This paper studies the self-control problem caused by time inconsistent preference and investigates the existence of the incentive scheme that would achieve the efficient outcome for present-biased agents. For naive agents who have misbelief about their future preference, they intend to...

This article provides direct evidence of appearance discrimination in Chinese context based on an experimental approach. We perform a field experiment to study if people with more attractive faces are more likely to be contacted after submitting a resume on the job search website. We find...

The bride price, as an informal institution originated from traditional culture, is pervasive in many areas of the developing world in a form of a payment from the family of the groom to that of the bride at marriage. We study the effects of bride price on parents' health in China. Using...

Purpose – Are members of socially dominant groups aware of the privileges they enjoy? We address this question by applying the notion of hypocognition to social privilege. Hypocognition is defined as lacking a rich cognitive or linguistic representation (i.e., a schema) of a concept in...

Ecological psychology has boomed from a rare form of psychology to a flourishing field, including psychologists, sociologists, and economists. We review the development of the field from early studies to more recent advances in subsistence theories, environmental challenges, human environments,...

Previous studies have found that Westerners value high intensity positive emotions more than people in China and Japan, yet few studies have compared actual rates of smiling across cultures. Particularly rare are observational studies of real-time smiling (as opposed to smiling in photos). In...

Collectivistic cultures have been characterized as having harmonious, cooperative ingroup relationships. Yet we find evidence that people in collectivistic cultures are more vigilant toward ingroup members, mindful of their possible unethical intentions. Study 1 found that Chinese participants...

Evidence across several studies leads to the conclusion that having moved and living in an unstable community are associated with some of psychology’s most central variables: happiness, self-concept, and altruism. We review evidence that mobile communities and mobile people have more...

Traditional paddy rice farmers had to share labor and coordinate irrigation in a way that most wheat farmers did not. We observed people in everyday life to test whether these agricultural legacies gave rice-farming southern China a more interdependent culture and wheat-farming northern China a...

Previous studies have found that high-status people are more individualistic and think more analytically than people of lower social status. We find new evidence that this is not always the case. We tested a large sample (N = 1,418) of people across China on analytic thought and the friend-...