Biography:Morteza Dehghani
Morteza Dehghani | |
|---|---|
| Nationality | Iranian-American |
| Alma mater | University of California, Los Angeles (B.S., M.S.) Northwestern University (M.S., Ph.D.) |
| Known for | Research on morality, language, artificial intelligence, and computational social science |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Psychology, Computer science |
| Institutions | University of Southern California |
| Doctoral advisor | Ken Forbus, Douglas Medin |
Morteza Dehghani is an Iranian-American psychologist and computer scientist who is a professor of Psychology and Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC). He is the Director of the Center for Computational Language Sciences,[1] Director of the Morality and Language Lab,[2] and a member of USC's Brain and Creativity Institute.
Education
Dehghani earned a B.S. in 2003 and an M.S. in 2005 in computer science from the University of California, Los Angeles. He later received an M.S. in 2007 and a Ph.D. in 2009 in computer science with a focus on cognitive science from Northwestern University,[3] where he also completed postdoctoral research in psychology.[4]
Career
Dehghani joined the University of Southern California in 2011 as a research scientist at the Institute for Creative Technologies, before holding faculty positions in computer science, psychology, and the Brain and Creativity Institute.[5] He served as an assistant professor from 2014[6] to 2020, associate professor from 2020 to 2023, and was promoted to full professor of psychology and computer science in 2023.[7]
Research
Dehghani's research lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence and psychology. His early work applied computational models and natural language processing to study morality,[8] decision-making, and cultural cognition. Beginning around 2012, his work examined what he terms the "dark side" of morality,[9][10][11] focusing on moral ecosystems,[12] moral homogenization,[13][14] prejudice, and hate. More recently, he has integrated psychological theories into artificial intelligence systems to improve robustness and human-like behavior.[15][16]
His work has been cited in policy discussions and presented at venues including the White House[17] and the United States Senate Committee on Armed Services. Dehghani has also engaged in activism supporting persecuted Iranian academics and has published opinion essays analyzing Iranian political crises through a moral psychological framework.[18][19]
Honors
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award (2012)[20]
- National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2018)[21]
- Elected Fellow of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology (2019)
- Google Award for Inclusion Research (2022)[22]
- Elected Fellow of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (2024)[23]
Selected publications
- Kennedy, Brendan; Atari, Mohammad; Mostafazadeh Davani, Aida; Hoover, Joe; Omrani, Ali; Graham, Jesse; Dehghani, Morteza (1 July 2021). "Moral concerns are differentially observable in language". Cognition 212. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104696. ISSN 0010-0277. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010027721001153.
- Hoover, Joe; Atari, Mohammad; Mostafazadeh Davani, Aida; Kennedy, Brendan; Portillo-Wightman, Gwenyth; Yeh, Leigh; Dehghani, Morteza (28 July 2021). "Investigating the role of group-based morality in extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice" (in en). Nature Communications 12 (1): 4585. doi:10.1038/s41467-021-24786-2. ISSN 2041-1723. PMC 8319297. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24786-2.
- Reimer, Nils Karl; Atari, Mohammad; Karimi-Malekabadi, Farzan; Trager, Jackson; Kennedy, Brendan; Graham, Jesse; Dehghani, Morteza (September 2022). "Moral values predict county-level COVID-19 vaccination rates in the United States." (in English). American Psychologist 77 (6): 743–759. doi:10.1037/amp0001020. ISSN 1935-990X. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2022-96483-002.
References
- ↑ "Faculty - Center for Computational Language Sciences". https://dornsife.usc.edu/ccls/morteza-dehghani/.
- ↑ "People - Morality and Language Lab". https://www.mola-lab.org/people.
- ↑ "Recent alumni". https://groups.linguistics.northwestern.edu/meaning/people.html.
- ↑ "Former Postdoctoral Fellows". https://groups.psych.northwestern.edu/medin/.
- ↑ "People". https://dornsife.usc.edu/bci/people-2/.
- ↑ "Introducing Professor Morteza Dehghani". USC. https://dornsife.usc.edu/psyc/wp-content/uploads/sites/81/2023/10/Inside_Outside_10.1.pdf.
