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About me

My name is Britt Currie. I am currently a Lecturer in the Hutton Honors College at Indiana University, Bloomington. I’m a philosopher of cognitive science who is really interested in: empathy, what it means to have an epistemic perspective on the world, what agency is, and understanding what social and moral norms are– particularly, how these norms shape and affect our everyday interactions. Most of my work is in moral psychology. Lately, I’ve also been thinking about whether we can empathize with LLMs; and, I have been also thinking about,[and developing an account of] the way that traumatic experiences shape our unique empathetic relationships with ourselves and other people.

I also think a lot about the distinct difference between empathy and compassion. Lastly, I am researching on which particular intellectual virtues make us more likely to reject misinformation and or inspire us to seek out epistemic goods like knowledge, truth, and understanding.

My Academic Journey

What I've Done: As a research assistant in the Department of Psychology at University of Illinois Urbana Champagne I was part of a

‘(Ir)rationality and Moral Judgment’ (Perspectives on Psychological Science, Regenwetter, M. Currie, B. et al 2025), investigating whether moral judgment is rational, using transitivity as our metric; we’ve got another paper explaining the formalization process of how we translated two major social theory’s predictions into testable, mathematical models. I’m interested in how individual value preferences affect people’s moral choices!


Things I wrote about: In my dissertation research, I applied theoretical methods in the cognitive sciences to analyze the fundamental nature of empathetic perspective taking. I argue that cultivating cognitive, rather than (only, or centrally) emotional-style empathy, makes us more likely to update our beliefs about others’ points of view. This line of argument contrasts with paradigmatic assumptions in contemporary empirical work on empathy, which often centralizes feeling the emotions of others as the most important component of empathy. Cognitive perspective-taking, I maintain, helps us understand why people value what they do, allowing us to reconsider our deeply held beliefs, which can be epistemically transformative. This new analysis of empathy provides us with ways to improve existing measurements for empathy.

What I'm Like

Research

As a researcher, I operate from a place of genuine wonder, open-mindedness, and curiosity.

Teaching

I empower my students by providing them with the tools of reason, logic, and the space for open and wondrous rational reflection

Activism

I work toward reimagining a world where empathetic understanding plays a critical role in community care.

What I'm Hoping to do

I am working toward making an epistemic virtue scale that serves as an additional measure of cognitive empathy which measures for features such as intellectual humility, open-mindedness, and sensitivity to evidence, which is not accounted for in our classical psychological measurements of empathy. Overall, my dissertation demonstrates empathy is a learned cognitive skill, and virtuous aim—in addition to being an emotionally motivating tool for sociomoral change.

 

My ongoing and forward-looking research explores how cognitive and epistemic virtues might improve our ability to empathize with non-human minds. 

 

In a paper in preparation for an anthology, I explore the psychology of perspective-taking with chatbots. In “Why We Cannot Empathize with ChatGPT,” forthcoming Summer 2026, I argue that we automatically perspective-take when interfacing with LLMs like Chat-GPT, and yet given my new analysis of empathy, this is not sufficient for empathy. Listen to my talk here.

 

Some collaborative stuff going on: Dr. Jonathan Livengood and I have a paper in preparation regarding our right to privacy and the ways in which empathizers can sometimes violate our right to privacy, if they do not employ certain intellectual virtues, such as intellectual humility, and sensitivity to the social evidence (see more in Works in Progress).

Teaching

I empower my students by providing them with the tools of reason, logic, and the space for open and wondrous rational reflection; my aim is to create an environment where students can learn to update their beliefs in accordance with the evidence; I think this helps my students become prepared, empowered, and engaged citizens of the world. Some courses I’ve taught include: intro to philosophy, ethics, biomedical ethics, philosophical foundations of computer science, and intro to logic. Some courses I’d like to teach are: moral psychology and misinformation, empathy and social justice, environmental ethics, and the moral psychology of love.

Education

PhD Philosophy, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

MSc. Philosophy University of Edinburgh

MA. Critical Theory, King’s College, London

BA Literature, Saint Leo University

The World I Imagine

 A world in which interdisciplinary research about the mind and how we relate to the world is accomplished by open dialogues, philosophical reflection, and empirical collaborations move forward the following question: how can we understand individual differences in social cognition in ways that honor individual differences, mitigate bias, and help us to understand more about how we interface with emergent technologies. I also care a lot about how we should understand values like, love and care, and what role empathetic understanding plays in achieving a world that reimagines what community care looks like.

  1. Causation and agency

  2. LLMs and whether they can really understand in the strict epistemic sense

  3. The role of empathy in belief update 

  4. Freedom of Speech 

  5. Moral Emotions

  6. Empathy and Trauma

  7. What really happens to the other sock we lose in the dryer, and whether people really care, or if they should, if our socks match; I’m team no match– a pair is pair is a pair. 

  8. Wittgenstein on almost everything– I’m always trying to understand 

  9. Civic engagement and social obligation

  10. Joy

  11. Philosophy and its boundary or blurred boundary, or whether there exists boundaries with philosophy as a science, and other scientific disciplines

  12. Mitigating misinformation 

  13. Intersectional feminism and its deep and powerful relationship to confessional poetry, and the arts

  14. Whether poetry can count as legal evidence, testimonial evidence, and if it does, what does that look like?

  15. What’s unconditional love, anyways?

Stuff I like to think about

In no particular order

My favorite reads

In no particular order

  1. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, T. Kuhn

  2. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, P. Freire

  3. Exposure, R. Bilott

  4. Buddhist Ethics, D. Keown

  5. Discipline and Punish, M. Foucault

  6. Silent Spring, R. Carson

  7. Reality +, D. Chalmers

  8. Small Gods, T. Pratchett

  9. The Failures of Forgiveness, M. Cherry

  10. Happiness, Love, Liberation, Thich Nhat Hanh

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