Crockett came to Princeton in September 2022 as an associate professor of psychology and the University Center for Human Values and the lab director of the Crockett Lab.

Crockett’s lab investigates the cognitive science of ethics, knowledge and power. They study relationships between self and society, power and knowledge, technology and culture. According to Crockett,  “Much of our work seeks to understand the nature of cultural evolution and epistemic injustice: How do systems of power shape the ways we understand the world (including the work we do as scientists)? How is knowledge marginalized or amplified by social learning, technology, and their interaction? How do our beliefs about what people are like influence our judgments of how people ought to be?”  

“Our work incorporates perspectives from philosophy, anthropology and economics as well as psychology and neuroscience, and we collaborate with scholars across these disciplines,” they added. “We use a variety of methods in our research, including behavioral experiments in the lab and online, field studies, computational modeling, brain imaging, machine learning, and natural language processing. We are especially interested in bridging quantitative and qualitative methods for understanding human experience and transformation.”

At UCHV, Crockett is the co-organizer of the Future Values Initiative with Catherine Clune-Taylor. The Future Values Initiative supports scholarship that expands traditional approaches to normative inquiry and applied ethics of science and technology, critically examining present injustices by imagining and co-creating radically different futures.

During the 2024-25 academic year, the Future Values Initiative launched the Future Values Fellows program, which introduced Princeton faculty and post-docs in STEM fields to critical, feminist, and science and technology studies, with a focus on applying insights from these fields to their own research in theory and in practice. 

“Crockett’s work on narrative and identity enriches our conversations and broadens our perspective at UCHV. The Future Values Initiative has helped UCHV to reach new audiences and constituencies in STEM fields at Princeton,” said Alan Patten, director of the Center. “We are delighted that the University has recognized Crockett’s many contributions with this well-deserved promotion.”