Mohammad Atari

Last chance to submit to the historical psychology preconference at SPSP 2027. THEME: How the events of yesterday shaped the minds of today DEADLINE: tonight!

This year UMass Amherst CICS will be hiring tenure-track faculty in natural language processing! Job ad to be posted soon. For anyone at #TADA2026 or #COLM2026 this week, I or my colleague Hamed Zamani would love to chat or answer questions about it - just say hi or send me an email to meet!

Mohammad Atari presents data measuring moral values in texts across history at SESP Montreal. #SESP2026

The symposium is Saturday, 5-6:10pm in Room Beaver, 8th floor. Join us! Thanks to @mohammadatari.bsky.social and Jesse Graham for organizing! 👏

Join me at the Historical Psychology Pre-Conference at SPSP. It'll be fun to finally get to join this pre-conference! 🤩 @spspnews.bsky.social

Who gets to claim a religious exemption? In the eyes of Americans, the answer depends heavily on political ideology, not just the belief itself. My first first-author paper is out in @spspnews.bsky.social’s Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin! New paper 🧵1/10

New paper on virtue trade-offs in everyday life, led by my PhD student, Qilin Zhang! A growing literature emphasizes trade-offs between competing moral principles (e.g., kindness vs. honesty), but are such trade-offs ubiquitous in everyday life? 1/5

I'm hiring a postdoc in 𝐡𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐩𝐬𝐲𝐜𝐡𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐲! This project will focus on psychological change in the Middle East and North Africa, with a particular interest in Islamic history. Topical themes include religiosity, creativity, morality, and institutions. 1/n

🚨 PNAS paper: "Indirect reciprocity undermines indirect reciprocity destabilizing large-scale cooperation" w/ Eric Schnell How do we achieve global cooperation on climate or conflict reduction? The problem isn't selfishness as much as it is cooperation itself - at a smaller scale. 1/

Exciting opportunity to work on historical psychology!

Such fun! Chatting about my research and journey was an absolute blast. Thank you @cornellilr.bsky.social for the piece!

Check out our new paper in SPPS.

Conventional wisdom suggests that modernization makes cultures more homogenous, but what if the resources of technology and wealth that modernization offers allow people to more fully express their cultural preferences? In PNAS Nexus: https://ow.ly/eBIU50Yvm1A

🏆 @simine.com, psychologist at @psychunimelb.bsky.social / @unimelb.bsky.social and Editor-in-Chief of Psychological Science (@psychscience.bsky.social) is a leading voice in the reform movement in psychology - and is now being honored with the €150K Individual Award. Huge congratulations! 🎉

LLMs overemphasize moral concerns common in Western societies and underestimate values more prominent elsewhere. These distortions likely stem from cultural biases in training data and carry societal implications and risks www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

We're excited about the upcoming Computational Psychology preconference at @spspnews.bsky.social this Thursday. See our action-packed full day agenda below! Featuring 3 keynote talk themes with related early-career speakers, data blitz session, panel discussion. Don't miss it! #SPSP

postdoc opportunity! would be a good fit for an intergroup person with NLP chops interested in the role of historical narratives bonus, Edinburgh is a phenomenal city to live in with wonderful, walkable quality of life elxw.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

Important work!!

Come work with me on cognitive diversity, development & dynamics in beautiful Amherst, Massachusetts! Graduate student applications are due a week from today. cognitiveconstructionlab.com

It's one of my favorite times of the year! And I'm so so proud of my SLAM Lab grads who did a fantastic job presenting the cool projects they've each been working on.! @psychonomicsociety.bsky.social FYI @stephanyrea.bsky.social is on the job market.

This—on my former university, department, and advisor—is harrowing but required reading for all social psychologists. www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

Come and do a PhD at Exeter with me and Chico Camargo (Computer Science) on human-genAI coevolution "Leveraging Natural Language Processing for Data-Driven Agent-Based Modelling of Online Cultural Dynamics" www.exeter.ac.uk/v8media/recr... More details here: www.exeter.ac.uk/study/fundin...

Do people remember where things are relative to their body (e.g. my left side) or relative to the environment (the North/uphill side)? The answer is both at once, according to my new paper now out in Psychological Science! 🧵 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Samani and Baumard map out trends in Romantic love in Persian literature from 10th century to 20th century CE. They find an increasing emphasis on romantic love over time, particularly during the Safavid era. This may reveal a link w economic development www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Fan and Baumard reveal new evidence of rising individualism over history, which suggests that wealth rather than Protestantism contributed to individualism www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

And last but not least, Obshonka and colleagues find that Roman rule explains puzzling variation in modern well-being differences across Germany Ancient Roman investment in infrastructure may explain why Southwestern Germans are so happy and healthy today www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

McClain and Kenny dig into the history of collectivism in Japan, conducting a pre-registered analysis of self-reported collectivism and tightness in the Japanese social survey and linking responses to historical subsistence patterns across Japan www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

@joannaschug.bsky.social leads a paper on gendered racial stereotypes. They show that the civil rights movement coincided with a rise in language about black men, but not black women www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

@mohammadatari.bsky.social and I begin with an editorial reflecting on the origins, current trends, and future of historical psych The future requires strong causal identification and theorizing about how institutions can cement or change historical trends www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

On election day, I wanna announce that I am recruiting social psych PhD students for my lab at UIC. My lab focuses on racial identities (esp Asian, Latino, MENA Americans) and intra-minority conflict/ coalition. So please tell your students to pick me! All details on my website: www.pbandjlab.com

Our "Historical Psychology" special issue is now out in CRESP! www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu... Co-edited with @mohammadatari.bsky.social and featuring historical perspectives on love, racial identity, emotion expression, well-being, collectivism, religion, and more! Brief 🧵

I’m delighted to announce that I’ll be joining the faculty at @umassamherst.bsky.social next year as an assistant professor in Psychological & Brain Sciences! 🥳