Sila Mutaf

LIFE Fellow since 2026, University of Michigan

I'm a PhD candidate in the Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience Area in the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan, working with Andras Molnar and Arnold Ho. My research examines how people make moral and political judgments across social and cultural contexts, with a particular focus on uses of punishment, narratives of victimhood, cultures of honor, and responses to wrongdoing. I take a philosophical and historical approach to understanding the motivations underlying human behavior and moral judgment, and how these processes produce both similarities and differences across cultures. My work uses experimental and survey methods, cross-cultural comparisons, and computational text analysis of archival materials to examine how moral beliefs and social norms are expressed, communicated, and transformed across societies and over time.