Hanne Watkins

Guest Author

Hanne M. Watkins (@hm_watkins) is a postdoctoral research associate with the Psychology of Peace and Violence Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research uses methods from experimental moral and social psychology to investigate the moral judgments people make about combatants at war. In particular, she compares the prescriptive norms of philosophy and international laws of war to the descriptive moral judgments made by lay people. The degree of match or mismatch across these domains of judgment has potential implications for the perceived legitimacy of international institutions, for how political and military elites are held accountable for their actions, and for how combatants are treated upon their return to civilian life. Her work has been published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and Perspectives on Psychological Science.