The Cultural Dynamics Lab team

Hanying is interested in studying beliefs and identities across social, political, and cultural contexts. She is particularly interested in foundational psychological and social processes (e.g., categorization, belief updating, coordination) and how they shape polarization and intergroup dynamics, especially as emerging societal phenomena (e.g., globalization, social media, AI) transform the transmission of social information. Her research uses large-scale surveys, experiments, computational modeling, NLP, and network analysis.

Shirley is interested in the cognitive processes that support social inference and behavioral adaptation, and in how these processes scale up through social interaction to produce collective phenomena such as shared representations, social norms, and cultural change. Methodologically, Shirley is particularly interested in combining formal and computational models, especially agent-based models, with clean experimental designs that isolate and test the psychological mechanisms proposed by those models.

Dan is interested in how the incentive structures embedded in people’s environments shape how they think and act. Dan is also curious to understand how values are changing around the world and how globalization and increasing wealth are contributing to that change.

Dan received a PhD in Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and was the 2024-2026 Dispute Resolution Research Center Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management. Dan’s research has been published in Nature Human Behaviour, Nature Communications, and Psychological Science.

Shen’s research focuses on historical psychology and language change using diachronic texts, with the goal of uncovering fundamental regularities in mind and language shared by people across time and space.

Umy studies norms, rules, and culture through an institutional lens, using computational models as well as lab and field experiments.

Shiyun is interested in how human adaptation to social ecology shapes distinct norms and values across cultures. She is particularly interested in the role of institutions, including ancient and modern forms, in cultural evolution. Shiyun is also drawn to cultural evolutionary mismatch, where once-adaptive cultural traits become maladaptive as ecological conditions change.

Meriel studies how culture and technology shape psychological change over time. She is particularly interested in meaning-making and how certain kinds of societal transformation can erode our sense of purpose and well-being.

Yuanze studies collective psychology and cultural evolution, with a focus on how interactions among individuals give rise to collective patterns of thought and behavior and how these patterns change over time. He is particularly interested in how psychological and cultural dynamics respond to changes in social ecology, including new institutions and technologies such as AI, and how these changes can be harnessed to improve collective outcomes.

Geshi received a B.A. in Cognitive Science and Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania. Geshi’s research involves exploring how social identity and network structure shape collective intelligence and emotions, as well as how to leverage psychological insights to improve human-AI collaboration. Before starting the Ph.D., Geshi worked as a research coordinator at the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab.

Lekshmi is interested in how the interpretive frames people inherit shape the way psychological distress is recognized and treated, where that produces misclassification, and who ends up without care. She approaches these questions from comparative evolutionary neuroscience of social bonding and primatology on one side, and from psychiatric residential care and mental health access research on the other.