MADLAB co-director highlighted in GIST Magazine
The co-director of the Kenan Institute for Ethics’ Moral Attitudes and Decision-Making Lab is featured in a special 10th anniversary issue of GIST Magazine, produced by Duke’s Social Science Research Institute (SSRI).
In a Q&A with the magazine, Jana Schaich Borg, who also serves as an assistant research professor at SSRI, shares insight on what it’s like to teach one of the most popular Massive Open Online Courses on learning site, Coursera, and what it takes to be a successful data scientist. Her work with Kenan and at Duke has included research on how and why humans and animals make social decisions, including moral decisions.
“It is very difficult for me to get my head wrapped around the fact that humans intentionally hurt each other,” Borg said in the interview. “The only way I could handle learning about such events is if I tried to do something to stop them or at least understand them.”
Since 2010, Borg has co-authored seven publications with Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, the Chauncey Stillman Professor in Practical Ethics in the Department of Philosophy and the Kenan Institute for Ethics, who directs the Moral Attitudes and Decsion-Making Lab. Their most recent work, “Distinct neuronal patterns of positive and negative moral processing in psychopathy,” was published last year in Cognitive, Affective, & Behaviorial Neuroscience.
