Aleksandr Chakroff

Aleksandr Chakroff

Chakroff is a second year PhD candidate in the Psychology Department at Harvard University, working in the Moral Cognition lab of Professor Joshua Greene. He holds a BA from Hampshire College, where he studied cognitive neuroscience and philosophy of mind. Chakroff became interested in studying the neural bases of moral judgment and behavior while working as a research assistant under Professor Kent Kiehl at the University of New Mexico, where his job involved performing brain scans of incarcerated psychopaths. More recently, he explored the role of mental state attribution in moral judgment using fMRI while working under Professor Rebecca Saxe at MIT. Presently, he is exploring the role of the self-concept in ethical behavior, and developing a data-driven approach to fMRI analysis, to elucidate the functional brain networks that underlie moral judgment.

During his fellowship year, he will be working with Elinor Amit, investigating the relationship between conceptual processing and support for the status quo.