- ↑ "Morteza Dehghani". https://dornsife.usc.edu/profile/morteza-dehghani/.
- ↑ Dehghani, Morteza; Johnson, Kate; Hoover, Joe; Sagi, Eyal; Garten, Justin; Parmar, Niki Jitendra; Vaisey, Stephen; Iliev, Rumen et al. (March 2016). "Purity homophily in social networks". Journal of Experimental Psychology. General 145 (3): 366–375. doi:10.1037/xge0000139. ISSN 1939-2222. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26726910/.
- ↑ Medzerian, David (16 December 2021). "Hate speech and online extremism focus of USC study — USC News". https://today.usc.edu/online-extremism-linked-to-shared-moral-beliefs/.
- ↑ Ramalho, Tiago (28 August 2023). ""Nós contra eles": a pureza e a lealdade são o reduto do discurso de ódio" (in pt). https://www.publico.pt/2023/08/28/ciencia/noticia/pureza-lealdade-sao-reduto-discurso-odio-2060356.
- ↑ "Where Does All That Hate We Feel Come From?". The New York Times. 27 April 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/27/opinion/rich-poor-immigration-fear.html.
- ↑ Hoover, Joe; Atari, Mohammad; Mostafazadeh Davani, Aida; Kennedy, Brendan; Portillo-Wightman, Gwenyth; Yeh, Leigh; Dehghani, Morteza (28 July 2021). "Investigating the role of group-based morality in extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice" (in en). Nature Communications 12 (1): 4585. doi:10.1038/s41467-021-24786-2. ISSN 2041-1723. PMC 8319297. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24786-2.
- ↑ Mooijman, Marlon; Hoover, Joe; Lin, Ying; Ji, Heng; Dehghani, Morteza (June 2018). "Moralization in social networks and the emergence of violence during protests" (in en). Nature Human Behaviour 2 (6): 389–396. doi:10.1038/s41562-018-0353-0. ISSN 2397-3374. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0353-0.
- ↑ Atari, Mohammad; Davani, Aida Mostafazadeh; Kogon, Drew; Kennedy, Brendan; Saxena, Nripsuta Ani; Anderson, Ian; Dehghani, Morteza (August 2022). "Morally homogeneous networks and radicalism". Social Psychological and Personality Science 13 (6): 999–1009. doi:10.1177/19485506211059329. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19485506211059329.
- ↑ "Chatbots learned to write from us. Can AI now change the way we think?" (in fr-ca). 13 August 2025. https://ici.radio-canada.ca/rci/en/news/2185213/ai-human-thought-processes.
- ↑ https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10531652
- ↑ Reyes, Melissa (5 May 2024). "White House Presentation". https://dornsife.usc.edu/psyc/2024/05/05/white-house-presentation/.
- ↑ Amir, Dorsa; Hemmatian, Babak; Kasirzadeh, Atoosa; Jasbi, Masoud; Yazdiha, Hajar; Dehghani, Morteza (1 November 2022). "Iran: amplify voices of persecuted academics" (in en). Nature 611 (7934): 33–33. doi:10.1038/d41586-022-03515-9. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03515-9.
- ↑ "The Moral Paralysis Facing Iranians Right Now". New York Times. 28 June 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/opinion/iran-israel-war-islamic-republic.html.
- ↑ "AFOSR Awards Grants to 48 Scientists and Engineers through its Young Investigator Research". https://www.wpafb.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/399575/afosr-awards-grants-to-48-scientists-and-engineers-through-its-young-investigat/.
- ↑ "Psychological Scientists Recognized with NSF Early-Career Awards" (in en). https://www.psychologicalscience.org/policy/psychological-scientists-recognized-with-nsf-early-career-awards.html.
- ↑ "Award for Inclusion Research recipients" (in en). https://research.google/programs-and-events/past-programs/award-for-inclusion-research-program/?filtertab=2022.
- ↑ "Celebrating 2024 SPSP Fellows". https://spsp.org/news/spsp-news/2024-spsp-fellows-announced.
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