Aidan McGuire, Philosophy “Against Empathy: How Fascism Wields our Conscience Against Us”
This project examines the relationship between empathy and resistance to fascist ideology, challenging the common assumption that cultivating empathy is the most effective antidote to authoritarian politics. While empathy is frequently promoted in civic education and anti-extremism discourse as a means of fostering tolerance and reducing intergroup hostility, recent theoretical and empirical work suggests that empathic concern can be selective, exclusionary, and susceptible to political manipulation. Fascist movements have historically mobilized emotionally charged narratives that encourage deep empathic identification within narrowly defined national, ethnic, or cultural communities while legitimizing hostility toward perceived outsiders.Building on this critique, the study investigates whether alternative moral frameweorks, such as rational compassion, provide more robust protection against fascist attitudes and movements. Using a mixed-methods approach combining survey experiments, discourse analysis, and comparative historical case studies, the project evaluates how different psychological and normative frameworks shape political judgment, group boundaries, and tolerance for authoritarian leadership. By reassessing the political function of empathy and identifying more durable foundations for democratic resilience, the research aims to contribute to debates in political theory, social psychology, and democratic studies about how societies can most effectively resist the appeal and consolidation of fascism.
Cutter Barrus, Individual Xenopus tadpoles display distinct and enduring visual preferences
How neurons self-assemble into circuits that give rise to behaviors is a fundamental question in neuroscience. We address this question in the visual system of the Xenopus tadpole, a powerful developmental model to study how circuits form and function. Tadpoles begin displaying several visually guided behaviors by developmental stage 48 – just 10 days postfertilization. These behaviors include an innate preference for green over light, and light over dark. Until now, these visual preferences have been characterized by studying groups of tadpoles and reporting the group average. The reported average, however, does not necessarily reflect the behavior of individuals. To address this, we are studying the visual preferences displayed by individual tadpoles. Thus far, our data show that individual tadpoles display varied behavior relative to one another: some tadpoles display a strong preference for light over dark while others prefer dark over light; some display a strong preference for green over light while others prefer light over green. Also, individual preferences were found to be relatively consistent over time. These findings indicate that the group average does not reflect what individuals are doing, which gives rise to the intriguing notion that tadpoles from the same clutch have distinct personalities. We hypothesize, based on our previous work, that individual behaviors are manifested through different levels of endogenous serotonin. To test this, we are experimentally decreasing and increasing serotonin transmission to examine how it affects individual preferences.
