About me
My name is Matthew Stanley. I am currently a post-doctoral research associate at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University where I conduct empirical research and teach graduate-level courses in the daytime MBA and MMS programs. I received my PhD in Psychology & Neuroscience from Duke University.
I take an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approach to doing ethics research, drawing from organizational behavior, social and cognitive psychology, philosophy and behavioral economics. I also have secondary research interests in belief, memory, and imagination, especially where those domains intersect with ethics.
My recent work has explored questions like: How do people legitimize the unfair and harmful treatment of workers? Why are people motivated to punish others for committing moral transgressions? How do positive stereotypes exacerbate inequality and limit others’ agency? How do subtle linguistic changes in framing moral transgressions affect people's responses to those transgressions? After we commit moral transgressions, how do biases preserve our beliefs that we are morally good?
Ultimately, most of my research is grounded in the desire to better understand why otherwise good people who want to be morally upstanding nevertheless treat others in unfair, harmful, and unjust ways, and to offer solutions to make us better as individuals and organizations. This research directly informs my teaching in management and business ethics, where I attempt to systematically identify and explain problems that individuals and organizations face, while offering concrete, easy-to-implement solutions to overcome them.
My work has been published in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cognition, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Journal of Personality, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Current Directions in Psychological Science, and other journals. Outlets like the BBC, Forbes, Financial Times, and The Wall Street Journal have also covered my research.
