Hi! I’ve been waiting for you 🙂 Feel free to explore my research, my blog or shoot me a message via this website (Also, here is my CV).
My name is Ke Fang 方可 (first and last names are in reverse order in Chinese). I go by Kay but you can also call me “Ke” (Kuh third-tone).
I’m currently pursuing my self-designed interdisciplinary master’s degree at NYU Gallatin. I work with Professor Madalina Vlasceanu and Professor Ashwini Ashokkumar in the Department of Psychology. My research mainly focuses on understanding the role of human cognition in facilitating coordination and collaboration in some circumstances but causing polarization and division in other cases. Specifically, taking a multi-level approach, I ask: How do the minds of each individual and their interactions give rise to emergent group cognitive patterns such as belief dynamics, norm evolution, emotional and moral contagion? At the same time, how does information from groups such as norms, identities shape individual cognitive processes? both of these questions are of great importance to understand real-world challenges such as misinformation sharing, climate crisis, online extremism and polarization.
My second interest is related to how to answer these questions. Social psychologists have long relied on rigorous behavioral experiments to obtain the “pure effects”. These studies have generated valuable treasure for us. However, they usually reduce social interactions as stimuli and generate scattered qualitative descriptions. I am interested in answering these questions by extending our toolkit with micro-level computational cognition, and macro-level agent-based simulation, social network analysis and game theory. The aim is to at a theoretical level provide a more systematic and formal account of human social cognition and behavior, and from a practical perspective, find key cognitive processes that inspire effective intervention towards real world problems. Of course, it’s not easy to master all these tools and skills, so I’m constantly working on them.
I received my Bachelor of Management from Lanzhou University in China. I majored in accounting but soon developed my interest in organizational psychology in management classes. Thus, I ended up conducting several projects related to employee stress, workplace ostracism, and employee well-being. And during investigating how workplace ostracism and abusive supervision extend employees’ stress after work, I discovered the impact of social media and became interested in how social media impact our group dynamics beyond organizational settings.
When not doing research, I usually make myself a cup of pour-over coffee and read, or if the weather is good, I explore NYC on foot, and good coffee shops and new exhibitions in museums always catch my eye.