Chi-yue Chiu

Introduction

Chi-yue Chiu is a Hong Kong social psychologist whose work has helped decide how cultural psychology explains itself. He grew up in Hong Kong, took his first degrees there, and completed his doctorate in social-personality psychology at Columbia University in New York. He has taught at the University of Hong Kong, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and in 2014 became Dean of the Faculty of Social Science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His name is attached to three ideas that are now standard currency: that culture can be primed in the laboratory like any other mental content, that what matters about a culture may be what its members believe most others believe rather than what any individual believes, and that cultures are best understood as mutually constituted rather than as separate boxes. He has published well over two hundred articles and book chapters and has edited or co-edited a series of volumes on culture and psychology.

Early Life and Education

Chiu was born and raised in Hong Kong. He took a bachelor's degree in social science and a master's degree in psychology at the University of Hong Kong, then went to the United States for doctoral study at Columbia University, where he earned a master's, a second master's, and his Ph.D. in social-personality psychology. The move from Hong Kong to New York is not incidental to what he later argued. Much of his work is an argument against treating culture as a fixed national essence, and it is difficult to read that argument without noticing that it comes from someone who has moved between several of them.

Academic and Professional Career

Chiu began teaching at the University of Hong Kong in 1994, where he served as associate dean of social sciences and head of the psychology department before moving in 2002 to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as professor of psychology and of marketing. In 2008 he joined Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, where he was executive director of the Culture Science Institute at the Nanyang Business School and held research leadership roles in consumer psychology. In November 2014 he became Dean of the Faculty of Social Science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he holds the Choh Ming Li Professorship of Psychology; from November 2024 he was also appointed Choh-Ming Li Professor of Sociology in CUHK's Department of Sociology, a reflection of how far his work had moved toward macro-level questions. He held the deanship until 30 June 2025, and on 1 July 2025 took up the post of Chair Professor and Vice-President (Administration) at City University of Hong Kong (Dongguan).

His awards include the Otto Klineberg Prize from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues and the Misumi Award from the Asian Association of Social Psychology. He is an elected fellow of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, holds an honorary professorial appointment at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and is a specially appointed researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He has served as associate editor of the Asian Journal of Social Psychology and the Journal of Personality, as associate editor of the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, and as series editor of Advances in Culture and Psychology and Frontiers of Culture and Psychology, both published by Oxford.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Culture as dynamic constructivism

The paper that made Chiu's reputation was Multicultural Minds: A Dynamic Constructivist Approach to Culture and Cognition, published in the American Psychologist in 2000 with Ying-yi Hong, Michael Morris, and Verónica Benet-Martínez. It is frequently cited as his alone, but it is a four-author paper, and the argument is a joint one: rather than treating culture as a stable internal attribute that individuals carry around, culture should be modelled as a network of shared knowledge that is activated by situational cues. That move made it possible to study culture experimentally — you can prime an individualistic or a collectivistic mindset in a laboratory and observe the consequences — and it changed the methods of the field.

Intersubjective culture

Chiu and Hong then added a second idea that complicates the first. What matters in a cultural setting, they argued, is not only what individuals personally endorse but what they believe others in their society endorse. A person may privately reject a norm and still be governed by it, because they believe most people around them accept it. This intersubjective consensus — culture as shared perception rather than as private belief — turned out to predict behaviour in cases where individual attitudes did not, and it gave the field a way to study culture without relying on national averages of self-report.

Polycultural psychology

With Morris and Zhi Liu, Chiu set out the case for polyculturalism in a 2015 Annual Review of Psychology article. The target was the habit of treating cultures as discrete, internally homogeneous, and mutually exclusive. Polycultural psychology starts instead from the observation that cultures have always borrowed from one another, that individuals carry multiple traditions with different weights, and that people differ in whether they experience their cultural traditions as compatible or as conflicting. The framework has been influential in education and management as well as in psychology.

Multicultural experience and creativity

A much-quoted line of work, reported in the American Psychologist in 2008 with Angela Leung, William Maddux and Adam Galinsky, found that exposure to more than one culture is associated with greater creativity, and that laboratory priming of multicultural experience produces the same effect. The proposed mechanism is that navigating between cultural systems loosens the grip of any single one, making remote associations more available.

Globalization: exclusionary and integrative responses

Chiu has also studied the psychology of globalization directly, distinguishing reactions that treat globalization as a threat to a bounded national identity from reactions that treat it as an opportunity for integration. That work connects cultural psychology to political psychology and to the study of intergroup relations.

Growth mindset in Chinese societies

From the early 2020s a substantial part of Chiu's output turned to growth mindset — the belief that personal qualities are malleable — and to the question of whether it means the same thing outside the United States where it was developed. He edited a 2024 special issue of the Journal of Pacific Rim Psychology on growth mindset in Chinese societies, and with colleagues examined how mindset relates to teachers' life satisfaction when they are asked to innovate, and to a sense of meaning among Hong Kong adolescents.

