Dr. Daryl Cameron (he/him/his) is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology and senior research associate in the Rock Ethics Institute. He received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and his B.A. in Philosophy and Psychology from the College of William and Mary. He completed a summer post-doctoral appointment at the Duke University Kenan Institute for Ethics, and was a Fellow at the Stanford University Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE). Dr. Cameron is a member of the Moral Psychology Research Group, an interdisciplinary group of psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers who study moral cognition. Before coming to Penn State, he was a faculty member at the University of Iowa from 2013-2016.

Dr. Cameron’s research has been funded by multiple grants from the National Science Foundation, as well as external grants from the John Templeton Foundation and UCLA Animal Law program. Internal to Penn State, Dr. Cameron has been funded by the Social Science Research Institute (SSRI; on empathy for social disparities), the Huck Life Sciences Institutes (on empathy during the Covid-19 pandemic), the Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence (CSRAI; on empathy during human-technology interactions), and the McCourtney Institute for Democracy (on empathy and political polarization). At Penn State, Dr. Cameron is an Affiliate at CSRAI, the Sustainability Institute, the Social Science Research Institute, and the Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center.

As part of his appointment at the Rock Ethics Institute, Dr. Cameron has led the Moral Agency & Moral Development Initiative until 2023, which has involved interdisciplinary workshops, conferences (such as hosting the Moral Psychology Research Group in 2017), and events such as the Expanding Empathy Speaker Series from 2019-2023. For more, see the Collaborations page of this website. Extending on this long-running work at the Rock Ethics Institute, starting in 2023, Dr. Cameron launched the Consortium on Moral Decision-Making, a jointly funded network of scholars who study the social science of moral decision-making (to learn more see here).

His work has been published in venues such as the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Psychological Science, and Personality and Social Psychology Review. Dr. Cameron is also involved in popular communication of scientific findings, through outlets such as the New York Times, The Conversation, Boston Review, and Scientific American. His research on moral judgments about implicit racial bias (Cameron, Payne, & Knobe, 2010) received the Morton Deutsch Award for Best Article from the International Society for Justice Research, and his paper on effort and empathy choice (Cameron et al., 2019, JEP: General) received Penn State’s Roy C. Buck Award for best social sciences paper by a pre-tenure faculty member.

Dr. Cameron received the Early Career in Affective Science Award in 2022, from the Society for Affective Science. He received the James McKeen Cattell Sabbatical Fund Fellowship for 2023-2024. Dr. Cameron was named the Doug S. and Joyce L. Sherwin Early Career Professor in the Rock Ethics Institute for 2023-2026. He is a Fellow in the Society for Personality and Social Psychology and a Fellow in the Society for Experimental Social Psychology. He is currently an Associate Editor at Emotion, and also serves on the Editorial Boards of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.