My name is Jinyi Kuang (匡金一). I am a Ph.D. student in Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. I received a bachelor's degree from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2016. After graduation, I joined the Center for Social Norms and Behavioral Dynamics as a Research Specialist. I worked with a team of interdisciplinary researchers to measure social networks, identify behavioral drivers, and design interventions for collective behavior change.
Moving beyond field research, I am interested in the social and cognitive mechanisms underlying social norm perceptions and inferences. By focusing on the interplay between individual cognitive processes and social environment, I investigate how people mentally represent collective others, make inferences about collective behaviors and act accordingly, and how they give rise to complex social phenomena.
To tackle these questions, I leverage methodological advances in social, cognitive and network science, including behavioral experiments, natural language processing and network analysis.
I am also an affiliated member of The Social Interaction Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.