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Dr. Jiin Jung is a social psychologist and postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychology at New York University. She studies the cognitive and social aspects of belief dynamics that reduce polarization and social division while promoting social change and diversity (Jung et al., 2019, 2021; American Psychologist). She particularly focuses on the role of minority dissent in these processes.
The three lines of her research are:
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How underrepresented minorities respond to societal uncertainty differently from the prototypical majority, resulting in marginalization, polarization, and social division.
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How the majority's open-minded listening to minority dissenting voices spreads minority ideas to society, maintains diversity, and potentially changes social norms and cultural practices.
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How diverse voices are brought into collective decisions.
Her research integrates scholarship from multiple disciplines (e.g., psychology, political science, epistemology, complex systems science) and uses multiple methodologies (e.g., lab/field experiments, surveys, network analysis, computational modeling) with diverse demographic and regional samples (e.g., United States, international collaborations) to study
how people construct and change beliefs about self, others, groups, and society when they face uncertainty and disagreement, and how these psychological processes generate societal phenomena such as social change, diversity, and polarization.
Her research has been acknowledged not only in the social psychology community but also in the computational social science and public policy communities. For example, she has received the Best Paper Award from the Computational Social Science Society of the Americas and the Research Scientist of the Year Award from Claremont Graduate University. Her work on minority influence was featured in a BBC Future article entitled “how the views of a few can determine a country’s fate.” Her decade-long collaboration with the computational social science group has been recognized in an American Psychologist special issue on multidisciplinary research teams (Jung et al., 2019; American Psychologist). She was invited to interdisciplinary research workshops at Santa Fe Institute for four summers. Last year, she was invited to several RAND Corporation policy panel discussions, including the RAND Democracy Project and the RAND Gender Equality Forum.
Prior to New York University, she served as a visiting assistant professor in the Brain, Behavior, and Quantitative Science Program of the Department of Psychology at the University of Kansas. She currently serves as a board member-at-large and webinar organizer of the Computational Social Science Society of the Americas.
Before she decided to pursue her career in academia, she worked as an editor for the Toto Book publisher. As part of this work, she developed an environmental education program for youth and helped Dae-Kwon Hwang to run the Wild Grass School. This program was part of Hwang's environmental movement group that used the non-violence method to achieve social change. Later she edited Mr. Hwang's related book, ''Wild Grass School". This experience planted the seed for her research on tolerance, indirect minority influence, and social change.
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