Ying-yi Hong is currently a professor at the Business School of The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She received her PhD from Columbia University in the field of personality and social psychology.

 

Ying-yi’s research interests include culture and cognition, identity and intergroup relations. She believes in interdisciplinary research, and seeks to integrate social psychology, behavioral economics, neuroscience, and genetics to study identity and intergroup dynamics. This integration hopefully will bring new understanding of how culture, identity, and human biology co-evolve, thereby shedding light on the development of humankind in the face of globalization and multicultural exposure.

 

These research topics are dear to Ying-yi’s heart as she grew up in Hong Kong during the colonial era. Ying-yi left Hong Kong to pursue graduate studies in the United States, and has worked in universities in multiple locations (the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore) before returning to Hong Kong to teach at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, her alma mater. She has worked on projects using experimental social psychology methods to examine identity and intergroup relations during major events, such as handover of Hong Kong’s sovereignty to China in 1997, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Japan Earthquake and Tsunami in 2011, and Hong Kong’s social events in 2015 and 2019. She has also conducted research relating to COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic. Overall, Ying-yi has attempted to integrate state-of-the-art methods from social psychology, behavioral economics, neuroscience, and genetics to unpack human dynamics in the face of social and environmental changes.

 

Ying-yi’s research reflects her global experiences. The editor of over ten books, including The Oxford Handbook of Multicultural Identity, which won the 2015 Ursula Gielen Global Psychology Book Award. Ying-yi has published over 180 journal articles and book chapters and her work has been cited widely in the fields of psychology, business and education. She has received several awards for her pioneering work, including the Otto Klineberg Intercultural and International Relations Award in 2001, International Society for Self and Identity Outstanding Early Career Award in 2004, and Nanyang Award for Research Excellence in 2013. Ying-yi was elected Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University in 2018. Her most recent awards include the Outstanding Contributions to Cultural Psychology Award in 2020 and the prestigious Senior Research Fellow Scheme (2021/22) award conferred by the Research Grant Council of Hong Kong SAR government.