Morteza Dehghani
Biographic Data
| ID | 202025 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Morteza Dehghani |
| GIVEN NAMES | Morteza |
| FAMILY NAME | Dehghani |
| SIGNATURE | DEHGHANI M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Southern California |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9478-4365 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 84 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
The Homogenizing Engine: AI's Role in Standardizing Culture and the Path to Policy
Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as unprecedented drivers of cultural homogenization, operating at scales and speeds that exceed all previous technologies. This paper examines how LLMs reduce cultural diversity across three cultural domains. Drawing on recent empirical studies, we demonstrate that LLMs disproportionately reflect a narrow demographic, primarily western, liberal, high-income, highly educated, male populations from English-…
Two wrongs is what makes it more right: How retaliatory incivility receives social leniency
The Sins of the Parents Are to Be Laid Upon the Children: Biased Humans, Biased Data, Biased Models
Technological innovations have become a key driver of societal advancements. Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of machine learning (ML), which has developed algorithmic models that shape our decisions, behaviors, and outcomes. These tools have widespread use, in part, because they can synthesize massive amounts of data to make seemingly objective recommendations. Yet, in the past few years, the ML community has been drawing attention…
Supplemental Material for Morality Beyond the Weird: How the Nomological Network of Morality Varies Across Cultures
Morality beyond the Weird: How the nomological network of morality varies across cultures
1,410, three populations) provided evidence for convergent validity of the MFQ-2 scores, expanded the nomological network of the six moral foundations, and demonstrated the improved predictive power of the measure compared with the original MFQ. Importantly, our results showed how the nomological network of moral foundations varied across cultural contexts: consistent with a pluralistic view of morality, different foundations were influential in …
Morally Homogeneous Networks and Radicalism
Online radicalization is among the most vexing challenges the world faces today. Here, we demonstrate that homogeneity in moral concerns results in increased levels of radical intentions. In Study 1, we find that in Gab—a right-wing extremist network—the degree of moral convergence within a cluster predicts the number of hate-speech messages members post. In Study 2, we replicate this observation in another extremist network, Incels. In Studies 3…
Supplemental Material for Moral Values Predict County-Level Covid-19 Vaccination Rates in the United States
Moral values predict county-level Covid-19 vaccination rates in the United States
Despite the widespread availability of COVID-19 vaccines, the United States has a depressed rate of vaccination relative to similar countries. Understanding the psychology of vaccine refusal, particularly the possible sources of variation in vaccine resistance across U.S. subpopulations, can aid in designing effective intervention strategies to increase vaccination across different regions. Here, we demonstrate that county-level moral values (i.e…
Toward a cumulative science of non-Weird morality: A reply to Rezvani Nejad et al
Moral concerns are differentially observable in language
Foundations of morality in Iran
Moral Foundations Twitter Corpus: A Collection of 35k Tweets Annotated for Moral Sentiment
Research has shown that accounting for moral sentiment in natural language can yield insight into a variety of on- and off-line phenomena such as message diffusion, protest dynamics, and social distancing. However, measuring moral sentiment in natural language is challenging, and the difficulty of this task is exacerbated by the limited availability of annotated data. To address this issue, we introduce the Moral Foundations Twitter Corpus, a col…
Measuring Abstract Mind-Sets Through Syntax: Automating the Linguistic Category Model
ion in language has critical implications for memory, judgment, and learning and can provide an important window into a person’s cognitive abstraction level. The linguistic category model (LCM) provides one well-validated, human-coded approach to quantifying linguistic abstraction. In this article, we leverage the LCM to construct the Syntax-LCM, a computer-automated method which quantifies syntax use that indicates abstraction levels. We test th…
Resisting temptation for the good of the group: Binding moral values and the moralization of self-control
When do people see self-control as a moral issue? We hypothesize that the group-focused "binding" moral values of Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Purity/degradation play a particularly important role in this moralization process. Nine studies provide support for this prediction. First, moralization of self-control goals (e.g., losing weight, saving money) is more strongly associated with endorsing binding moral values than with endors…
Moralization in social networks and the emergence of violence during protests
The cultural influence model: When accented natural language spoken by virtual characters matters
The Subtlety of Sound: Accent as a Marker for Culture
