Much of my research focuses on how we reason about what is moral, possible, and common. Based on previous findings showing that default representations of possibility often exclude events that are prescriptively and descriptively abnormal (i.e., immoral, irrational, and statistically improbable), my work with Dr. Jonathan Phillips extends this by asking whether moral judgments rely on a default representation of possibility. We find evidence of a common default template for moral judgment that becomes differentiated upon reflection. Further, our results suggest that default representations of moral permissibility reflect default representations of possibility.

Acierno, J., Mischel, S., & Phillips, J. (2022). Moral judgements reflect default representations of possibility. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 377(1866), 20210341. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0341

Building on the finding that what comes to mind is informed by subjective value and commonality, we ask whether people have an intuitive theory of the decision-making process that allows them to infer others’ subjective values from the options that come to mind. Across four studies we find that participants are able to infer others’ subjective values—including in the moral domain—by inverting their intuitive understanding of the option-generation process. Our results suggest that such inferences follow the principles of diagnosticity and screening off, such that participants only make strong inferences about others’ general values when their consideration cannot be explained some other way. 

Acierno, J., Kennedy, C., Cushman, F., & Phillips, J. (2025). Inverse option generation: Inferences about others' values based on what comes to mind. Cognition, 264, 106238. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106238

Additional work with Gokul Srinivasan utilizes large language models to investigate how people generate options when faced with open-ended problems. Across three experiments, we apply semantic similarity and sentiment analyses to the options that participants sequentially generate for real-world decision problems, and find that the first options generated tend to be sampled from a relatively local region of semantic space and are typically of high value. As additional options are generated, they become increasingly dissimilar and are of lower value. These patterns hold at both the level of individual option generation trajectories within a given participant and at the level of individual differences across participants. 

Srinivasan, G., Acierno, J., & Phillips, J. (2022). The shape of option generation in open-ended decision problems. Proceedings of the Forty-Fourth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

How can we harness moral and descriptive social norms to bring about positive social change, such as increasing pro-climate behavior and decreasing belief in misinformation? Here, we combine data experimentally testing the efficacy of moral and descriptive norm based interventions across 42 nations, with national metrics of cultural tightness, to ask whether the influence of social norms varies as a function of cultural tightness—the degree that people adhere to shared cultural norms. 

Acierno, J.*, Tedaldi, E.*, Ginn, J., Goldwert, D., Vlasceanu, M., Geiger, S.,, Sparkman, G., & Constantino, S. (under revision). A Global Test of Whether Cultural Tightness Moderates Conformity to Norms in an Experimental Setting.

* denotes shared first-authorship.

I am currently extending my work on reasoning about morality and possibility to ask how people sample information to form impressions of others’ moral beliefs and behavior. Using a modified information foraging paradigm (preview here), I will examine this in the context of moral norms (i.e., what ought to be done) and descriptive norms (i.e., what is commonly done). In the paradigm, participants are given the opportunity to open-endedly sample information about other Americans' behavior and moral beliefs. I ask whether individuals differentially search for information when learning about moral and descriptive norms and how this informs domain-relevant decision making.

Acierno, J., Wylie, J., Liang, N., Handley-Miner, I., Young, L., & Constantino, S. (June 2024). Information Sampling for Social Norms. Society for Philosophy and Psychology, West Lafayette, IN.

Additional research using the same paradigm (preview here) examines information seeking to form moral character judgments. Specifically, we focus on the role of curiosity in driving information seeking about ambiguous moral agents, and examine subsequent belief updates.

Acierno, J., Liang, N., Handley-Miner, I., Constantino, S., Kleiman-Weiner, M., Young, L., & Wylie, J. (2025). Curiosity is linked to information seeking in the moral domain. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 47. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/96v2q327

My undergraduate research asks how we integrate information about group members in moral judgment. My work builds on evidence that people point to the moral behavior of close ingroup members to justify their own immoral actions. I test for licensing and consistency effects when participants are primed with the moral actions of a political ingroup member. I also examine the potential moderating effects of the strength of participants’ political and moral identities.

Acierno, J. (2020). Can Good Groups Create Immoral Individuals? Examining Vicarious Moral Licensing in Political Ingroups

My interests primarily lie within the realm of moral cognition, but I have a separate interest in psycholinguistics. I spent 3 years in Macalester College’s iLab, an NSF-funded eye tracking lab, studying idiom comprehension in English and semantic processing in Chinese. One of the lab’s main lines of research examined whether idioms are proceeded independently from literal meanings. Our research finds that both literal and figurative meanings are immediately activated, but literal meanings remain active longer and are less affected by supporting context than figurative meanings.

Sanford, E., Shaffer, O., Acierno, J., Harmon, E., & Lea, R.B. (July 2019). Interpretation on the Fence: Do Idioms Activate Figurative and Literal Meanings Equally? 2019 Annual Meeting of the Society for Text & Discourse, New York City, NY.

Sanford, E., Harmon, E., Acierno, J., Spanos, N., Shaffer, O., & Lea, R.B. (2018). When You Kick the Bucket, Do You Pick Up the Pail? 59th annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, New Orleans, LA.

As Lab Manager I created a project studying foveal load effects in Chinese reading through manipulations of lexical ambiguity. We examined how information density influences parafoveal preview effects by manipulating the density of the parafoveal word (e.g., a word contains several meanings vs. single meaning; or a two-character word where both constituent-characters have similar meanings as the whole word vs. the two constituent-characters have different meanings individually, but form one meaning when combined).