I am a fourth year graduate student in Social Psychology at the University of Virginia.

I study morality, with a focus on its basis in emotion and how it is constrained by, and expressed in, the body. I am currently working on projects with Jon Haidt (my advisor), Jerry Clore, Shige Oishi, and Jim Coan on a variety of topics such as how notions of purity and pollution shape moral thinking and behavior.

For a quick introduction to one of my main research interests, see the following article which I wrote with Jerry Clore for the Scientific American website. It gives our perspective on a recent paper that found that physical cleansing can influence people's moral judgments.

Clean and Virtuous: When Physical Purity Becomes Moral Purity

contact: gsherman@virginia.edu