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I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I am the director of the Culture and Morality Lab (CaM-L).

My research focuses on the intersection of culture, morality, and computational methods. I study how moral values and norms vary across societies and historical periods, and how cultural evolution, institutions, ecology, language, and social learning shape the moral mind. I am interested in both the cooperative power of morality (how shared values bind people together) as well as its darker side: how moral convictions can fuel prejudice, polarization, hate, and violence. I use methods from experimental social psychology, ethnography, natural language processing, and large-scale social data analysis to study psychological life across time and place. Part of my research examines how artificial intelligence systems, specifically large language models, represent human psychology—and when they compress, stereotype, or misrepresent the psychological diversity of human populations. A broader question underlies most of this work: How does culture shape what humans value, and what happens when machines begin to model those values?

At the Culture and Morality Lab, my team studies how culture shapes the moral mind across societies, historical periods, and emerging technological environments. Our work brings together cultural psychology, moral psychology, cultural evolution, natural language processing, large language models, surveys, fieldwork, and social psychological experiments. We ask three broad questions: How have human psychologies changed over historical time? Why do moral norms vary so substantially across societies? And what happens when machines begin to model human psychology, simulate research participants, or cooperate with us?

Before joining UMass Amherst, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University, working with Dr. Joseph Henrich. I completed my Ph.D. at the University of Southern California (USC), working 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.