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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.

01

Culture Across Time and Place

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

We study how values, norms, emotions, and beliefs vary across societies and shift across historical time.

Minds are shaped by the cultural worlds people inhabit, and those worlds change. Because most psychological research rests on WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) samples, we work with populations beyond that narrow slice, mapping where familiar findings generalize and where they break down, and we extend the same questions backward in time, using text corpora and archival 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 treat morality as plural, several distinct concerns rather than one thing, and study the work each does in social life.

People and cultures build moral systems from multiple concerns: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, purity, and more. The same moral psychology that makes large-scale cooperation possible can also sharpen the boundaries between groups, escalating into hostility, radicalization, and violence. Treating morality as plural lets us ask precisely which moral concerns, in which cultural contexts, bind people together, and which divide them into “us” versus “them.”

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 develop and apply natural language processing to study moral and cultural life at a scale no laboratory could reach.

Everyday language carries traces of what people care about, whom they trust, and where they draw group boundaries. The lab builds methods for measuring moral concerns in text, validated like any psychological instrument and shared openly, and applies them to everyday conversation, social media, and historical corpora, including work on when morality actually surfaces in daily talk and how moral language behaves in online networks.

NLPText analysisMoral languageComputational methods

Methods

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

Selected publications

All publications in this area