Babak Hemmatian
Associate Director for Research Center for Brain, Biology and Behavior University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Contact
- Address
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1100 T St., C86 STE
Lincoln, Nebraska, 68588-0156, - Phone
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4024724803
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bhemmatian2@unl.edu
- Social Media
I study complex reasoning in humans. More specifically, how people internalize, and in turn negotiate, collective knowledge. I have used cognitive theories and behaviorial experiments to explain reasoning processes, led functional neuroimaging studies to determine its neural underpinnings, and applied machine learning and AI to large-scale social media texts to see how complex reasoning plays out in real life. More recently, I have looked at the ways in which knowledge representation and negotiation differs between humans and large language models.
Education
B.A. in Clinical Psychology, University of Tehran, 2013
M.S. in Computer Science, Brown University, 2019
Ph.D. in Cognitive Science, Brown University, 2022
Representative Publications
Keshmirian, A., Baltaji, R., Asghari, H., & Hemmatian, B. (2025). Collective moral reasoning in multi-agent LLMs. International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2 2025).
Hemmatian, B. (2024). Communal knowledge and brain function. Encyclopedia of the Human Brain (2nd Ed.). Elsevier.
Hemmatian, B., Varshney, L.R., Pi, F., & Barbey, A.K. (2024). The utilitarian brain: Going beyond the Free Energy Principle. Cortex, (170) 69-79.
Hemmatian, B., Baltaji, R., Varshney, L.R. (2023). Muslim-Violence Bias Persists in Debiased GPT Models. In the Thirty-seventh Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023).
Keshmirian, A., Hemmatian, B., Bahrami, B., & Deroy, O., & Cushman, F. (2022). Diffusion of punishment in collective norm violations. Scientific Reports, (12) 15318.
Amir, D., Hemmatian, B., Kasirzadeh, A., Jasbi, M., Yazdiha, H., Dehghani, M. (2022). Iran: Amplify Voices of Persecuted Academics. Nature, 611, 33. doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-03515-9
Hemmatian, B., & Sloman, S.A. (2020). Two systems for thinking with a community: Outsourcing versus collaboration. In S. Elqayam, I. Douven, J.S.B.T. Evans and N. Cruz (Eds.), Logic and Uncertainty in the Human Mind: A Tribute to David Over. New York: Routledge.
Sloman, S.A., Zemla, J. C., Lagnado, D., Bechlivanidis, C., & Hemmatian, B. (2019). Are humans intuitive philosophers? In S. R. Grimm (Ed.), Varieties of Understanding: New Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychology and Theology. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Hemmatian, B., Sloman, S.J., Cohen-Priva, U., & Sloman, S.A. (2019). Think of the consequences: a decade of discourse on same-sex marriage. Behavior Research Methods. DOI: 10.3758/s13428-019-01215-3
Hemmatian, B., & Sloman, S.A. (2018). Community appeal: explanation without information. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147(11):1677-1712. DOI: 10.1037/xge0000478