About

Professor Geoffrey Goodwin is a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include decision processes, social and cultural psychology, social cognition, moral psychology, and reasoning. He has contributed to understanding moral character in person perception, the psychology of meta-ethics, and how people judge moral and social actions. Professor Goodwin teaches courses such as Social Psychology, Seminar in Social Psychology, and Proseminar in Social Psychology. He holds a BA in Psychology from the University of Queensland and a Ph.D. in Psychology from Princeton University. His scholarly work includes numerous publications exploring moral intuitions, judgments, and social cognition.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Cognitive psychology
• Epistemology
• Computer science

Selected publications

• Lay beliefs about the badness, likelihood, and importance of human extinction

  PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints) · 2026-02-16

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Human extinction would mean the end of humanity’s achievements, culture, and future potential. According to some ethical views, this would be a terrible outcome for humanity. But what are the public’s beliefs about human extinction? And how much do people prioritize preventing extinction over other societal issues? Across five empirical studies (N = 2,147; U.S. and China), we find that people consider extinction prevention a societal priority and deserving of greatly increased societal resources. However, despite estimating the likelihood of human extinction to be 5% this century, people believe that the chances would need to be around 30% for it to be the very highest priority (U.S. medians). In line with this, people consider extinction prevention to be only one among several important societal issues. We also find that people’s judgments about the relative importance of extinction prevention appear relatively fixed and hard to change by reason-based interventions.

  Publisher

• Lay beliefs about the badness, likelihood, and importance of human extinction

  Scientific Reports · 2026-02-20

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Human extinction would mean the end of humanity’s achievements, culture, and future potential. According to some ethical views, this would be a terrible outcome for humanity. But what are the public’s beliefs about human extinction? And how much do people prioritize preventing extinction over other societal issues? Across five empirical studies (N = 2,147; U.S. and China), we find that people consider extinction prevention a societal priority and deserving of greatly increased societal resources. However, despite estimating the likelihood of human extinction to be 5% this century, people believe that the chances would need to be around 30% for it to be the very highest priority (U.S. medians). In line with this, people consider extinction prevention to be only one among several important societal issues. We also find that people’s judgments about the relative importance of extinction prevention appear relatively fixed and hard to change by reason-based interventions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Lay beliefs about the badness, likelihood, and importance of human extinction

  2026-02-16

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Human extinction would mean the end of humanity’s achievements, culture, and future potential. According to some ethical views, this would be a terrible outcome for humanity. But what are the public’s beliefs about human extinction? And how much do people prioritize preventing extinction over other societal issues? Across five empirical studies (N = 2,147; U.S. and China), we find that people consider extinction prevention a societal priority and deserving of greatly increased societal resources. However, despite estimating the likelihood of human extinction to be 5% this century, people believe that the chances would need to be around 30% for it to be the very highest priority (U.S. medians). In line with this, people consider extinction prevention to be only one among several important societal issues. We also find that people’s judgments about the relative importance of extinction prevention appear relatively fixed and hard to change by reason-based interventions.

  PublisherDOI

• Moral Character

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-02-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Relationship Between Judgments of Evil and Punishment Judgments

  Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025-09-11

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  What consequences result from judging a given act (or its perpetrator) as evil? Because evil actions represent the worst possible forms of immorality, and that on some conceptions evil people are irredeemable, it stands to reason that judgments of evil would predict severe punishments. However, surprisingly little is known about precisely how judgments of evil relate to judgments of punishment. We theorized that judgments of evilness should add unique predictive value beyond comparable, and more widely studied, measures of wrongness, blame, and moral character. In a preregistered study, participants (N = 238) made moral judgments and punishment recommendations in response to a comprehensive range of wrongs (e.g., theft, battery, manslaughter, murder). Results revealed three general findings. First, judgments of evil uniquely predicted punishment recommendations beyond related moral judgments (e.g., wrongness, blame, moral character). Second, judgments of evil uniquely predicted death penalty endorsement and judgments of an offender's potential rehabilitation, whereas other moral judgments did not always do so. Finally, death penalty endorsement and rehabilitation judgments were better associated with person judgments than with act judgments, whereas more general punishment judgments showed no such divergence. These findings illuminate the predictive power of judgments of evil with regard to punishment judgments.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Are moral people happier? Answers from reputation-based measures of moral character.

