Hongbo Yu, “Representational Spaces of Social Relationship and Morality”

Institute of Personality and Social Research Colloquium

Relationship and morality are two cornerstones in social life. How do we represent the myriad social relationships and moral considerations in our mind? Do (and how) these mental representations differ across cultures? Leveraging a recent trend in cognitive science that underscores latent multidimensional space in understanding mental representation, our recent work aims to ascertain the mental representations of social relationship and moral cognition. Moreover, everyday moral cognition occurs in relational context. I will talk about a computational model that explains how relationship values modulate moral judgment.

Dr. Yu received his Ph.D. in psychology in 2016 and his B.S. in physics in 2010 from Peking University, China. His Ph.D. work with Dr. Xiaolin Zhou investigated the neural bases of social emotions (e.g., guilt, gratitude) by developing social interactive tasks that can naturally and repeatedly elicit social emotions in laboratory environments. Shortly after receiving his Ph.D., Dr. Yu joined Dr. Molly Crockett's lab as a postdoctoral researcher, first at the University of Oxford, where he was awarded a British Academy Newton International Fellowship, and then at Yale University. His postdoctoral research has focused on the neurocomputational mechanisms of moral judgment and decision-making. He joined the faculty at UCSB in 2019.