Heather M. Maranges

Background

About Heather M. Maranges

Heather María Maranges (or just Heath) received her PhD in Social and Personality Psychology from Florida State University (Tallahassee, Florida), was awarded the Horizon Postdoctoral Fellowship to conduct research with the Social Justice Centre, Department of Psychology, and Department of Philosophy at Concordia University (Montreal, Quebec), and was director of research at Wake Forest University’s Program for Leadership and Character (Winston-Salem, North Carolina). Currently, Heath is a Research Fellow investigating the role of forgiveness (divine, interpersonal, self) in morality and flourishing at the Family Institute and Department of Human Development and Family Science at Florida State University (see Her work addresses when, why, and how people cooperate, or make decisions in accord with the group’s well-being, and evince virtue. In her research, she examines various processes and ecological factors that shape social and moral cognition. Heather not only employs traditional experimental and individual difference methods but also leverages diverse theories and methods, including those of evolutionary biology, relationship research, philosophy, neuroscience, and genetics to understand how people arrive at their social and moral judgments. Her research has been published in scientific journals such as the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Personality and Individual Differences, and Review of General Psychology and featured in Huffington Post, Consumer Affairs, MSN, and Science Daily. In her current work, Heather explores moral cognitive processes and the centrality of self-control in them. Her research demonstrates that high self-control is associated with less moral temptation and with diverse, often countervailing moral concerns, such as avoiding harm and maximizing outcomes. Her work also highlights that people appear to understand the importance of self-control for cooperation and therefore make inferences about others' self-control abilities to inform attributions of morality and trustworthiness. Heather also examines how childhood environments affect later personality, individual differences, and social and moral cognitive processes, such as moral dilemma judgments. Additionally, Heather investigates bias, stereotyping, and prejudice—whether against people or groups based, e.g, on their weight, race, or gender—which fundamentally undermine broad social cooperation, individual prosociality, and flourishing.