Isabela Hazin Antunes de Souza

Isabela Hazin is a Biologist, with a MSc in Human Biology and Evolution, who is currently a Ph.D. student at the Department of Women's and Children's health, at Uppsala University. Her Ph.D. project focuses on using longitudinal data to study the dynamics of moral opinions amongst immigrants to Sweden.

Her research interests include moral values, migration and integration of migrants, and social norms and metanorms (i.e., norms about sanction of norm violations).

Broadly, my research aims at investigating how the moral values of immigrants to Sweden change. More specifically, my research questions are: (i) Do the moral values of immigrants to Sweden change after migration? (ii) If yes, how do they change? Do immigrants become more conservative/liberal? (iii) Is there a difference regarding how much values change? Do some values change more than others? And (iv) what individual-level factors (e.g., education, employment, age) contribute to moral values change among migrants?

My project will use Moral Argument Theory (Strimling et al., 2019) as a framework to predict whether immigrants become more conservative or liberal after they come to Sweden, and to predict which moral values gain more support among migrants.

According to Moral Argument Theory, arguments related to harm avoidance, the pursuit of fairness and the pursuit of freedom are universally relevant, that is, they resonate with the majority of the population. The theory thus predicts that the values that gain support over time are those justified by these universally relevant moral arguments. For example, being 'for' same-sex marriage is usually more easily backed up by arguments related to harm, fairness, and freedom, than being 'against' same-sex marriage. Public opinion should, therefore, be moving towards being 'for' when it comes to this moral issue.