UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — C. Daryl Cameron, associate professor of psychology and Sherwin Early Career Professor 2023-26, has been awarded a prestigious James McKeen Cattell Fund Fellowship.

The fellowship allows Cameron to take a full sabbatical for the 2023-24 academic year and focus on his myriad research interests. He was one of just four academics nationwide to receive the award.

Established more than a half century ago specifically for scholars in the psychology field, the McKeen Cattell Fund provides fellowships to supplement the regular sabbatical allowance provided by recipients’ home institutions.

“It’s very exciting,” Cameron said. “I had known about the fellowship for a while — it’s fairly well-known and competitive. I’d been looking around for opportunities to extend my sabbatical for a full year, and so I figured it was worth applying for. They liked the vision of my work and my lab’s research. This will be my first sabbatical, which affords me more time to dig into a project and devote more time to learning new skills. It’s something I’m really looking forward to.”

A senior research associate for the College of the Liberal Arts’ Rock Ethics Institute, Cameron studies the psychological processes that motivate people to demonstrate empathy and moral decision-making, applying an interdisciplinary approach that draws on affective science, social cognition, and moral philosophy. To carry out his research, he employs a number of methods, among them behavioral choice paradigms, measures of empathic emotional responding to scenes, bystander intervention, and neuroimaging. He’s worked with several types of populations, including students, physicians, patients and voters.

Much of Cameron’s research is conducted in his role as director of Penn State’s Empathy and Moral Psychology (EMP) Lab in the Department of Psychology. There, he and his team of graduate students seek to better understand how people think, feel and behave in important ethical situations, be it showing a lack of empathy in response to mass tragedies, employing blame and punishment, or using outrage as the impetus for collective action, said Cameron. 

“One of the big reasons I got into psychology was because of my interest in moral philosophy,” Cameron said. “I wanted to use psychology to understand ethical questions. Why do people respond so emphatically to one person, but when you describe mass conflicts, people tend to be numb to it? What’s behind those inconsistencies? Part of what we can do in psychology is create experiments to help find answers to those questions.”

During his sabbatical, Cameron plans to further the lab’s research in the areas of animal ethics, political polarization, and human-artificial intelligence interactions.

“We’re always looking to build on the previous research — and pay attention to what else is going on out in the field,” Cameron said. “Even if it goes outside the scope of my own interests, I try to give my students space to dive into areas they want to explore. Students really shape the identity of the lab. It is very much a team-based effort — as a group, we’re always trying to make our impact and move the field forward.”

Cameron said he also plans to use his time pursuing collaborations and networking outside the University, including with philosopher Walter Sinnott-Armstrong of Duke University’s Kenan Institute for Ethics. Also, he will officially launch programming for the new Consortium on Moral Decision-Making, which he conceived as an interdisciplinary network of scholars dedicated to taking a social science approach to morality and ethics.

Sponsored by the Rock Ethics Institute, the College of the Liberal Arts, and the Social Science Research Institute, with additional support from the McCourtney Institute for Democracy and the Department of Philosophy, the consortium will expand on the Rock Ethics Institute’s Cameron-led Moral Agency and Moral Development Initiative, which includes events such as the Expanding Empathy Speaker Series.

“The interdisciplinary piece is one of the key components to the consortium,” Cameron said. “We’ll be working to bring together psychologists, political scientists, philosophers, engineers, and sociologists in the same space to think about some of these complex human questions. And hopefully it creates sparks for some cutting-edge collaborations.”

All told, it should make for an exciting year ahead, said Cameron, who views the sabbatical as a time to “rekindle and reinvigorate a lot of the philosophical motivations of the work we do.”

“Sometimes taking that bird’s eye view can remind you why you got into the field in the first place, and I’m hoping this sabbatical helps me do that,” Cameron said. “I anticipate it’s going to be a nice recharging, and I hope to develop some more foundational questions that our lab can pursue. What have we done, and what are we going to do next?”