Xuechunzi Bai joined the Department of Psychology as an Assistant Professor in July 2024. Dr. Bai completed her A.B. degree at the University of Tokyo in Japan and her Ph.D. in Psychology and Public Policy from Princeton University in the US. At Princeton, she was a fellow in the Cognitive Science Program and the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning. At the University of Chicago, she will also affiliate with the Center for Decision Research at the Booth School of Business.

Dr. Bai studies dynamic social minds. Broadly, she explores the interplay between individual decision processes and societal phenomena in the field of social cognition. She investigates how individuals adaptively but selectively construct their social world and how the constructed social world, in turn, shapes individual minds. A key area of her research has been investigating the psychological origins of social stereotypes, uncovering the paradoxical relationship between intelligent individual behaviors, such as self-interested exploration, and the collective detrimental outcomes, such as social stratification.

Combining perspectives from social and cognitive psychology, computer science and machine learning, and public policy, Dr. Bai employs a diverse range of methodologies in her research, including cross-national surveys, large-scale online behavioral experiments, naturalistic text analyses, and computational cognitive models. Her future research aims to explore various aspects of dynamic social minds in both human and artificial social worlds.