Expansive interdisciplinarity and the moral self

The authors discuss their work in conducting several psychological experiments to explore what they call the “moral self hypothesis”: that morals matter for identity, and they matter more than many other things. They expected some of the challenges of deep integration. They note that each member of their team has been committed to combining philosophy and psychology; how, in collaboration, they have consistently needed to move back and forth between theory and experimental design. That has involved spelling out theoretical statements, operationalizing, looking at results, getting feedback, and revising theories. They also discuss the need to learn statistical modeling in more depth, as well as the need to focus on real-life events. The latter focus has induced them to delve into cross-cultural psychology, and to bring the study of other disciplines, such as history, into the ambit of cognitive science research.