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Culture and Morality Lab

Research

One premise, three programs

Moral psychology can only be understood in cultural context. Our three research programs approach that premise from different directions, across history and geography, across moral systems, and across methods.

The programs feed each other: cross-cultural and historical work reveals variation worth explaining; a pluralistic theory of morality provides the concepts to explain it; and computational methods let us test those ideas in everyday language at scale.

01

Culture Across Time and Place

How and why do psychological processes vary across history and across cultures?

We examine the “how” and “why” of cultural variation in psychological variables, across historical time (historical psychology) and across space (cross-cultural psychology).

Human psychology is not fixed: minds are shaped by the cultural worlds people inhabit, and those worlds change. This research program asks how psychological variables, values, norms, emotions, and beliefs, differ across societies today, and how they have shifted over historical time.

Cross-cultural work in the lab takes seriously that most psychological research has been conducted with WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) samples. We study populations beyond that narrow slice, mapping where familiar findings generalize and where they do not.

Historical psychology extends the same questions backward in time, using text corpora and other historical records to trace how moral and psychological concepts have evolved across generations.

Cross-cultural psychologyHistorical psychologyWEIRD samplesCultural change

Methods

  • Cross-cultural surveys and fieldwork
  • Historical text corpora
  • Large-scale archival data
  • Measurement-invariance testing

Selected publications

All publications in this area

02

Pluralistic Morality

How do different moral systems bind people together, or divide them into “us” versus “them”?

We take a pluralistic approach to human morality, studying how different flavors of morality can bind people into ultra-cooperative groups or divide them into an “us vs. them” mindset that justifies violence and hatred.

Morality is not one thing. People and cultures build moral systems from multiple concerns, care, fairness, loyalty, authority, purity, and more, and these systems do real work in social life.

The same moral psychology that supports trust, cooperation, and belonging within groups can also sharpen boundaries between groups. This program studies both faces of morality: how shared moral commitments make large-scale cooperation possible, and how moralized divisions can escalate into hostility, radicalization, and intergroup conflict.

By treating morality as plural rather than monolithic, we can ask precise questions about which moral concerns, in which cultural contexts, predict cohesion, and which predict conflict.

Moral foundationsCooperationIntergroup conflictRadicalization

Methods

  • Laboratory and online experiments
  • Moral Foundations Theory measures
  • Social-network analysis
  • Field studies

Selected publications

All publications in this area

03

Computational Social Science

How can natural language processing help answer social-psychological questions at scale?

We both develop and apply state-of-the-art computational methods, particularly natural language processing, to tackle social-psychological questions.

Everyday language carries traces of moral and cultural life: what people care about, whom they trust, and how they draw group boundaries. Natural language processing lets us study those traces at a scale no laboratory could reach.

The lab develops methods for measuring moral concerns in text and applies them to everyday conversation, social media, and historical corpora. This includes work on when and how often morality actually surfaces in daily talk, and how moral language behaves in online networks.

We treat computational tools as instruments that must be validated like any psychological measure, built carefully, tested across cultures and languages, and shared openly.

NLPText analysisMoral languageComputational methods

Methods

  • Natural language processing
  • Machine learning
  • Large language models
  • Open-source measurement tools

Selected publications

All publications in this area

Interested in these questions?

We collaborate across psychology, anthropology, computer science, and beyond, and we welcome students who want to work on culture and morality.

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