Matthew Vanaman
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Ask people from ten different cultures why or whether something is immoral and you’ll get ten different answers, yet most will have a strong opinion. Underneath this apparent moral relativism lies a seemingly universal tendency to moralize potentially any dimension of social life, depending on time and place. This observation raises several important questions that motivate my scholarship. Why are we moralizing creatures? By what process do we moralize things? And how can scientific descriptions of morality help traverse the gap between descriptive moral diversity and the uniquely moral experience we all paradoxically seem to share? My scholarship tries to answer questions like these by drawing from diverse methods and perspectives across social psychology, experimental philosophy, affective science, complexity science, and applied quantitative psychology.
- PhD Psychology, The City University of New York, 2023
- MPhil Psychology, The City University of New York, 2021
- MS Psychology, The City University of New York, 2021
- BA Psychology, Stetson University, 2017
Biography
Matthew E. Vanaman joined Stetson University as an Assistant Professor in Psychology in 2026. Before that, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Statistics and Data Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, where he carried out qualitative and applied psychometric research to help understand and measure the informal data analysis skills experienced analysts learn from applying data analysis in real-world settings.
More About Matthew Vanaman
Areas of Expertise
- Social psychology
- Moral psychology
- Emotion
- Applied psychometrics
Course Sampling
- Behavioral Statistics
- Research Methods and Senior Project
- Social Psychology
- Morality
- Moral emotions
- Thinking and reasoning
- Mind perception
- Person perception
- Social cognition
- Shared reality theory
- The enlightenment ideal
- Vanaman, M.E. Revisiting the Disgust–Conservatism Link: A Meta-Analysis of Unpublished Evidence. Under review at Social Justice Research
- Vanaman, M. E., & Peng, R. D. (2026). The Analytic Fluency Scale: Measuring the Skill of a Data Analyst. Collabra: Psychology, 12(1), 163031.
- Vanaman, M. E., & Chapman, H. A. (2020). Disgust and disgust-driven moral concerns predict support for restrictions on transgender bathroom access. Politics and the Life Sciences, 39(2), 200–214.