About me
Hello! I'm Aliah Zewail, an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and PhD student in Social Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where I work with Dr. Mohammad Atari in the Culture and Morality Lab. My research rests at the intersection of moral psychology, cultural evolution, and computational social science. Specifically, Iām interested in how moral and cultural representations are formed, how they evolve across history and societies, and how they are encoded (sometimes imperfectly) into modern technologies like Large Language Models. I integrate psychometrics, econometrics, and computational methods to pursue these questions.
Prior to beginning my doctoral studies, I earned my BA in Psychology (with a minor in French) from the University of Texas at Austin, where I worked in the Pennebaker Lab on the 2022 edition of the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC).
When Iām not glued to my computer, you can usually find me homebrewing, playing with my cat, rehearsing with a local orchestra, or offering unsolicited literary commentary on books I find neat (see Notes).
Iām always happy to connect -- whether it be about research, NSF applications, or shared interests. Feel free to reach out at azewail[at]umass[dot]edu :-)
Recent News!
- [March 2026] š Our paper, Moral Stereotyping in Large Language Models, was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences!
- [December 2025] š Our paper, Public Speakers With Non-Native Accents Garner Less Engagement, was published in Psychological Science!
- [September 2025] š New preprint ā Is Empathic AI Possible?
- [June 2025] š Selected participant, Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science (University of Edinburgh)
- [May 2025] š Our paper, Morality Across Time and Space, was published in European Review of Social Psychology!
- [April 2025] š Awarded the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship
- [December 2024] š New preprint ā Moral Stereotyping in Large Language Models