Andrew J. Vonasch
I am a social and personality psychologist who studies the mental processes that enable human agency and moral character. I conduct experiments inspired by philosophical questions, such as "do people have free will?" and "what does it mean to be a moral person?" I'm interested in big questions like what makes a person moral, and what makes them rational.
​
My main interest currently is understanding how people think about other people's ulterior motives. I'm using a new model to understand this: the Heuristic of Sufficient Explanation. The idea is simple, but its applications are complex. People observing someone's behavior ask themselves: do the publicly available reasons for their behavior offer sufficient explanation for it? If yes, people mostly assume those are the real reasons. But if no, they look for some hidden motive, belief, information, intentions, or something else that might explain their behavior. Often, it's an ulterior motive, and that's important, because if we think someone is hiding their true motivations, it can be hard to trust them, interact with them, cooperate with them, or even tolerate them.
​
Some applications of the Heuristic of Sufficient Explanation include understanding: why people reject free money, why people believe conspiracy theories, why people censor speech, why people reject dates from extremely attractive people.
​
I am a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Canterbury, in Christchurch, New Zealand.
​
I can be contacted at andrew.vonasch@canterbury.ac.nz
MY RESEARCH
​
​
Humans are different from other animals in several ways. Notably, humans use reflective thinking to control and guide their own behavior. We form cooperative societies that function not just because the leader is strong enough to beat up his subordinates, but because people follow a moral and legal code of conduct. Human societies and the individuals within them flourish mainly because people use thinking to control themselves and are moral.
​
My research investigates the mental processes that enable human agency and morality. My work falls into the four areas described below.
EDUCATION AND RELEVANT EXPERIENCE
2021-Present
Senior Lecturer in Psychology
University of Canterbury, New Zealand
2018-2020
Lecturer in Psychology
University of Canterbury, New Zealand
​
2016-2018
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Advisor: Kurt Gray
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
​
RESEARCH INTERESTS
2010-2016
Ph.D. and M.S. in Psychology
Advisor: Roy F. Baumeister
Florida State University
Moral Motivation
People are highly motivated to be cooperative, for two main reasons: a motivation to be good and a motivation to appear good. My colleagues and I are studying how strongly motivated people are to appear good. Human's survival strategy is to satisfy our various evolutionary needs (e.g., shelter, food, medicine, mates) through cooperation. You need a good reputation as a moral person who won't cheat or harm others, or no one will want to cooperate with you. So people are really protective of their moral reputations. They're willing to do a lot to avoid reputation damage in my experiments, including sticking their hands in a bucket of squirming worms (Vonasch, Reynolds, Winegard, & Baumeister, 2017).
2009-2010
Research Assistant
Advisor: John Bargh
Yale University
2002-2006
B.A. in Psychology and Economics
Advisors: Bill Banks, Suzanne Thompson, and Cecilia Conrad
Pomona College
Human agency and free will
Free will is sometimes considered an unscientific, religious concept—but it's not. Free will is simply the ability to make a choice unconstrained by social pressure or mental impairment. Free will is essential to understanding moral agency. A long term goal of my research is to show that free will is a viable, practical scientific concept. To that end, I have conducted several studies on how believing in free will can be important in preventing addictive behaviors. Moreover, I have studied how people control themselves, and what happens when mental fatigue sets in. When fatigued, people become more mentally passive and rely on simple decision-making rules to save energy for the future.
Understanding moral diversity
To act morally one must know what is moral. But different groups view morality differently. Liberals think a flat tax is unfair, while conservatives think richer people should not be punished for economic success with higher taxes. One puzzle for social psychologists is to uncover why people disagree about moral questions. I received a grant to study why people disagree about fairness. My approach is to follow the perceptions of harm. Preliminary results indicate that liberals perceive much harm resulting from raising taxes on the poor, whereas conservatives perceive much harm resulting from taxing people whose incomes are flourishing.
Reading intentions
Cooperation with others usually means knowing other people's intentions. Sure, you can ask people what they are going to do, or what they would do if they had a chance to cheat you—but people lie. Observing how people deal with tradeoffs is more revealing of their true intentions. If someone violates a moral norm for money, it tells you more about their intentions to violate that norm than if someone violates that same norm to save their child. If someone was forced to help the environment at gunpoint, you learn little about their values, whereas if they freely and eagerly or reluctantly helped, you learn much more. Recently, I've begun studying how people think about the intentions behind overly generous offers of money, and show when overpayment can backfire and make people less likely to accept an offer.