Yang Xiang

I am a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University, working primarily with Tobias Gerstenberg. My research asks how people build richly structured intuitive theories and use them to plan and make decisions.
One line of work centers on collaboration: how people combine the complementary strengths of different individuals to achieve shared goals, such as deciding whom to recruit to a team or how to motivate collaborators to contribute. Another line of work focuses on learning: how people invest in their own growth, such as deciding which goals are worth pursuing and when effort is likely to pay off. I also study how these processes reinforce each other: how collaborators become more competent on the job, and how training collaborators benefits future collaboration. I approach these questions using computational modeling and behavioral experiments.
I earned my Ph.D. in Psychology at Harvard, working with Samuel J. Gershman, Fiery A. Cushman, and Natalia Vélez.

Email: yangxiang.yyx@gmail.com