Assistant Professors Teresa Lynch and Nic Matthews recently gave invited talks at the University of Luxembourg, supported by the Department of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences within the Faculty of Humanities, Education, and Social Sciences.

Lynch presented a talk titled "Agentic Objects: Understanding the Way Video Games Represent Gender," to students and faculty. Her presentation reviewed a series of studies examining how video games portray gender through their characters and how players react to and interpret these gender portrayals while playing. During her visit, Lynch also served as an external expert committee member for a dissertation jury.

Matthews’ talk, "Speaking Bias into Being: How Communication Fosters Subjectivity in Moral Judgment," explored how media and relationships help shape moral judgment biases. He discussed research showing that biases tend to grow stronger when media characters commit more serious moral violations. He also presented data demonstrating how artificial intelligence (AI) systems that display emotional expressions can evoke human empathy—even pity—when mistreated, leading to moral bias in judgment.

Moral judgment is typically viewed as deliberate and fair, yet this talk underscored how biases can emerge quickly and unconsciously. Matthews highlighted how communication is central to this process, effectively "speaking bias into being."