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About Me
About Me
Hi! My name is Yuanze (pronounced yuăn zé, approximately “You-ahn-Zuh”). I am a PhD student in Organizational Behavior at Harvard Business School.
I study collective psychology and cultural evolution. My research asks how psychological and cultural processes adapt to changing social environments, when these processes produce undesirable outcomes, and how institutions and technologies can help people deliberately shape collective change. Across these questions, I examine how interactions among individuals give rise to collective patterns, how those patterns evolve, and how they feed back to shape individual psychology.
I am especially interested in how these dynamics unfold amid changes in social ecology, including the emergence of new institutions and technologies such as large AI models. Ultimately, my work aims to understand how we can build better forms of collective life.
For more about my research, see Research or Google Scholar; for my personal story, see Bio.
Research questions
How do psychology and culture adapt to changing social environments?
I study how psychological processes such as person perception, social judgment, and intergroup attitudes emerge from and co-evolve with social ecology. I am particularly interested in large-scale transformations such as state centralization, globalization, and digitalization, and in how they reshape the ways people think about and relate to one another.
When do collective and cultural dynamics produce undesirable outcomes?
Processes that are adaptive in one environment, or under one criterion of success, may become maladaptive as environments and evaluative standards change. I study the origins and dynamics of such mismatches, including persistent prejudice and inequality, political polarization, and barriers to cross-cultural communication.
How can people deliberately shape collective and cultural change?
I study how human collectives can steer their own development—for example, by changing which practices are adopted, which ideas spread, how information circulates, and how disagreements are managed. I am especially interested in how new institutions and technologies can alter these processes and potentially improve collective outcomes.