My current research projects

My research interests span the fields of anthropology, psychology, and Chinese studies, with a focus on the origins and nature of morality from infancy to adolescence and across cultures. From this interdisciplinary perspective, I examine the intersection between culture and cognition from a mixed-methods approach. Moral development in cultural contexts also provides a unique angle to interrogate broader methodological, epistemological, ontological and even existential questions facing today's world, for example, the nature and culture of AI ethics. Therefore currently I am working on various intersecting research projects, spanning from child development to Chinese comedy, from cross-cultural research to intellectual history: 

1. Global Chinese childhood and learning ("Chinese" in the broad sense of cultural heritage)

• I was granted unique access to a rare set of historical fieldnotes on children in a Han village in mid-20th century Taiwan. This project connects the history of China Studies, Taiwan Studies, anthropology of childhood, and psychological anthropology: I re-analyzed the late anthropologist/sinologist Arthur Wolf's unpublished dissertation fieldwork materials, combining ethnography and computational methods (i.e., text-analytics, LLMs, and social network analysis) . Those materials were collected in a Taiwan village (1958-1960) as the first anthropological research on ethnic Han children in the world, and the study was originally intended to replicate and expand from the classic project, the Six Cultures Study. Countering the conventional top-down approach of "parenting" and "child-training," my re-analysis sheds new light on the so-called "Traditional Han Family" by putting children, especially peer-learning, at the center of analysis. This project received funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation (with Stevan Harrell), National Academy of Education and Spencer Foundation. I have published a monograph and several articles from this project and am working on more manuscripts.

• Continuing my long-term interest in childhood, education and family life in China, I delve into heated debates in contemporary Chinese social life and examines childrearing anxiety and children's wellbeing among urban middle class families. Moreover, my experience of being a Chinese mother and scholar in the U.S. has broadened my perspectives on childhood in larger regional (East Asian), comparative and transnational context. I have published academic articles and engaged with public audience on these social issues.

• Expanding my inquiry on Chinese childhood in cross-cultural and transnational context, I am a co-investigator in a new project, collaborating with evolutionary anthropologists and developmental psychologists to examine social learning from early childhood to adolescence in four societies (PI: Dr. Sheina Lew-Levy, Durham University, funding: Economic and Social Research Council, UK). I am leading the greater Seattle site, focused on children American children learn instrumental skills, social norms, and moral values from peers and their adult caregivers and educators.

2. Moral development and identity formation in political contexts

• Through encountering Arthur Wolf's fieldnotes, my long-term interest in moral development expands to the question of morality and identity in Martial-Law era Taiwan. My new book, "Unruly" Children, started to explore this question through the lens of gender and political socialization. I am doing follow-up research to further this direction of research.

• Interrogating how moral development intersects with important political and epistemic concerns of our time, I am involved in a collaborative research called "Youth and Truth", led by psychologist Dr. Jocelyn Dautel (Queen's University Belfast), to examine children's and youth's truth-seeking and truth-communication behavior in a polarized world. I am leading the analysis of educational texts combining LLM and qualitative analysis. Our team was among the first awardees of Templeton World Charity Foundation's initiative on human flourishing and we have produced an award-winning documentary video with public impact.

3. Culture, morality, learning, and AI

   • How do humans learn morality in different cultural contexts, and how can anthropologists and AI researchers work together to address the challenges at the intersection of culture, ethics, and artificial intelligence? Across my current research projects, I not only engage with language AI as methodological tools, complementing and augmenting the value of qualitative, ethnographic methods, I also interrogate the very question of how AI learn morality in comparison with humans. 

   • In my new book, "Unruly" Children, and forthcoming articles, I have developed a LLM-ethnography collaborative approach to analyze historical texts and further compare how humans and AI learn morality. As a reviewer summarized: “Amid intense debates on open science and AI-assisted approaches, this work presents a landmark exploration of the value and limitations of both human and machine intelligence in anthropological knowledge production."

   • In the "Youth and Truth" project, I am applying a human-AI hybrid approach to identify biases in the production and transmission of pedagogical information on contentious topics in divided societies.

4. Critical and collaborative reflections on knowledge production

• The charm of studying Chinese society never ceases to surprise me yet the current status of China anthropology in the English-speaking world is less charming. For example, humor is such a fascinating and important topic in contemporary Chinese society yet it has been a neglected angle in the anthropology of China. I have recently published several articles on this topic, e.g., humor in childrearing narratives, humor in popular comedy programs, advocating for creative forms of research that takes humor seriously as an ethnographic project. Expanding from humor and narrative, I am co-organizing events to reflect on knowledge production in the anthropology of China amid geopolitical tensions and critical misalignments, in collaboration with Dr. Yang Zhan in Hong Kong. 

• Revisiting intellectual history can shed critical new light on knowledge production, as the development of an intellectual field is not just from ideas to ideas, but rather through and with real people in actual contexts. I am particularly interested in backstage stories that are crucial for the formation and circulation of certain ideas yet usually obscured in publications, see my recent reflections on Arthur Wolf's archive (in Chinese) and our collaborative re-discovery of a pioneer female Chinese anthropologist Wang Tong Hui's story.  

• Beyond the anthropology of China, the larger discipline of American anthropology is in existential crisis. As Associate Editors of the journal American Anthropologist, Dr. Yang Zhan and I hope to critically reflect on U.S.-centrism and bring pluralistic frameworks and voices, through our work in the "World Anthropologies" section. In the spirit of collaboration, openness, and reflexivity, we invite scholars and practitioners in anthropology and related disciplines globally to work with us. We will curate individual interviews, roundtables with scholars based in a certain region, and forums or special collections on vital topics, in coordination with the journal’s other sections.

My previous research projects

• My postdoctoral research in developmental psychology examined early prosocial development in infancy and toddlerhood, in particular, sharing behavior and reciprocity, using experimental methods in laboratory settings (most of the subjects are American children).

• My dissertation research in anthropology combined ethnography, questionnaire survey and field-experiments to examine Chinese children's moral development under the one-child policy and China's widely perceived "moral crisis." This research formed the basis of my first book, "The Good Child" (Stanford University Press, 2017), and several articles published in major anthropology journals in English and Chinese.

• Before coming to the U.S. for doctoral study, I have done research at Tsinghua University on a variety of issues in China, such as ethnic minority groups in Chinese history and contemporary public health initiatives (with publications in Chinese) .  

Labs/Organizations where I have worked

• Early Childhood Cognition Lab, Department of Psychology, University of Washington, Seattle.

• Memory and Development Lab, Department of Psychology, Washington University in St. Louis.

• McDonnell International Scholars Academy, Washington University in St. Louis 

People who have supervised me

• Pascal Boyer, Washington University in St. Louis

• James V. Wertsch, Washington University in St. Louis

• Stevan Harrell, University of Washington

• Jessica Sommerville, University of Washington

• Xiaojun Zhang (张小军) Tsinghua University, China

• Jun Jing (景军), Tsinghua University, China