Stephen Vaisey

Associate Professor of Sociology

Senior Fellow, Kenan Institute for Ethics

Duke University

What I Study

The main goal of my current research is to understand the varieties, origins, and consequences of different moral worldviews. I want to know where people get their ideas about what a "good life" looks like and what it means to be a "good person" and how these (usually implicit) ideas help shape their strategies of action over time. In recent months, I have also been writing about the promise and pitfalls of panel data for causal inference.

In the past, I have also conducted research on 1970s communes, religion and marijuana use, educational overqualification, gene-environment interactions, and the relationship between poverty and educational aspirations.

NEW: check out the Measuring Morality project site for more information on the data we recently collected using the most common morality instruments from sociology and psychology. If you're interested in getting the data when it's public (soon), please email me.