I study machine moral psychology. My research examines the moral behavior of large language models, focusing on honesty, trustworthiness, and moral judgment and decision making in AI systems. I bring methods from experimental psychology to the study of AI behavior. A question that runs through this work is how psychological constructs like traits, values, and attitudes translate to AI systems, and how they can be measured.

My ongoing work explores:

• Understanding how the moral psychology of AI models differs from human moral psychology.

• Bringing behavioral experiments from psychology to AI evaluation.

• Training AI systems to better capture human morality and its diversity.

This work builds on my research in human moral psychology, where I study dishonesty and social influence in the moral domain. Past projects include the moral psychology of misinformation, how social information shapes ethical behavior, and moral change. My work has been published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, and Organization Science, and featured in the Financial Times and Harvard Business Review.

I am an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at Yale School of Management, where I teach Business Ethics to Master's in Asset Management, MBA, and EMBA students. I earned my Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from London Business School, and my B.Sc. in Psychology and M.Sc. in Management from Queen's University, Canada.

Yale students interested in machine psychology, AI character, or AI safety more broadly are encouraged to get in touch at ba.helgason@yale.edu.