Xuechunzi Bai

Our lab studies how humans make sense of the social world they themselves construct, both in its sophisticated design and its unintended consequences. Current projects often use social bias as a window into this process. For example, we build computational cognitive models and multi-player experiments to examine how seemingly rational behaviors can create social stratification; analyze historical datasets to trace stereotypes of immigrants; and explore ways to design socially intelligent agent system that can change human biases. Our goal is to understand how humans collectively create, sustain, and respond to social structures, shaping reality, and navigating it as if given, and to explore how to change some potentially suboptimal social structures to imagine more collaborative futures.

We hold weekly joint lab meetings with Drs. Alex Koch and Alex Todorov at Booth School of Business.