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Mohammad Atari is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He directs the Culture and Morality Lab (CaM-L).

Mohammad’s research examines the intersection of culture, evolution, and morality. He combines diverse methodologies to understand how social structures and immediate contextual cues impact people’s moral judgment and acceptance of social norms. At CaM-L, our team’s research is currently organized into three interrelated lines of inquiry. Firstly, we examine the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of cultural variation in psychological variables across historical time (historical psychology) and space (cross-cultural psychology). Secondly, we adopt a pluralistic approach to human morality, aiming to understand how different flavors of morality can either bind people together in ultra-cooperative groups or divide them into an “us versus them” mindset that justifies violence and hatred. Lastly, our third stream of research focuses on developing and using state-of-the-art computational methods, particularly Natural Language Processing (NLP), to tackle social psychological questions.

Before joining UMass Amherst, Mohammad was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University, working with Dr. Joseph Henrich. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Southern California (USC), where he worked with Dr. Morteza Dehghani and Dr. Daphna Oyserman.

You can find additional information about Mohammad and his research using the menu above. A complete list of his papers can be found on Google Scholar.