NSU faculty member presents at Oxford

On June 6, NSU faculty member and Cherokee Nation citizen, Alissa Baker-Oglesbee, gave a presentation titled, The Fallibility of Science on Moral Reasoning, at the Experiments and Ethics: An Interdisciplinary Conference, hosted by the Ertegun House at Oxford. The conference was one of many regularly scheduled special topics conferences the institution puts on each year.

Kevin Tobia, a graduate student studying Philosophy at the University of Oxford, organized this particular conference, attended by roughly 40 people, most of who are philosophers.

Tobia and Baker-Oglesbee have been collaborating on the topic of this presentation for some time, combining Baker-Oglesbees psychology background and Tobias in philosophy.

My presentation was based on a study that is a collaboration between Kevin Tobia, my colleague in Oxford, and my lab (to include myself and some of my undergraduate research assistants: Dale Arnold, Savanah McKnight, and Holly Caddell), said Oglesbee. We are performing a replication of a study that received a lot of attention on howsubtly cuing people to think about science concepts (priming science concepts) affects their moral decision making.

This collaborative study has been in the works for about a year at this point and the research team hopes to be finished collecting data by the end of next spring so that the conclusions can be submitted for publication next summer. At the conference, the presentation given was based on two of four total experiments and one correlation.

Baker-Oglesbees initial interest in the idea came from the conclusions of the original study that found that participants who were primed with science made "more moral" decisions. After analyzing the study, she felt that the study was lacking.

I had two major contentions with this conclusion: a) I felt these results would be very limited to specific groups of people (such as people who are more liberal and value science) and should not be generalized to all groups, and b) philosophically, defining morality is a very difficult thing to do and the original study authors did not make clear how they were doing so. It was clear that in their study, there were single 'correct answers' in the moral scenarios while it can be easily argued that there is a range of appropriate moral decisions depending on culture and circumstance (among other things), said Baker-Oglesbee.

In completing her own study, Baker-Oglebee hopes to be able to offer a critique on the Western bias of morality presented in the study while pointing out an instance of scientism (the idea that science will solve all problems andcould regulate subjective areas like morality).

To not only to curb her own interests in the subject matter, but also to provide a great opportunity to expose her undergraduate assistants to new ideas and techniques, Baker-Oglebee made the decision to make science and morals the topic of study.

I felt a lot of awe and respect for the people who were there, and was really pumped to have the chance to share some fascinating conversations with people in different areas of study (I was the only person representing psychology), said Baker-Oglesbee. The fact that I was pregnant with my daughter also made it a really special experience. It was empowering to present while visibly pregnant, really just making a visual statement that mothers and women have a place in the sciences and in areas of academia that tend to be more male-dominated.

Baker-Oglesbee is an active member in the presentation aspect of research in psychology both locally and nationally.

In the fall of 2013 she took her lab to Oklahoma Research Day in Edmond, and in the spring of the same year, her and some of her students attended the Southwestern Psychological Association conference in San Antonio, TX.

The most valuable realization was that a small town mixed Native girl like me can make it in a place like Oxford, and that to get those kind of places you have to work on networking and collaborating, said Baker-Oglesbee. It was a great lesson that the best projects are not executed singularly, but by a community. I feel like it helps me to empower students who come from a similar background as me (which is a lot of students at NSU) and show them that it is possible for them to go far. My hopes are that I can encourage other Natives and women to participate in STEM areas and get involved in research. If underrepresented groups don't guide the conversation, issues important to those groups won't be explored.