October 19, 2023

Assistant Professor Mohammad Atari has been awarded the SAGE Emerging Scholar Award by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) recognizing his outstanding achievement in social and personality psychology as an early-career scientist. Congratulations!

In collaboration with SAGE Publications, SPSP offers the SAGE Emerging Scholar Award in order to recognize exceptional accomplishments in teaching, research, or service to the field.

Atari, who joined the Psychological and Brain Sciences faculty in fall 2023, studies how culture shapes moral values and norms. His research team uses diverse methods, including computational techniques, lab experiments, and fieldwork. Their 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. The third stream of research focuses on both developing and using state-of-the-art computational methods, particularly Natural Language Processing, to tackle social psychological questions.

Learn more about Atari's research

Visit the Culture and Morality Lab (CAM-L)