CUHK Research: Changing the world

of reference shifts when prompted with culture-specific tasks. Professor Hong discovered this by observing respondents’ reactions to specific symbols or the way they completed certain tasks, from which her team compared the similarities and differences in their behavioural, emotional, and neuro- physiological responses. This allowed them to better elicit their cultural knowledge systems, thereby enabling them to extrapolate “the effect of culture on one’s own actions and beliefs, and interpreting the causality within”. This new method of approaching culture and cognition has ensured that Professor Hong remains an authority on the subject: as of February 2023, her work has been cited more than 25,000 times. She has also won many awards for her work in the realm of social psychology, including the Otto Klineberg Intercultural and International Relations Award, and in 2021 was also appointed as a Fellow for the Research Grant Council’s Senior Research Fellow Scheme. Professor Hong says the biggest problem comes from the delicacy required to broach the topics she works on. Some of her interviewees were extremely reluctant to talk about the nuances of their identity, often self-censoring or even refusing to think about these issues. Besides the sensitivity of respondents, the issue of “Hong Kong identity” is also a sensitive one. But as Coordinator of China Studies at CUHK, Professor Hong simply hopes that her work will enable people to understand China better. Future directions of identity Having spent a quarter of a century on her research, ProfessorHong has alreadyprovided the outsideworldwith valuable insights into intergroup relations, and examined how multiculturalism affects the city. She continues to operate in both Hong Kong and the US, where she and her research team, collectively known as “The Culture Lab”, are currentlyworking on studies that examine cultural problems and changes engendered by the COVID-19 pandemic. Their recent research has encompassed both anti-Asian hate as a response to the pandemic, as well as the recent rise of conspiracy theories in both China and America, particularly those connected to vaccines and climate change. Of the latter, she asks: “Abnormal climate change has led to weather occurrences like the recent blizzards in America; has this led to people being less convinced by climate-related conspiracy theories?” Her research output still finds itself at the centre of academic discussions: citing a recent paper she wrote on the responses to the mainland’s zero-COVID policy as an example, she says: “It didn’t take long for it to become the top hit on that platform, where it stayed for the whole month. It shows everyone still wants to know about these things.” The underlying rationale behindmy research is: howdo people fromdifferent cultural backgrounds see things from different perspectives? 46