Fiery Cushman

About

Fiery Cushman is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and the Director of the Moral Psychology Research Laboratory. His research aims to organize the complexity of moral judgment around basic functional principles, motivated by the idea that morality serves to teach others how to behave and to learn appropriate patterns of behavior through punishments and rewards. His laboratory investigates these issues using a variety of methods, including surveys, laboratory behavioral studies, psychophysiology, infant and child research, functional neuroimaging, economic games, and formal modeling. His ultimate goal is to use the moral domain to understand broader phenomena such as the balance between learned and innate contributions to cognition, the human capacity to explain, predict, and evaluate others’ behavior, the relationship between automaticity and control, and the architecture of learning and decision-making in social contexts. Cushman received his BA and PhD from Harvard University, where he also completed a post-doctoral fellowship. He served as an Assistant Professor at Brown University from 2011 to 2014. His research has been recognized with awards including the Stanton Prize by the Society for Philosophy and Psychology and the Daniel M. Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. His teaching excellence was acknowledged with the Henry Merrit Wriston Fellowship at Brown University. His research has been supported by…

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Social psychology
• Cognitive psychology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Psychology
• Epistemology
• Cognitive science
• Microeconomics

Selected publications

• Knowledge before belief

  Behavioral and Brain Sciences · 2020 · 226 citations

  Research on the capacity to understand others' minds has tended to focus on representations of beliefs, which are widely taken to be among the most central and basic theory of mind representations. Representations of knowledge, by contrast, have received comparatively little attention and have often been understood as depending on prior representations of belief. After all, how could one represent someone as knowing something if one does not even represent them as believing it? Drawing on a wide…

  DOI

• Reasoning supports utilitarian resolutions to moral dilemmas across diverse measures.

  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · 2020 · 126 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Sacrificial moral dilemmas elicit a strong conflict between the motive to not personally harm someone and the competing motive to achieving the greater good, which is often described as the "utilitarian" response. Some prior research suggests that reasoning abilities and deliberative cognitive style are associated with endorsement of utilitarian solutions, but, as has more recently been emphasized, both conceptual and methodological issues leave open the possibility that utilitarian responses ar…

  DOI

• Planning with Theory of Mind

  Trends in Cognitive Sciences · 2022 · 96 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

• Punishment is Organized around Principles of Communicative Inference

  Cognition · 2020 · 67 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

• Inverse option generation: Inferences about others' values based on what comes to mind

  Cognition · 2025-07-15 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  Prior research shows that when people try to think of things, such as solutions to a problem, the options that come to mind most often are those that they consider statistically common and valuable. Here, we ask whether ordinary people anticipate this and, therefore, infer that when uncommon solutions come to someone's mind, it is diagnostic of how much those solutions are represented as valuable—including in the moral domain. To illustrate, imagine your friend is brainstorming what to serve a v…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Investigating the functional match between punishment and learning.

  NSF · $85k · 2012–2014

Frequent coauthors

• Sydney Levine

  Allen Institute

  55 shared

• Nick Chater

  University of Warwick

  46 shared

• Joshua B. Tenenbaum

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  46 shared

• Max Kleiman‐Weiner

  Seattle University

  39 shared

• Jonathan Phillips

  30 shared

• Adam Morris

  28 shared

• Mark K. Ho

  New York University

  27 shared

• Samuel J. Gershman

  Harvard University

  24 shared

Labs

• Cushman LabPI

Awards & honors

• Stanton Prize by the Society for Philosophy and Psychology
• Daniel M. Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize by the Society…
• Henry Merrit Wriston Fellowship

Similar researchers at Harvard University

• Randy L. Bucknerh-268
• Daniel L. Schacterh-181
• Matthew K. Nockh-126