Yoel is a Visiting Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia and and a Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto. Previously, he was an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. He studied at the University of California Berkeley and Cornell.

Yoel studies moral thinking. This means understanding the basic processes underlying moral judgments, but also applying this knowledge to better understand our beliefs about consequential social questions. His earliest research examined disgust-based moral intuitions and their relationship with political ideology and social attitudes. This led to a broader interest in moral intuitions and how they interact with deliberative reasoning in people’s judgments and beliefs. In addition to his basic research on these questions, he has also studied how people’s moral beliefs underlie attitudes towards genetically engineered food and other new technologies. In a new line of research he is using natural language processing techniques to observe the content and consequences of morality “in the wild.”