Léo Fitouchi awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship

Congratulations to Léo Fitouchi, who has been awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship to work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University!

This grant funds two years of research with Rebecca Saxe at MIT and Fiery Cushman at Harvard, followed by a one-year return phase at TSE with Jean-François Bonnefon. "At MIT and Harvard, Rebecca, Fiery, and I will develop formal models of the cognitive algorithms underlying legitimacy intuitions and test them experimentally against alternative models. During the return phase at TSE, Jean-François and I will expand this experimental testing to 20 countries across five continents to assess the universal and culturally variable dimensions of these moral computations", explains Léo.

"The fellowship investigates the cognitive foundations of legitimate authority: 

• Why do human minds perceive that some individuals have a right to command, and others a duty to obey? 
• Why do they see some uses of power as rightful, and others as abusive?
• Why do they think that leaders are entitled to resources and deference?"

Léo Fitouchi is an IAST postdoctoral research fellow within TSE. In his research, he investigates the structure and function of moral cognition, integrating instights from cognitive science, evolutionary biology and the broader social sciences.