Mohammad Atari

Postdoctoral Training, Harvard University

PhD, University of Southern California

Dr. Atari runs the Culture and Morality Lab (CAM-L) at UMass Amherst. The Culture and Morality Lab examines how culture shapes moral values and norms using various methods, including computational techniques, lab experiments, and fieldwork. Our current research falls under three interrelated lines. The first line of research examines the "how" and "why" of cultural variation in psychological variables both across historical time (i.e., historical psychology) and space (i.e., cross-cultural psychology). The second line of research takes a pluralistic approach to human morality to understand how different flavors of morality can bind people together in ultra-cooperative groups or divide them into an "us vs. them" mindset that justifies violence and hatred. Our lab's third stream of research focuses on both developing and using state-of-the-art computational methods, particularly Natural Language Processing (NLP), to tackle social psychological questions. 

Human Nature and Cultural Psychology (PhD-level — Psych 891NA) 

Cultural Diversity Around the Globe (Undergraduate-level — Psych 391CU) 

Representative Publications:

Atari, M., Haidt, J., Graham, J., Koleva, S., Stevens, S. T., & Dehghani, M. (2023). Morality beyond the WEIRD: How the nomological network of morality varies across cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Atari, M. & Henrich, J. (2023). Historical psychology. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 32, 176–183.

Atari, M., Mehl, M. R., Graham, J., Doris, J. M., Schwarz, N., Davani, A. M., Omrani, A., Kennedy, B., Gonzalez, E., Jafarzadeh, N., Hussain, A., Mirinjian, A., Madden, A., Bhatia, R., Burch, A., Harlan, A., Sbarra, D. A., Raison, C. L., Moseley, S. A., Polsinelli, A. J., & Dehghani, M. (2023). The paucity of morality in everyday talk. Scientific Reports, 13, 5967.

Yan, V. X., Oyserman, D., Kiper, G., & Atari, M. (2023). Difficulty-as-improvement: The courage to keep going in the face of life’s difficulties. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Atari, M., Davani, A. M., Kogon, D., Kennedy, B., Saxena, N. A., Anderson, I., & Dehghani, M. (2022). Morally homogeneous networks and radicalism. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 13, 999-1009.

Hoover, J., Atari, M., Davani, A. M., Kennedy, B., Portillo-Wightman, G., Yeh, L. & Dehghani, M. (2021). Investigating the role of group-based morality in extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice. Nature Communications, 12, 4585.

Atari, M., Davani, A. M., & Dehghani, M. (2020). Body maps of moral concerns. Psychological Science, 31, 160–169.

For a complete list, please see Dr. Atari's Google Scholar profile.