Xuechunzi Bai
​​白　雪純子
I am Bai (pronounce like bye)! I am a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology at Princeton University. I study social cognition, especially how humans learn inaccurate stereotypes.
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I work primarily with Susan T. Fiske, and study in certificate programs in Statistics and Machine Learning, and Social Policy in the School of Public and International Affairs. I also learn lot from collaborations with Alex Todorov and Tom Griffiths.
 
Research Interests
 
My current projects study the origin and evolution of social stereotypes, with a focus on the interaction between individual cognition and environmental representations, from theoretical [2,5], sociological [1,3], experimental [4,6], and computational [6] approaches.
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Other topics of interest: Comparative moral reasoning in the nation v. world domain, and Natural Language Processing (NLP) in social science.
 
Selected publications

I am grateful to collaborate with many amazing researchers on diverse projects. Below is my recent research focus, see CV for other publications.

  • [6] Bai, X., Fiske, S. T., & Griffiths, T. L. (under review). Globally inaccurate stereotypes can result from locally rational exploration. [paper]

  • [5] Bai, X., Nicolas, G., & Fiske, S. T.  (in press). Social stereotype: Content and process. In D. Carlston, K. Johnson, & K. Hugenberg (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Social Cognition: 2nd Edition/Volume.

  • [4] Bai, X., Uddenberg, S., Labbree, B., & Todorov, A. (ms in prep). Insta-learn: Face stereotypes emerge and persist through insufficient statistical learning.

  • [3] 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]

  • [2] Fiske, S. T. & Bai, X. (2020). Vertical and horizontal inequality are status and power differences: Applications to stereotyping by competence and warmth. Current Opinion in Psychology. [paper]

  • [1] 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. (2019). Stereotypes as historical accidents: Images of social class in post-communist versus capitalist societies. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. [paper] [data & code][slides]

 
Social Activities
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  • My friends and I designed a social entrepreneur project called Open a Door in 2015. It is an activity-based inter-class interaction. Students in elementary schools in ethnic minority rural villages (Zhoujiaping, Sichuan) and ethnic majority in urban cities (Shenyang, Liaoning) interact with each other. The goal is to rebuild the confidence of kids from lower SES backgrounds via oriented collaborations. See details here and here.​
 
  • I participated in Teach for China during 2012-13 (Zhoujiaping, Sichuan). I taught maths, literature, sports, and music to preschoolers, 1st-year, and 2nd-year students. It did not feel right - I introduced smartphones or shopping malls to my students, but felt I was superimposing my superiority to them, thus constrained their own uniqueness. e.g., the dilemma in international aid programs.
 
  • A bridge between Japan and China. China and Japan always have complicated inter-nation relations, but I love both. I spent my high school in Kyoto and received undergraduate education in Tokyo Japan. Since high school, as a student representative, I advocated for more communications between ordinary people of the two countries. I did an intern at a Japanese consulting firm, Hyacca LLC, developing cross-cultural personality assessment tests. I am an Alumni of AIESEC Japan, in charge of international student conferences, cross-national internships, and workshops. I also did an intern at Genron NPO (a democratic conversation channel), assistance in negotiations between Japan and China government. Not to complicate things, I am a Chinese-Korean ethnic minority as well.
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  • In leisure times, I dance (Hip-Hop), walk (dog), and play (mahjong).

© 2021 By Xuechunzi Bai. All rights reserved.