  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · 2025-03-20 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author

  = 281) self-reported their well-being and nominated informants who provided a second, continuous measure of the targets' moral character. These studies showed that those who are more moral in the eyes of close others, coworkers, and acquaintances generally experience a greater sense of subjective well-being and meaning in life. These associations were generally robust when controlling for key demographic variables (including religiosity) and informant-reported liking. There were no significant differences in the strength of the associations between moral character and well-being across two major subdimensions of both moral character (kindness and integrity) and well-being (subjective well-being and meaning in life). Together, these studies provide the most comprehensive evidence to date of a positive and general association between everyday moral character and well-being. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Author response for "The Relationship Between Judgments of Evil and Punishment Judgments"

  2025-06-06

  peer-reviewSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• A large-scale investigation of everyday moral dilemmas

  PNAS Nexus · 2025-04-30 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Questions of right and wrong are central to daily life, yet scientific understanding of everyday moral dilemmas is limited. We conducted a data-driven analysis of these phenomena by combining state-of-the-art tools in machine learning with survey-based methods. We extracted and analyzed 369,161 descriptions (“posts”) and 11 M evaluations (“comments”) of dilemmas from the largest known online repository of everyday moral dilemmas: Reddit's “Am I the Asshole?” Users described a wide variety of everyday dilemmas on topics ranging from broken promises to privately held emotions. Dilemmas involving relational obligations were the most frequently reported, while those pertaining to honesty were the most frequently condemned. The types of dilemmas people experienced depended on the interpersonal closeness of the interactants, with some dilemmas (e.g. politeness) more prominent in distant–other interactions and others (e.g. relational transgressions) more prominent in close–other interactions. A preregistered follow-up investigation showed that similar dilemmas are reported in a census-stratified representative sample of the US population (n = 510). Overall, this paper highlights the diversity of moral dilemmas experienced in daily life and contributes to the development of a moral psychology grounded in the vagaries of everyday experience.

  PublisherDOI

• Disentangling the contributions of impact-oriented versus reputation-focused legacy motives on intergenerational concern and action

  Journal of Environmental Psychology · 2023-08-01 · 18 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• A Large-Scale Investigation of Everyday Moral Dilemmas

  2023-07-11 · 7 citations

  preprintOpen access

  Questions of right and wrong are central to daily life, yet scientific understanding of everyday moral dilemmas remains limited. We conducted a data-driven analysis of these phenomena by combining state-of-the-art tools in machine learning with survey-based methods. We extracted and analyzed 369,161 descriptions (“posts”) and 11M evaluations (“comments”) of dilemmas from the largest known online repository of everyday moral dilemmas: Reddit’s “Am I the Asshole?” Users described a wide variety of underexplored everyday dilemmas on topics ranging from broken promises to privately held emotions. Dilemmas involving relational obligations were the most frequently reported, while those pertaining to honesty were the most broadly condemned. The types of dilemmas people experienced depended on the interpersonal closeness of the interactants, with some dilemmas (e.g., politeness) more prominent in distant-other interactions, and others (e.g., relational transgressions) more prominent in close-other interactions. A preregistered follow-up investigation showed that similar dilemmas are reported in a census-stratified representative sample of the US population (N = 510). Finally, a longitudinal investigation showed that shifts in social interactions prompted by the global pandemic resulted in predictable shifts in landscape of moral dilemmas. Overall, this paper highlights the diversity of moral dilemmas experienced in daily life and contributes to the foundation of a moral psychology grounded in the vagaries of everyday experience.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Marking the Boundaries of Punishment: Retribution Directed at Innocents, Animals & Collectives

  NSF · $75k · 2012–2014

Frequent coauthors

• Corey Cusimano

  19 shared

• P. N. Johnson‐Laird

  New York University

  19 shared

• Jared Piazza

  Lancaster University

  13 shared

• Justin F. Landy

  Nova Southeastern University

  12 shared

• Dena M. Gromet

  University of Pennsylvania

  11 shared

• Hanne M Watkins

  University of Pennsylvania

  7 shared

• Paul Rozin

  University of Pennsylvania

  7 shared

• Sangeet Khemlani

  6 shared

Labs

• Geoffrey Goodwin LabPI