Description

Morteza Dehghani is a Professor of Psychology, Computer Science, and the Brain and Creativity Institute (BCI) at the University of Southern California, where he directs the Cognition, Alignment, and Learning in Machines (CALM) Laboratory. His research combines correlational studies of psychological processes in social discourse with behavioral experimentation to examine how human values interact with environmental and psychological factors to predict real-world behavior. He is especially interested in how extreme moral worldviews give rise to prejudice, violence, and hate. Dr. Dehghani's lab bridges psychological theories of human cognition with AI architecture to build more robust, human-centric systems—aligning large language models to human-like reasoning styles such as System 1 and System 2 thinking, and adapting models to heterogeneous individual preferences. His team also designs cognitively plausible frameworks for schema-based learning, structural abstraction, analogical reasoning, continuous memory adaptation, and autonomous agent coordination through learned representations. His research has been featured by the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, the Atlantic, the Boston Globe, Science, Nature Human Behavior, and Psychology Today, and has been funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the National Science Foundation, Microsoft, and the National Institutes of Health. He is a Fellow of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology and has received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the Google Award for Inclusion Research (AIR), and the American Arab, Middle Eastern, and North African Psychological Association Outstanding Paper Award.