Nina Powell received a bachelor’s degrees (magna cum laude) in psychology and French studies from The University of North Caroline at Greensboro. Nina went on to complete her PhD at the University of Birmingham, UK in moral psychology. Nina’s main research interests are moral condemnation, the development of moral reasoning, and how we judge virtue compared to vice. After completing her PhD at the University of Birmingham, Nina stayed on as a postdoctoral research fellow funded by the Leverhulme Trust, and investigated how negativity biases in judging morality, and the effect of condemnation and praise on well-being. Her research has shown that people are very willing to condemn others without looking for potential mitigating information even when they are uninformed and have nothing to gain directly from condemning. She has also found that the experience of condemning another person and being morally outraged in some situations can be an enjoyable and positive experience, despite what people may report explicitly. Finally, her research has demonstrated that moral reasoning is very late developing, and she argues that attempts to detect early signs of crude morality in infants and young children are misguided and demonstrative of a misunderstanding of what it is to be a moral agent. Currently, Nina is in a two-year fellowship at the National University of Singapore researching honesty and how people use evidence to determine if a person is honest or dishonest.

Nina has written on topics including the morality and pain, children’s morality and early-childhood intervention, and moral panic relating to sexism. She has spoken at international conferences on morality and the development of moral judgements. Pursuing an understanding of the moralisation and moral panic associated with parenting and gender roles are some of her additional research interests. She believes we are living during an interesting period in history with moral dissonance and moral panic playing a major role in decision making; everything has a moral component, from recycling to parenting to how we se advertising. Her goal is to understand culturally what has led us to this point as a society, and how and when moral principles emerge.