JULIA MARSHALL
julia_marshall1@brown.edu
ABOUT ME
I am an Assistant Professor at Brown University in the Department of Cognitive and Psychological Sciences (CoPsy). There, I direct the Mind & Morality Lab. The lab's research focuses on understanding the roots of human cooperation by conducting research with children and adults.
Prior to working at Brown, I was an National Science Foundation post-doctoral fellow in the Cooperation Lab at Boston College. There, I primarily worked with Dr. Katherine McAuliffe. I received my PhD in 2020 under the supervision of Dr. Paul Bloom in the Mind & Development Lab. There, I also focused on questions surrounding the development of moral reasoning. Prior to graduate school, I worked with Dr. Scott Lilienfeld at Emory University. There, I primarily investigated psychopathy's relationship to moral judgment.
I will be reviewing applications for graduate students to begin in Fall 2025. For more information about the graduate application process, please see this website.
MY RESEARCH
My research focuses on the development of cooperation.
In what ways do children reason similarly or differently about cooperation compared to adults?
Illustrations by Molly Coyne
How do children & adults respond to transgression & why?
One key way that human societies maintain cooperation is through intervention in response to transgression. When others act in ways that break social & moral norms, we feel an immediate desire to rectify injustice. Much of my recent work focuses on how children reason about the pursuit of punishment (Marshall et al., 2024; JEP: General), whether children are willing to pursue punishment of transgressors (Marshall et al., 2024; Child Development), and why (Marshall, Yudkin, & Crockett, 2021; Nature Human Behaviour). This work broadly demonstrates that children are both assessors and agents of punishment (Marshall & McAuliffe, 2022; Nature Reviews Psychology).
When do children & adults think we're obligated to cooperate with others?
Cooperation can manifest in a variety of ways, including helping and punishment. These sorts of behaviors, though, rarely happen in a vacuum. Instead, these behaviors typically emerge within specific social contexts involving known and unknown others. In this vein, much of my recent work has investigated the ways in which children and adults take social relationship into account when ascribing both prosocial & punitive obligations. For example, we find that younger children are much less inclined to take social relationship into account compared to older children when considering obligations to help (Marshall, Wynn, & Bloom, 2020; Child Development) and obligations to intervene in response to transgression (Marshall, Mermin-Bunnell, & Bloom, 2020; Cognition). We also find that these developmental patterns emerge across a variety of disparate cultures, including Germany, India, Japan, & Uganda (Marshall, Gollwitzer, Mermin-Bunnell, Shinomiya, Retelsdorf, & Bloom, 2022; Journal of Experimental Psychology: General).
What factors influence the development of prejudicial attitudes?
The emergence of prejudicial attitudes represents a serious problem in society. To address this, some of my recent work has focused on delineating the particular psychological factors that may promote the development of prejudicial attitudes. This work has found that a domain-general aversion to deviancy plays a role in shaping prejudice against atypical individuals in our society (Gollwitzer, Marshall, Yang, & Bargh, 2018; Nature Human Behaviour) but less so against racial minorities (Gollwitzer, Marshall, & Bargh, 2019; Journal of Experimental Psychology: General). Beyond deviancy, my work has also examined how status beliefs relate to biased social preferences in children growing up in non-WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies, including in rural Uganda (Marshall, Gollwitzer, Mermin-Bunnell, & Mandalayawala, 2022; Developmental Science).
MY PUBLICATIONS
26. Marshall, J., Mermin-Bunnell, K., Gollwitzer, A., Retelsdorf, J., & Bloom, P. (2024). Cross-cultural conceptions of third-party intervention across childhood. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
25. McLaughlin, A., Marshall, J., & McAuliffe, K. (2024). Developing conceptions of forgiveness across the lifespan. Child Development.
24. Marshall, J., & Wilks, M. (2024). Does distance matter? How physical and social distance shapes our perceived obligations to others. Open Mind.
23. Gollwitzer, A.*, Marshall, J.*, Lee, Y., Deutchman, P., Warneken, F., & McAuliffe, K. (2024) Parent and community political orientation predicts children's health behaviors. British Journal of Social Psychology. *shared first-authorship
22. Marshall, J. & McAuliffe, K. (2024). How retributive motives shape the emergence of third-party punishment across intergroup contexts. Child Development.
