Professional Bio

Wiktoria M. Pedryc joined the MASC lab at Penn State as a PhD student in Fall 2024. After spending most of her life in Poland and attending an international United World College high school in Germany, she received her BA in psychology and philosophy from Lake Forest College in Illinois. During her time in college, she completed a semester in the MSc in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Human Sciences program at Università degli Studi di Pavia in Italy.

Her research interests orient around moral psychology and legal decision-making incorporating methods and approaches from social cognitive psychology, experimental philosophy, and law. Currently, Wiktoria is interested in how people judge others’ intentionality, especially in cases of desired action and incognizant consequences. Wiktoria dedicates significant amount of her time to sexual misconduct prevention, which is a source of her motivation to conduct translational research allowing for practical applications in that domain of criminal justice system and preventative interventions. She is also interested in judgements of free will and responsibility of adolescents as compared to young adults in relation to the arbitrary boundary of legal age of adulthood.