Dr. Laura Niemi is an Assistant Professor in Social Psychology and Global Justice at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Dr. Niemi began at the University of Toronto in 2018 and teaches at the Trudeau Centre for Peace, Conflict and Justice. Prior to arriving at the University of Toronto, she completed research fellowships at Duke University and Harvard University. She received her Ph.D. in Social Psychology and Social Neuroscience from Boston College.

Tell us about yourself.

I’m a psychologist specializing in the area of moral psychology. My work is focused on the sources of diversity in moral values. I’m interested in how people judge each other, make morally-relevant decisions, and live out their values, and how this affects well-being within and across individuals and cultures. I do practical and basic research that asks questions like: How does variability in what people consider to be right and wrong affect everyday language, thought, and action? At Duke, I was jointly in the Department of Philosophy and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, and I worked on projects related to causal cognition, moral decision-making, and social epistemology. At Harvard, I did interdisciplinary research on the psycholinguistics of morality. My Ph.D. research at Boston College was focused on the psychological and neural underpinnings of moral norms. It’s exciting to investigate these topics in the context of the Peace, Conflict, and Justice program and the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.

What past academic experiences led you to the Munk School of Global Affairs?

My teaching and research involves asking questions that cross disciplinary boundaries. I like this approach because it can spur new ways of thinking about the mechanisms behind important aspects of human behavior on a global scale, such as peace, prosociality, conflict, stigmatization, and blame. I came to my Ph. D. training at Boston College from graduate work in counseling psychology. I was motivated to study social psychology, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience because I wanted to contribute to increasing the scientific understanding of why people harm each other. This huge question has been addressed from a multitude of angles by philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, theologists, criminologists, economists, and political scientists  — I found that the subdiscipline of moral psychology was tackling it in novel and powerful ways by combining theory and methods from many of these disciplines. During my Ph.D. training, my moral psychology approach bridged psychology and neuroscience and I investigated topics including moral values, stigma and blame, and the neuroscience of fairness. In postdoctoral research at Harvard, I used the fine-grained lens offered by linguistics to investigate when and how causal attribution for violence is reflected in people’s use and interpretation of language. At Duke, my postdoctoral research primarily bridged philosophy and neuroscience to look at an aspect of epistemic injustice: the experience of being denied testimonial credibility. I’ve enjoyed teaching for a range of courses, such as Clinical Psychology at Boston College and Social Psychology at Harvard. In my position at the Munk School, I look forward to discussing the many findings from moral psychology that have direct relevance to students’ interests in peace, conflict and justice.

What are your current research interests?

Right now I’m following up on several different questions that stem from previous findings. Many of my current studies are focused on moral judgment. For example, I’m investigating how people with different moral commitments view responsibility and causation for morally-relevant events, how media venues that support particular ideologies subtly communicate moral judgments, and what happens to people’s views on blame and responsibility when they’re told various generalized explanations for violence. I’m also continuing research on the topic of fairness, including how people’s ideological perspectives factor into their views on whether different modes of allocation are just and fair. I have ongoing work that’s concerned with how the interpretation of causation connects with self-blame after the experience of violence and stigmatization.

What is the most interesting fact you have uncovered in your research?

I have been continually interested by the far-reaching implications of what I’ve learned about people’s endorsements of certain moral values. Of course, moral commitments in no way guarantee behavior or judgments that read as praiseworthy. But in comparison to commitments to do no harm, commitments to be loyal, obey authority, and maintain purity have a particularly striking tendency to be linked to unsavory outcomes. These include stigmatization and blame of victims, moralized judgments that are antithetic to justice. Moral commitments likely provide a relatively rigid framework for people’s judgments about victims. However, we found that patterns in how we talk and write about violent events also affect victim-blaming. Linguistic focus on perpetrators rather than victims reduces victim-blaming. I’m now looking in detail at how linguistic focus influences judgments of who is responsible and who should be held accountable across a range of morally-relevant events. This line of research has implications for how people involved in global affairs and policy-making might peaceably convey information.

What are you most looking forward to in teaching your PCJ courses?

I’m looking forward to working with students to apply what we know from past research in psychology to better understand the best practical approaches to furthering peace and justice, and reducing conflict. There’s excellent potential for novel approaches to global problems to be found in findings from moral psychology in particular. PCJ students are invested in broadly promoting positive change, and I believe that a strong grounding in empirical science is empowering for this endeavor. I hope that they’ll feel better equipped to take a scientific approach to their future work, which I believe has powerful implications for humanity.

What advice would you give a student studying Peace, Conflict & Justice Studies?

I have been amazed by the steadfastness with which students approach their studies. By and large, they’re driven by some persistent question – or many questions. They just want to understand and are deeply driven by this. I think students are served well by taking themselves and their intellectual commitments seriously, and weaving that together with frank consideration of how and with whom they would be excited to spend their days, and where they will find continued inspiration.