21. Marshall, J., Lee, Y., Deutchman, P., Warneken, F., & McAuliffe, K. (2023). When not helping is nice: Children’s changing evaluations of helping during COVID-19. Developmental Psychology, 59, 953–962.
20. Lee, Y., Marshall, J., Deutchman, P., McAuliffe, K., & Warneken, F. (2022). Children’s judgments of interventions against norm violations: COVID-19 as a naturalistic case study. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 221, 105452.
19. Marshall, J., Gollwitzer, A., & Bloom, P. (2022). Why do children and adults think other people punish? Developmental Psychology, 58, 1783–1792.
18. Marshall, J. & McAuliffe, K. (2022). Children as assessors and agents of third-party punishment. Nature Reviews Psychology,1, 1783–1792.
17. Marshall, J.*, Gollwitzer, A.*, Mermin-Bunnell, N., & Mandalaywala, T. (2022). The role of status in the emergence of pro-white bias in rural Uganda. Developmental Science, e13240. *joint first authorship.
16. Hauser, N., Felthous, A., Hsass, H., Neumann, C., Marshall, J., & Mokros, A. (2022). Rational, emotional, or both? Subcomponents of psychopathy predict opposing moral decisions. Behavioral Sciences and the Law, 39, 541–566.
15. Marshall, J., Gollwitzer, A., Mermin-Bunnell, N., Shinomiya, M., Retelsdorf, J., & Bloom, P. (2022). How development and culture shape intuitions about prosocial obligations. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 151, 1866–1882.
14. Gollwitzer, A., McLoughlin, K., Martel, C., Marshall, J., Hohs, J., & Bargh, J. (2021). Linking self-reported social distancing to real-world behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 13, 656–668.
13. Marshall, J., Yudkin, D., & Crockett, M. (2021). Children punish third parties to satisfy both consequentialist and retributive motives. Nature Human Behaviour, 5, 361–368.
12. Marshall, J., Mermin-Bunnell, K., & Bloom, P. (2020). Developing judgments about peers' obligation to intervene. Cognition, 201, 103215.
11. Marshall, J., Wynn, K., & Bloom, P. (2020). Do children and adults take social relationship into account when evaluating other peoples’ actions? Child Development, 91, 1395–1835.
10. Marshall, J. (2019). Obligations without cooperation. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 43.
9. Gollwitzer, A. & Marshall, J., & Bargh, J. (2019). Pattern deviancy aversion predicts prejudice via a dislike of statistical minorities. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 149, 828–854.
8. Marshall, J., Gollwitzer, A., Wynn, K., & Bloom, P. (2019). The development of third-party corporal punishment. Cognition, 190, 221–229.
7. Marshall, J., Gollwitzer, A., Santos, L. (2018). Two tests of an implicit mentalizing system: Evidence for the submentalizing position. PLoS One, 13, e0194101.
6. Gollwitzer, A., Marshall, J., Wang, Y., & Bargh, J. (2017). Relating pattern deviancy aversion to stigma and prejudice. Nature Human Behaviour, 1, 920–927.
5. Wynn, K., Bloom, P., Jordan, A., Marshall, J., & Sheskin, M. (2017). Not noble savages after all: Limits to early altruism. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 27, 3–8.
4. Marshall, J., Watts, A.L., Frankel, E., Lilienfeld, S.O. (2017). An examination of psychopathy’s relationship with two indices of moral judgment. Personality and Individual Differences, 113, 240–245.
3. Marshall, J., Lilienfeld, S.O., Mayberg, H., & Clark, S. (2017). The mixed effects of neurological information and brain images on perceptions of psychopathic wrongdoers. Journal of Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology, 28, 212–436.
2. Marshall, J., Watts, A., & Lilienfeld, S.O. (2016). Do psychopathic individuals possess a misaligned moral compass? A meta-analytic examination of psychopathy’s relations with moral judgment. Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment, 9, 40–50.
1. Lilienfeld, S.O., Marshall, J., Todd, J. T., & Shane, H. C. (2015). The persistence of fad interventions in the face of negative scientific evidence: Facilitated communication for autism as a case example. Evidence-Based Communication Assessment and Intervention, 8, 1–40.
