Matthew Vanaman
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Why is it immoral to have sex with your sister? Ask people from ten different cultures and you’ll get ten different answers, yet most will have a strong opinion. Just as people from nearly all cultures have sex – albeit in radically diverse ways – nearly all cultures create sacred rules and rituals about how sex should be done. Underneath an apparent moral relativism lies a seemingly universal drive to moralize sex – and for that matter, potentially any and all dimensions of social life, depending on time and place.
This fascinating pattern raises several equally fascinating questions. Why are we moralizing creatures? By what process do we moralize things? How – and to what extent – can scientific descriptions of morality help traverse the gap between the moral diversity found across people and cultures, and the uniquely moral experience they paradoxically seem to share? My scholarship seeks to answer such questions by drawing from diverse methods and perspectives found 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 and enlightenment ideals
- Vanaman, M.E. Revisiting the Disgust–Conservatism Link: A Meta-Analysis of Unpublished Evidence.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.