Aspects of language, such as accent, play a crucial role in the formation and categorization of one's cultural identity. Recent work on accent emphasizes the role of accent in person perception and social categorization, demonstrating that accent also serves as a meaningful indicator of an ethnic category. In this article, we investigate whether the accent of an interaction partner, as a marker for culture, can induce cultural frame-shifts in bic…
Analyzing Political Rhetoric in Conservative and Liberal Weblogs Related to the Construction of the “Ground Zero Mosque”
We use different text-processing algorithms to gain insight into the political rhetoric used in conservative and liberal weblogs. We specifically focus on the online debate regarding the issue of the “Ground Zero Mosque,” which has been one of the most controversial political issues in U.S. politics in the last several years. Overall, our results show that there are significant differences in the use of various linguistic features related to sent…
Measuring Moral Rhetoric in Text
In this paper we present a computational text analysis technique for measuring the moral loading of concepts as they are used in a corpus. This method is especially useful for the study of online corpora as it allows for the rapid analysis of moral rhetoric in texts such as blogs and tweets as events unfold. We use latent semantic analysis to compute the semantic similarity between concepts and moral keywords taken from the “Moral foundation Dict…
Moralization in social networks and the emergence of violence during protests
Measuring Moral Rhetoric in Text
In this paper we present a computational text analysis technique for measuring the moral loading of concepts as they are used in a corpus. This method is especially useful for the study of online corpora as it allows for the rapid analysis of moral rhetoric in texts such as blogs and tweets as events unfold. We use latent semantic analysis to compute the semantic similarity between concepts and moral keywords taken from the “Moral foundation Dict…
Morality beyond the Weird: How the nomological network of morality varies across cultures
1,410, three populations) provided evidence for convergent validity of the MFQ-2 scores, expanded the nomological network of the six moral foundations, and demonstrated the improved predictive power of the measure compared with the original MFQ. Importantly, our results showed how the nomological network of moral foundations varied across cultural contexts: consistent with a pluralistic view of morality, different foundations were influential in …
Resisting temptation for the good of the group: Binding moral values and the moralization of self-control
When do people see self-control as a moral issue? We hypothesize that the group-focused "binding" moral values of Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Purity/degradation play a particularly important role in this moralization process. Nine studies provide support for this prediction. First, moralization of self-control goals (e.g., losing weight, saving money) is more strongly associated with endorsing binding moral values than with endors…
Moral values predict county-level Covid-19 vaccination rates in the United States
Despite the widespread availability of COVID-19 vaccines, the United States has a depressed rate of vaccination relative to similar countries. Understanding the psychology of vaccine refusal, particularly the possible sources of variation in vaccine resistance across U.S. subpopulations, can aid in designing effective intervention strategies to increase vaccination across different regions. Here, we demonstrate that county-level moral values (i.e…
Analyzing Political Rhetoric in Conservative and Liberal Weblogs Related to the Construction of the “Ground Zero Mosque”
We use different text-processing algorithms to gain insight into the political rhetoric used in conservative and liberal weblogs. We specifically focus on the online debate regarding the issue of the “Ground Zero Mosque,” which has been one of the most controversial political issues in U.S. politics in the last several years. Overall, our results show that there are significant differences in the use of various linguistic features related to sent…
The Subtlety of Sound: Accent as a Marker for Culture
Aspects of language, such as accent, play a crucial role in the formation and categorization of one's cultural identity. Recent work on accent emphasizes the role of accent in person perception and social categorization, demonstrating that accent also serves as a meaningful indicator of an ethnic category. In this article, we investigate whether the accent of an interaction partner, as a marker for culture, can induce cultural frame-shifts in bic…
Analyzing Political Rhetoric in Conservative and Liberal Weblogs Related to the Construction of the “Ground Zero Mosque”
We use different text-processing algorithms to gain insight into the political rhetoric used in conservative and liberal weblogs. We specifically focus on the online debate regarding the issue of the “Ground Zero Mosque,” which has been one of the most controversial political issues in U.S. politics in the last several years. Overall, our results show that there are significant differences in the use of various linguistic features related to sent…
Measuring Moral Rhetoric in Text
In this paper we present a computational text analysis technique for measuring the moral loading of concepts as they are used in a corpus. This method is especially useful for the study of online corpora as it allows for the rapid analysis of moral rhetoric in texts such as blogs and tweets as events unfold. We use latent semantic analysis to compute the semantic similarity between concepts and moral keywords taken from the “Moral foundation Dict…
The Subtlety of Sound: Accent as a Marker for Culture
