Lin Bian joined the Department of Psychology as an Assistant Professor in 2021. Before moving to the University of Chicago, she was the Evalyn Edwards Milman Assistant Professor at Cornell University. Lin obtained her B.S. in Psychology at Zhejiang University (China) and her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and then completed her postdoctoral training at Stanford University.
Her research examines the development of social cognition, with an emphasis on children’s reasoning about social categories. In this vein, she has pursued two major lines of research: One line of work focuses on the acquisition and consequences of stereotypes about social groups for children’s interests and motivation. The other line of work focuses on infants’ and toddlers’ sociomoral expectations, especially as how they apply to behaviors within vs. across group boundaries.