

  35 shared

• Daniel Ullman

  31 shared

• Xuan Zhao

  Stanford University

  27 shared

• John Voiklis

  Knology

  24 shared

• Steve Guglielmo

  23 shared

• Andrew E. Monroe

  Verisk Analytics (United States)

  18 shared

• Eric Rosen

  John Brown University

  18 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Psychology

  Stanford University

  1994

Awards & honors

• Society of Experimental Social Psychology Outstanding Disser…
• National Science Foundation CAREER award
• past president of the Society of Philosophy and Psychology

Similar researchers at Brown University

• Thomas Serreh-145
• Michael Frankh-120
• David Badreh-59