Rate My Professor Tom Kupfer

Tom Kupfer is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology within the School of Social Sciences at Nottingham Trent University. He combines evolutionary and social psychology perspectives to study emotions, moral judgement, and behaviour. Kupfer obtained his PhD in social psychology from the University of Kent. Prior to his current role, he was a Marie Curie Research Fellow at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He has received significant funding for his research, including an ERC Horizon 2020 grant to investigate whether expressing moral emotions such as anger and disgust enhances the reputation of individuals who punish immoral behaviour. Additionally, he serves as Principal Investigator on a project funded by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research examining the role of mental states in moral judgement, norms, and laws.

Kupfer's research explores the evolutionary function and design of psychological mechanisms involved in moral judgement, encompassing disgust, jealousy, pathogen avoidance, and mental-state inference, and how these influence moral norms, values, and social practices. He investigates why certain aspects of morality are consistent across cultures while others vary with social and ecological conditions. His influential publications include 'What makes moral disgust special? An integrative functional review' (2018, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology), 'Behavioral immune trade-offs: Interpersonal value relaxes social pathogen avoidance' (2020, Psychological Science), 'Benevolent sexism and mate preferences: Why do women prefer benevolent men despite recognizing that they can be undermining?' (2019, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin), 'Disgust sensitivity and opposition to immigration: Does contact avoidance or resistance to foreign norms explain the relationship?' (2019, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology), and 'Communicating moral motives: The social signaling function of disgust' (2017, Social Psychological and Personality Science). With over 1,000 citations on Google Scholar, his work contributes substantially to moral psychology and evolutionary psychology.