Draft:Kurt James Gray

Kurt Gray
Born	Kurt James Gray
Education	University of Waterloo (BSc) Harvard University (PhD)
Known for	Mind perception Moral typecasting Theory of dyadic morality
Notable work	The Mind Club (2016) Outraged (2025)
Awards	APS Janet Taylor Spence Award (2014) SPSP Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize (2013) SESP Career Trajectory Award (2025)
Scientific career
Fields	Social psychology Moral psychology
Workplaces	Ohio State University University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University of Maryland, College Park
Doctoral advisor	Daniel Wegner
Website	kurtjgray.com

Kurt James Gray is a Canadian-born social psychologist who works in the United States. His research concerns moral psychology, mind perception, and political polarization. He is the Weary Foundation Endowed Chair in Social Psychology at Ohio State University, where he directs the Deepest Beliefs Lab and the Collaborative on the Science of Polarization and Misinformation (C-SPAM). He previously taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

With Daniel Wegner he co-authored The Mind Club (2016). His 2025 book Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground was reviewed in The New Yorker, Nature, Science, and New Scientist. With Chelsea Schein he proposed the theory of dyadic morality, a harm-centered account of moral judgment often contrasted with moral foundations theory.

Early life and education

Gray grew up in Canada and first planned to study geophysics. He has said a night stranded in the Canadian wilderness during a student work placement led him toward psychology instead.

He received an honours B.Sc. in psychology, with a minor in earth science, from the University of Waterloo in 2003, and the university's Alumni Gold Medal that year. He completed a Ph.D. in social psychology at Harvard University in 2010 under Daniel Wegner.

Career

Gray joined the University of Maryland, College Park as an assistant professor in 2010 and moved to UNC Chapel Hill in 2012, becoming professor of psychology and neuroscience in 2022. At UNC he directed the Deepest Beliefs Lab and the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding.

In 2025 he joined Ohio State as the Weary Foundation Endowed Chair in Social Psychology, a position created with a US$5 million gift from Gifford Weary and her family foundation that also supports C-SPAM.

Research

Mind perception

With Heather M. Gray and Wegner, Gray reported in Science in 2007 that people attribute minds along two dimensions: agency (planning and self-control) and experience (feeling pain, hunger, joy, and related states). Respondents in that study treated infants as high in experience and low in agency, and God as high in agency and low in experience.

Gray and Wegner later argued that the uncanny valley reflects attributions of experience to entities that lack a living body. In a 2012 target article in Psychological Inquiry, Gray, Liane Young, and Adam Waytz argued that moral judgment depends on perceiving minds that cause or suffer harm. In a commentary in the same issue, Andrew E. Monroe, Steve Guglielmo, and Bertram F. Malle argued that a moral dyad of agent and patient does not exhaust moral judgment and that the “essence” claim overreached.

Moral typecasting and dyadic morality

Gray and Wegner described moral typecasting as a tendency to sort people into moral agents (those who do good or harm) and moral patients (those who receive it), with occupancy of one role reducing perceived fitness for the other.

Gray and Schein later developed the theory of dyadic morality (TDM). On that account, people condemn acts in proportion to perceived harm by an intentional agent against a vulnerable victim, and they often infer harm even in scenarios written to be victimless. TDM is presented as an alternative to moral foundations theory, which treats care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity as partly independent foundations.

Other researchers have disputed the stronger claim that harm is the master template of all moral judgment. In a 2015 comment in Social Psychological and Personality Science, Jesse Graham argued that studies by Gray and colleagues did not show that perceived harm explains differences between judgments of harm and impurity, a split that moral foundations theory ties to political disagreement. Edward B. Royzman and Samuel H. Borislow reported experimental cases of "wrongless harms": acts that match an agent–patient harm pattern but are not judged immoral. In a review of Outraged, Elizabeth Kolbert treated Gray's harm thesis as a live challenge to modular accounts rather than an established consensus.

Later work has studied the same kind of political disagreement through perceptions of harm. In a 2025 review in the Annual Review of Psychology, Gray and Samuel Pratt wrote that liberals and conservatives can share a harm-based view of morality and still disagree because they see harm in different places. Across twelve studies, Womick, Kubin, Gray, and colleagues reported that disagreement on divisive issues lines up with different assumptions about who is vulnerable to victimization, including the environment, marginalized groups, powerful people, and religious targets. Those assumptions predicted moral judgments even after moral-foundations scores were taken into account. Reviewing the book in New Scientist, Chen Ly described this harm account as a reading of political division in which opponents are motivated by the same concern about harm, and treated its call for moral humility as a proposed way across that divide.

