I am Bai (pronounced like bye)!

I am a rising fifth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology at Princeton University. I hold a certificate in Statistics and Machine Learning and a joint degree in Social Policy from the School of Public and International Affairs. I am a graduate student fellow in the Program in Cognitive Science and a winner of the Prize Fellowship in the Social Sciences at Princeton.

My research examines how and why humans learn inaccurate stereotypes. I am very lucky to work with and learn from Susan Fiske, Tom Griffiths, and Alex Todorov.

I will be on the academic job market in 2022 fall. [CV]

My current projects study the origin and evolution of social stereotypes, focusing on the iterative interactions between individual-level cognitive processes and societal-level representations. I ask: How do individual minds adaptively but selectively construct the social world? And how does the constructed social world feedback to individual minds? My work tries to understand not only how people make sense of the social world, but also how people make the social world, and eventually, how people can make the social world better.

My research is inspired by interdisciplinary insights from social and cognitive psychology, computer science and machine learning, and public policy. I use multiple methodologies to pursue these questions, including cross-national surveys, large-scale online behavioral experiments, naturalistic text analyses, and computational cognitive models. In all my work, I attempt to find parallel patterns in human behavior, and connect these patterns with policy implications, such as structural diversity and intergroup exploration, aiming to reduce intergroup misunderstanding.

Illustrative Publications

• Bai, X., Fiske, S. T., & Griffiths, T. L. (2022). Globally inaccurate stereotypes can result from locally adaptive exploration. Psychological Science. [paper][data & code][slides]

  • Presented at Social Biases in Machine Learning and in Human Nature workshop​, Princeton, 2021.

  • A 15-min talk presented at the Computational Social Cognition symposium, SPSP, 2022.

• Bai, X., Ramos, M.R., & Fiske, S. T. (2020). As diversity increases, people paradoxically perceive social groups as more similar. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [paper][data & code][slides]

  • Featured in Princeton School of Public and International Affairs News, The Conversation, and The Greater Good at Berkeley​

• Grigoryan, L., Bai, X., Durante, F., Fiske, S. T., Fabrykant, M., Maloku, E., Verbilovich, V., Hakobjanyan, A., Kadirov, K., Mullabaeva, N., Makashyili, A., Morozova-Larina, O., Yahiiaiev, I., Samekin, A., Berdyna, E. M. (2020). Stereotypes as historical accidents: Images of social class in post-communist versus capitalist societies. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. [paper] [data & code][slides]​

  • Winner of SPSP Student Publication Prize​

In leisure time, I dance (hip-hop), walk (my malamute), and play (mahjong).

© 2022 By Xuechunzi Bai. All rights reserved.