Jen Cole Wright

Professor of Psychology, Director of the First-Year Experience Program, and affiliate faculty in Philosophy, Environmental and Sustainability Studies, Women's and Gender Studies, and Medical Humanities Program

Education

Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology (Focus: Developmental), University of Wyoming

B.S. in Psychology, University of Wyoming

B.A. and M.A. in Philosophy (Special Focus in Ethics), University of Wyoming

Research Interests

Her area of research is moral development and moral psychology more generally. Specifically, she studies virtue (with a specific focus on humility), moral conviction, and tolerance, the influence of liberal vs. conservative mindsets on our moral values.

Courses Taught

• PSYC 103: Introduction to Psychological Science
• PSYC 224: Lifespan Development
• PSYC 332: Psychology of Social Change
• PSYC 375: Topics in Child and Adolescent Development
• PSYC 410: Special Topics in Psychology (Psychology of War and Conflict, Transpersonal Psychology)

Selected Publications

Undergraduate student coauthors are marked with an asterisk.

Books:

A Psychological Perspective on Folk Moral Objectivism (2023), Routledge Press

Understanding Virtue: Theory and Measurement (2020), Oxford University Press (with M. Warren & N. Snow)

Humility (Editor). Oxford series on the virtues (2019), Oxford University Press

Articles:

Wright, J.C. (2022). Conviction as a tool for navigating disagreement. In A. Finger (Ed). Subjective Matters: Personal Conviction in the Age of Fake Facts, Routledge Press.

Wright, J. C., & Pölzler, T. (2021). Should morality be abolished? An empirical challenge to the argument from intolerance. Philosophical Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2021.1983160.

Wright, J. C. (2021). Morality as a regulator of divergence: Deviance or diversity? Special Edition of Social Cognition, titled Morality as a hub: Connections within and beyond social cognition, Vol. 39, No. 1, 2021, pp. 81–98.

Wright, J.C. (2021). Diversity, deviance, and virtue within imperfect moral communities. Virtues and Virtue Education: Local or Universal? Routledge Press.

Wright, J. C., *Weissglass, D. E., & *Casey, V. (2020). Imaginative role-playing as a medium for moral development: Dungeons & Dragons provides moral training. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 60(1), 99–129. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022167816686263.

Wright, J. C., Nadelhoffer, T., Thomson Ross, L., & Sinnott-Armstrong, W. (2018). Be it ever so humble: Proposing a dual-dimension account and measurement of humility. Self & Identity, 17(1), 92–125. https://doi.org/10.1080/15298868.2017.1327454.

Wright, J. C., Nadelhoffer, T., *Perini, T., Langville, A., *Echols, M., & *Venezia, K. (2017). The psychological significance of humility. Journal of Positive Psychology, 12(1), 3–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2016.1167940.