Morteza Dehghani is an Iranian-American psychologist and computer scientist who serves as a professor of Psychology and Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC). He completed a B.S. and an M.S. at the University of California, Los Angeles, followed by an M.S. and a Ph.D. at Northwestern University, where he worked with Ken Forbus and Douglas Medin. Dehghani is the Director of the Center for Computational Language Sciences, the Director of the Morality and Language Lab, and a member of USC's Brain and Creativity Institute.^[5,1,2] His research spans morality, language, artificial intelligence, and computational social science.

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, where he also completed postdoctoral research in psychology.^[4,3]

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 to 2020, associate professor from 2020 to 2023, and was promoted to full professor of psychology and computer science in 2023.^[7,6]

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, decision-making, and cultural cognition.^[8] Beginning around 2012, his work examined what he terms the "dark side" of morality, focusing on moral ecosystems, moral homogenization, prejudice, and hate.^[9,12,13] 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 and the United States Senate Committee on Armed Services.^[17] 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 received include the Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award in 2012 and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2018. Additionally, they were elected a Fellow of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology in 2019, received the Google Award for Inclusion Research in 2022, and were elected a Fellow of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in 2024.

Brendan Kennedy, Mohammad Atari, Aida Mostafazadeh Davani, Joe Hoover, Ali Omrani, Jesse Graham, and Morteza Dehghani published "Moral concerns are differentially observable in language" in Cognition on 1 July 2021. On 28 July 2021, Joe Hoover, Mohammad Atari, Aida Mostafazadeh Davani, Brendan Kennedy, Gwenyth Portillo-Wightman, Leigh Yeh, and Morteza Dehghani published "Investigating the role of group-based morality in extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice" in Nature Communications. In September 2022, Nils Karl Reimer, Mohammad Atari, Farzan Karimi-Malekabadi, Jackson Trager, Brendan Kennedy, Jesse Graham, and Morteza Dehghani published "Moral values predict county-level COVID-19 vaccination rates in the United States." in American Psychologist.