JONATHAN DORISCAR

Hi, I’m Jonathan Doriscar. I’m a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in Social Psychology and a master’s student in Statistics and Data Science at Northwestern University. Before Northwestern, I earned my B.A. in Psychology with a minor in Composition & Rhetoric from Knox College.

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My research examines how people make sense of moral harm—what happens when evidence of wrongdoing, inequality, or social change threatens their belief that they, their communities, or the systems they belong to are good and fair. These moments expose what I refer to as the moral image: the narratives that sustain our sense of moral coherence. When that image is challenged, people face a choice—to acknowledge the harm and reassess their assumptions, or to deny and reinterpret it to protect a sense of moral integrity. My work investigates what determines those reactions, how they spread across social and digital networks, and how they shape the moral life of communities and institutions.

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I explore these dynamics across diverse contexts where moral expectations and lived realities collide—from public responses to police violence and debates about demographic and cultural change, to individual reactions to bias feedback and the emerging ethics of artificial intelligence. Combining large-scale computational analyses of digital discourse with experimental and qualitative approaches, I trace how acknowledgment and denial develop, diffuse, and transform as they move between individuals, groups, and societies.

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At its core, my research bridges psychology and data science to understand how people preserve moral meaning in the face of harm—and what makes acknowledgment possible in a world that often rewards denial.