Rate My Professor Simon Laham

Associate Professor Simon Laham serves in the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne, part of the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences. As Associate Professor in Psychology, he directs the Moral Psychology Laboratory, focusing on the psychological bases of moral and ethical judgement, decision-making, and behaviour. His research draws on social and cognitive psychology to explore the nature of morality and sociality, the ways people make moral judgements, biases inherent in ethical decision making, and factors that shape ethical reflection and behaviour.

Laham's academic interests span social psychology, moral psychology, motivational psychology, emotional communication, personality, attitudes, intergroup relations, and metacognition. He has produced influential scholarship, including the paper 'Mood effects on eyewitness memory: Affective influences on susceptibility to misinformation' (Forgas, Laham, and Vargas, 2005), 'Blaming, praising, and protecting our humanity: The implications of everyday dehumanization for judgments of moral status' (Bastian, Laham, Wilson, Haslam, and Koval, 2011), 'The name-pronunciation effect: Why people like Mr. Smith more than Mr. Colquhoun' (Laham, Koval, and Alter, 2012), 'Multiple emotions: A person-centered approach to the relationship between intergroup emotion and action orientation' (Fernando, Kashima, and Laham, 2014), 'Darwinian grandparenting: Preferential investment in more certain kin' (Laham, Gonsalkorale, and Von Hippel, 2005), 'Expanding the moral circle: Inclusion and exclusion mindsets and the circle of moral regard' (Laham, 2009), 'Easy on the mind, easy on the wrongdoer: Discrepantly fluent violations are deemed less morally wrong' (Laham, Alter, and Goodwin, 2009), and 'The Socio-Moral Image Database (SMID): A novel stimulus set for the study of social, moral and affective processes' (Crone, Bode, Murawski, and Laham, 2018). Laham co-edited the book 'Social motivation: Conscious and unconscious processes' (Forgas, Williams, Laham, and Von Hippel, 2005) and contributed the chapter 'Halo effects' to 'Cognitive illusions' (Forgas and Laham, 2016). His work has advanced understandings of affective influences on cognition, dehumanization, intergroup dynamics, and socio-moral processes in psychology.