Aspects of language, such as accent, play a crucial role in the formation and categorization of one's cultural identity. Recent work on accent emphasizes the role of accent in person perception and social categorization, demonstrating that accent also serves as a meaningful indicator of an ethnic category. In this article, we investigate whether the accent of an interaction partner, as a marker for culture, can induce cultural frame-shifts in bic…
The cultural influence model: When accented natural language spoken by virtual characters matters
Resisting temptation for the good of the group: Binding moral values and the moralization of self-control
When do people see self-control as a moral issue? We hypothesize that the group-focused "binding" moral values of Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Purity/degradation play a particularly important role in this moralization process. Nine studies provide support for this prediction. First, moralization of self-control goals (e.g., losing weight, saving money) is more strongly associated with endorsing binding moral values than with endors…
Moralization in social networks and the emergence of violence during protests
Foundations of morality in Iran
Moral Foundations Twitter Corpus: A Collection of 35k Tweets Annotated for Moral Sentiment
Research has shown that accounting for moral sentiment in natural language can yield insight into a variety of on- and off-line phenomena such as message diffusion, protest dynamics, and social distancing. However, measuring moral sentiment in natural language is challenging, and the difficulty of this task is exacerbated by the limited availability of annotated data. To address this issue, we introduce the Moral Foundations Twitter Corpus, a col…
Measuring Abstract Mind-Sets Through Syntax: Automating the Linguistic Category Model
ion in language has critical implications for memory, judgment, and learning and can provide an important window into a person’s cognitive abstraction level. The linguistic category model (LCM) provides one well-validated, human-coded approach to quantifying linguistic abstraction. In this article, we leverage the LCM to construct the Syntax-LCM, a computer-automated method which quantifies syntax use that indicates abstraction levels. We test th…
Toward a cumulative science of non-Weird morality: A reply to Rezvani Nejad et al
Moral concerns are differentially observable in language
Morally Homogeneous Networks and Radicalism
Online radicalization is among the most vexing challenges the world faces today. Here, we demonstrate that homogeneity in moral concerns results in increased levels of radical intentions. In Study 1, we find that in Gab—a right-wing extremist network—the degree of moral convergence within a cluster predicts the number of hate-speech messages members post. In Study 2, we replicate this observation in another extremist network, Incels. In Studies 3…
Supplemental Material for Moral Values Predict County-Level Covid-19 Vaccination Rates in the United States
Moral values predict county-level Covid-19 vaccination rates in the United States
Despite the widespread availability of COVID-19 vaccines, the United States has a depressed rate of vaccination relative to similar countries. Understanding the psychology of vaccine refusal, particularly the possible sources of variation in vaccine resistance across U.S. subpopulations, can aid in designing effective intervention strategies to increase vaccination across different regions. Here, we demonstrate that county-level moral values (i.e…
Supplemental Material for Morality Beyond the Weird: How the Nomological Network of Morality Varies Across Cultures
Morality beyond the Weird: How the nomological network of morality varies across cultures
1,410, three populations) provided evidence for convergent validity of the MFQ-2 scores, expanded the nomological network of the six moral foundations, and demonstrated the improved predictive power of the measure compared with the original MFQ. Importantly, our results showed how the nomological network of moral foundations varied across cultural contexts: consistent with a pluralistic view of morality, different foundations were influential in …
The Sins of the Parents Are to Be Laid Upon the Children: Biased Humans, Biased Data, Biased Models
Technological innovations have become a key driver of societal advancements. Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of machine learning (ML), which has developed algorithmic models that shape our decisions, behaviors, and outcomes. These tools have widespread use, in part, because they can synthesize massive amounts of data to make seemingly objective recommendations. Yet, in the past few years, the ML community has been drawing attention…
The Homogenizing Engine: AI's Role in Standardizing Culture and the Path to Policy
Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as unprecedented drivers of cultural homogenization, operating at scales and speeds that exceed all previous technologies. This paper examines how LLMs reduce cultural diversity across three cultural domains. Drawing on recent empirical studies, we demonstrate that LLMs disproportionately reflect a narrow demographic, primarily western, liberal, high-income, highly educated, male populations from English-…
Two wrongs is what makes it more right: How retaliatory incivility receives social leniency
Psychology (14 works) · Social Psychology (9 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (7 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Morality (6 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (5 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Linguistics (5 works)