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ABOUT

Dr. Jiin Jung is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Psychology at New York University, where she is affiliated with the Motivation Lab. In this lab, she works on a number of different projects, including the social psychology of intellectual humility and misplaced certainty, funded by John Templeton Foundation.

 

Before coming 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 has been collaborating with the Computational Social Science Group for a decade. She is a board member-at-large and webinar organizer of the Computational Social Science Society of the Americas. She serves as an expert panel member of the RAND Center for Asia Pacific Policy Gender Equity Initiative.

She studies how people construct beliefs about self, others, groups, and society when they face uncertainty and disagreement and how these psychological processes generate collective system behaviors such as social change, diversity, and polarization. She particularly focuses on the role of minority dissent in these processes. To understand the cross-level causality and iterations over time, she combines social psychology and other social sciences with a complex adaptive systems approach. She uses behavioral experiments, surveys, network analysis, and agent-based computational modeling.

She developed an agent-based model of indirect minority influence based on the empirical work of indirect minority influence on social change in the social psychological literature. This research identified a leniency threshold that is required for minority dissenting views to spread in society and change social norms. Also, this research indicated how societal tolerance toward minority dissents triggers indirect minority influence and generates different patterns of collective belief dynamics such as polarization, diversity of beliefs, and social change in terms of speed, magnitude, and frequency in various communication network structures. 

This study received the Best Paper Award from the Computational Social Science Society of the Americas in 2016. In four summers of 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2022, she was invited to the research workshops at Santa Fe Institute to advance her minority model. In 2019, this research was featured in a BBC Future article entitled “how the views of a few can determine a country’s fate.” This project was recognized in the American Psychologist special issue: psychological perspectives on culture change (Jung, Bramson, Crano, Page, & Miller, 2021). 

Social systems are complex, with multiple levels from individuals through small groups to large societies. Many factors at different levels interact to influence one another and different disciplines focus on different levels of analysis. Interdisciplinary research is critical for scientific progress. She has been collaborating with interdisciplinary and international researchers including social epistemologists, political scientists, and complex systems scientists to understand how cognitively limited people can reach truth or polarized through group deliberation. This group originated at the University of Michigan's Center for the Study of Complex Systems. This group, in which she is the only psychologist, has produced a number of publications. Her decade-long collaboration has been recognized in the American Psychologist special issue: multidisciplinary research teams (Jung et al., 2019).

She was born in Seoul, South Korea. Before coming to New York, she worked as a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA, where she was affiliated with the Brain, Behavior, and Quantitative Science Program. She received her Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Claremont Graduate University under the supervision of Dr. Michael Hogg. She studied Biology B.S. at Seoul National University and Social Psychology M.A. at Sungkyunkwan University, both in Seoul.

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 formulated 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 nonviolent methods to achieve social change. Later she edited Mr. Hwang's related book, ''Wild Grass School". This experience planted the seed for her research on leniency, indirect minority influence, and social change. 

You can click here to download her CV.

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