122. What Sparks Change in Our View of Animals? PHAIR 2025 with Dr. Matti Wilks and Dr Luke Mcguire

The Deal With Animals with Marika S. Bell

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Special Episode: Psychology for Human Animal Intergroup relations. PHAIR 2025 Register! Transcript

Guests: Dr Matti Wilks is a Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Edinburgh. She completed her PhD at the University of Queensland, Australia, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton and Yale Universities. She is generally interested in morality and related things. Her research mostly focuses on the moral circle and moral development, with a particular focus on moral concern for distant others (distant people, non-human animals, AI) and the motivations of unusually altruistic individuals. She also examines perceptions of AI, attitudes towards cultured meat, and the natural-is-better bias.

Dr Luke McGuire is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Exeter. His research focuses on social and moral development, with a particular focus on development in middle childhood and adolescence across a range of contexts where moral concerns conflict with social norms. Most recently, his research has come to focus on children’s and adolescents’ moral judgments about the treatment of non-human animals. This work has been published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Child Development, and Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Book Recommendations

Matti's Rec: The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter by Peter Singer and Jim Mason

Luke's Rec: Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guinn

Other Conference Coverage (first episodes):

34: Aggression in Dogs Conference Mini-Series: with Michael Shikashio, CDBC Part 1

58: Emerging Voices For Animals in Tourism Conference Miniseries (Part 1): Animal Experience International with Nora Livingstone

94. Rapid Environmental Change with Dr. Rachel Blakey and Dr. Kasey Fowler-Finn (S10)

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