Past Research Interests

YourMorals.org

       Why do people disagree so passionately about what is right and wrong? Why is there such hostility and incomprehension between members of different political parties? At this research and public education website, over 600,000 registered users have filled out surveys to help us answer these questions. Along with Jonathan Haidt, Jesse Graham, Ravi Iyer, Sena Koleva, Sean Wojcik, and Matt Motyl, we developed this research platform to provide users with immediate, personalized feedback on every study, quiz, and survey. Explore your own morals here.

 

End-of-Life Decision Making

       Although not a focus of our current empirical work, the lab maintains an interest in a variety of psychological issues involved in end-of-life medical decision-making.  Can healthy people predict what treatments they will want at the end of life?  Can surrogate decision-makers predict the life-sustaining treatment wishes of their incapacitated loved ones? As a whole, the work can be seen as a psychological critique of the potential effectiveness of “living wills” (i.e., advance medical directives).

Selected papers:

Ditto, P. H., Danks, J. H., Smucker, W. D., Bookwala, J., Coppola, K. M., Dresser, R., Fagerlin, A., Gready, R. M., Houts, R., Lockhart, L. K., & Zyzanski, S. (2001). Advance directives as acts of communication: A randomized controlled trial. Archives of Internal Medicine, 161, 421-430.

Ditto, P. H., Smucker, W. D., Danks, J. H., Jacobson, J. A., Houts, R. M., Fagerlin, A., Coppola, K. M., & Gready, R. M. (2003). The stability of older adults’ preferences for life-sustaining medical treatment. Health Psychology, 22, 605-615.

Ditto, P. H. (2006). What would Terri want? On the psychological challenges of surrogate decision making. Death Studies, 30, 135-148.

Sharman, S. J., Garry, M., Jacobson, J. A., Loftus, E. F., & Ditto, P. H. (2008). False memories for end-of-life decisions. Health Psychology, 27, 273-290.