Robots and artificial intelligence

With Yochanan Bigman, Gray reported aversion to machines making morally freighted decisions, which they linked to the belief that machines neither fully think nor feel. Later work found less outrage at algorithmic than at human discrimination, which the authors attributed to weaker ascriptions of prejudiced intent.

Religion

Using reverse correlation, Gray and colleagues generated composite images of how American Christians pictured God's face and reported that those images varied with respondents' politics. Other work with Michele Gelfand associated "tight" cultures with belief in more punishing gods.

Polarization

Gray argues that partisans often see their own side as vulnerable, and that perceived threat helps explain moral condemnation of opponents. A 2021 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper with colleagues reported that personal stories of harm moved people across moral divides more than facts and statistics. He co-authored a 2022 Nature Human Behaviour review of interventions aimed at reducing partisan animosity.

Those claims are the core of Outraged (2025). Kolbert summarized Gray's thesis that harm is the "master key" of morality and that political fights turn on whose vulnerability people see. Leor Zmigrod's Nature review accepted the shared-harm framing but asked whether exchanging stories of victimhood can replace evidence in public debate. Science reviewed the book as a proposed framework for lowering moral conflict.

Books

• Wegner, Daniel M.; Gray, Kurt (2016). The Mind Club: Who Thinks, What Feels, and Why It Matters. New York: Viking Press. ISBN 978-0-670-78583-4.
• Gray, Kurt; Graham, Jesse, eds. (2018). Atlas of Moral Psychology. New York: Guilford Press. ISBN 978-1-4625-3256-8.
• Gray, Kurt (2025). Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground. New York: Pantheon Books. ISBN 978-0-593-31743-3.

Awards

Gray is a fellow of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Society of Experimental Social Psychology. Selected honors include the SPSP Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize (2013), the APS Janet Taylor Spence Award (2014), and the SESP Career Trajectory Award (2025).

Personal life

Gray is married to the psychologist Kristen Lindquist; they moved from UNC Chapel Hill to Ohio State in 2025.

Selected publications

• Gray, Heather M.; Gray, Kurt; Wegner, Daniel M. (2007). "Dimensions of Mind Perception". Science. 315 (5812): 619. doi:10.1126/science.1134475. PMID 17272713.
• Gray, Kurt; Wegner, Daniel M. (2009). "Moral typecasting: Divergent perceptions of moral agents and moral patients". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 96 (3): 505–520. doi:10.1037/a0013748. PMID 19254100.
• Gray, Kurt; Young, Liane; Waytz, Adam (2012). "Mind Perception Is the Essence of Morality". Psychological Inquiry. 23 (2): 101–124. doi:10.1080/1047840X.2012.651387. PMC 3379786. PMID 22754268.
• Schein, Chelsea; Gray, Kurt (2018). "The Theory of Dyadic Morality: Reinventing Moral Judgment by Redefining Harm". Personality and Social Psychology Review. 22 (1): 32–70. doi:10.1177/1088868317698288. PMID 28504021.
• Kubin, Emily; Puryear, Curtis; Schein, Chelsea; Gray, Kurt (2021). "Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 118 (6) e2008389118. doi:10.1073/pnas.2008389118. PMC 8017940. PMID 33526500.
• Hartman, Rachel; et al. (2022). "Interventions to reduce partisan animosity". Nature Human Behaviour. 6 (9): 1194–1205. doi:10.1038/s41562-022-01442-3. PMID 36104536.
• Gray, Kurt; Pratt, Samuel (2025). "Morality in Our Mind and Across Cultures and Politics". Annual Review of Psychology. 76: 663–691. doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-020924-124236. PMID 39413201.
• Womick, Jake; Kubin, Emily; et al. (2026). "Liberals and Conservatives See Different Victims: Moral Disagreement Is Explained by Different Assumptions of Vulnerability". Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. doi:10.1177/01461672261422957.

See also

• Moral foundations theory
• Social intuitionism
• Theory of mind
• Political polarization

External links

• Official website
• Faculty profile, Ohio State University
• Google Scholar profile

Category:Living people Category:Year of birth missing (living people) Category:Canadian social psychologists Category:American social psychologists Category:Harvard University alumni Category:University of Waterloo alumni Category:Ohio State University faculty Category:University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill faculty Category:University of Maryland, College Park faculty Category:Moral psychologists Category:21st-century psychologists Category:Fellows of the Association for Psychological Science