This work is notable for the doubts it raises about its own instruments. In a 2023 paper in the same journal, Chiu and colleagues applied the correspondence principle to mindset measures and found that the usual scales often fail to match the criterion they are supposed to predict — a psychometric problem that quietly undermines a good deal of mindset research, and one he documented rather than glossed. He and his collaborators have also reported that parents in Hong Kong hold ambivalent mindsets, endorsing malleability and fixedness at the same time, which complicates the simple malleable-versus-fixed contrast the literature depends on.

Geopolitical psychology

Chiu's most recent framing is geopolitical psychology, set out in an editorial with Karim Bettache and Sammyh Khan for a 2025 special issue of the Journal of Social Issues. The argument is that cultural psychology has studied culture as if it floated free of state power, trade, conflict and history, and that this is no longer tenable. In the same issue, work with Xu Geng and Yimin Wang reported that meritocracy beliefs predict institutional trust only in societies with substantial economic freedom — a finding that makes the meaning of a widely used individual-difference measure depend on the political economy surrounding it.

He has also continued the editorial work that has shaped the field's infrastructure, co-editing volumes 10 (2024) and 11 (2025) of the Handbook of Advances in Culture and Psychology with Michele Gelfand and Ying-yi Hong.

Major Publications

Hong, Y.-y., Morris, M. W., Chiu, C.-y., & Benet-Martínez, V. (2000). Multicultural minds: A dynamic constructivist approach to culture and cognition. American Psychologist, 55, 709–720.
Hong, Y.-y., & Chiu, C.-y. (2006). Social Psychology of Culture. Psychology Press.
Leung, A. K.-y., Maddux, W. W., Galinsky, A. D., & Chiu, C.-y. (2008). Multicultural experience enhances creativity. American Psychologist, 63, 169–181.
Morris, M. W., Chiu, C.-y., & Liu, Z. (2015). Polycultural psychology. Annual Review of Psychology, 66, 631–659.
Chan, H.-S., Chiu, C.-y., Lee, S.-L., Leung, I. T.-C., & Chan, A. H.-T. (2023). Improving the predictor-criterion consistency of mindset measures: Application of the correspondence principle. Journal of Pacific Rim Psychology, 17.
Chiu, C.-y., Chan, H.-S., Lee, S.-L., Huang, Z., & Tong, Y.-Y. (2024). Growth mindset in Chinese societies: Introduction to the special issue. Journal of Pacific Rim Psychology, 18.
Gelfand, M. J., Chiu, C.-y., & Hong, Y.-y. (Eds.). (2024, 2025). Handbook of Advances in Culture and Psychology, Vols. 10–11. Oxford University Press.
Bettache, K., Chiu, C.-y., & Khan, S. S. (2025). Geopolitical psychology: An emerging perspective. Journal of Social Issues, 81(4).
赵志裕、康萤仪：《文化社会心理学》，中国人民大学出版社，2011年。

Impact and Legacy

Chiu belongs to the generation that turned cultural psychology from a comparative curiosity into a mainstream part of social cognition, and the techniques he helped establish — priming cultural syndromes, measuring intersubjective consensus, treating multicultural identity as a variable — are now ordinary practice. The framework has travelled well beyond psychology into marketing, management and education, partly because it offers something usable: culture is treated as something that can be activated, measured and worked with rather than as a fixed demographic label.

The same features attract the criticism. Culture priming, the method that made dynamic constructivism testable, has been subject to the same scrutiny that reshaped social psychology in the 2010s. Oyserman and Lee's 2008 meta-analysis of individualism and collectivism priming found the effects to be genuine but small and highly variable across studies, which is a more fragile basis for a research programme than the early enthusiasm suggested. More generally, priming effects in social psychology have proved difficult to reproduce at the sizes originally reported, and the culture-and-cognition literature has not been exempt.

The multicultural-experience-and-creativity finding, among the most cited in the field, rests largely on laboratory priming and self-reported exposure in student samples, with creativity measured by brief laboratory tasks. Attempts to extend it have produced uneven results, and the causal chain the account proposes — exposure, then identity integration, then epistemic unfreezing, then creative output — is rarely measured in full in a single study. It is also difficult to separate the effect of multicultural experience from the effect of the traits that lead people to seek it, such as openness to experience.

Polyculturalism has drawn a different objection. Critics have argued that emphasising hybridity and mutual borrowing can understate the role of power: cultural exchange under colonialism or under a dominant global culture is not symmetrical, and a framework that stresses how much cultures have borrowed from each other risks smoothing over conquest, hierarchy, and who gets to decide which borrowings count. Defenders reply that polyculturalism is precisely a way of describing those asymmetries rather than ignoring them, but the argument is unresolved.

A final problem is structural and applies to the field rather than to Chiu alone. Cross-cultural psychology still rests heavily on contrasts between a small number of societies, most often the United States and East Asia, with participants who are overwhelmingly university students. Whatever the merits of the theories, the empirical base is narrower than the claims made on its behalf.

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Jonathan Haidt, whose work on moral foundations explores cultural variation in moral judgement
Social psychology, the discipline Chiu's cultural research belongs to