Join us for Heterodox Academy’s Brown Bag Colloquium Series, a virtual seminar series designed to highlight the scholarship and thought leadership emerging from our community.

This colloquium will feature Michael Inzlicht, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, presenting his latest research on the moralization of AI.

Can We Think Clearly About AI?

Artificial intelligence draws an unusual kind of opposition. People resist it even after they are shown it works, and they resist it across wildly different uses, from generating art to giving medical advice. Pragmatic worry cannot explain that pattern. I argue that a meaningful slice of AI opposition is moral: a conviction that using AI is wrong, full stop, not merely impractical. In four studies, my collaborators and I find that AI is moralized in news headlines at levels rivaling vaccines and GMOs; that most people who oppose AI say their view would not budge even if the benefits grew and the risks shrank; that this opposition behaves like a single general attitude rather than a set of application-specific judgments; and that earlier moralization predicts refusing a useful AI tool months later, at real personal cost. Moralization makes a person ignore evidence, forgo benefits, and treat an empirical question as a settled verdict. If we want to evaluate AI honestly, we first must notice when we have stopped evaluating it at all.

This colloquium offered exclusively to HxA members on June 30, 2026 at 2:00-3:00 PM EST will include time for audience discussion and Q&A. Register today to join the conversation.

About the Speaker

Michael Inzlicht is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto, with a cross-appointment as Professor in the Department of Marketing at the Rotman School of Management. He is also a Research Lead at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology & Society. His research sits at the boundaries of social psychology and cognitive science, exploring the paradoxes of human motivation—particularly why people both avoid and find meaning in mental effort, and how digital technologies are reshaping behavior and wellbeing. He has pioneered research showing that empathy is cognitively demanding and often avoided because of its mental costs, challenging common assumptions about human compassion. His current work examines how exerting effort paradoxically increases feelings of meaning, how rapid content switching on digital platforms increases boredom, whether artificial intelligence can express empathy more effectively than humans, and the psychological effects of recreational cannabis use.

Michael completed his B.Sc. in Anatomical Sciences at McGill University in 1994, his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology at Brown University in 2001, and his postdoctoral fellowship in Applied Psychology at New York University in 2004. He has published more than 180 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters and edited two books, with his work cited over 34,000 times. His research has been featured in major media outlets including The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, NPR, The Washington Post, BBC News, The Globe and Mail, TIME, Forbes, and Science, among many others. His research and teaching have been recognized with the Carol and Ed Diener Mid-Career Award in Social Psychology, the Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize, the ISCON Best Social Cognition Paper Award, and Professor of the Year. He has also been recognized as among the top 1% of most-cited psychologists in the world for four consecutive years (2022-2025). He co-hosts the podcast Two Psychologists Four Beers and writes the Substack newsletter Speak Now Regret Later.