Su Yanjie

Introduction

Su Yanjie (苏彦捷, born 1964) runs the longest bridge in Chinese psychology — the one between species. Trained at Peking University (entering in 1983, completing her doctorate there in 1992, and joining its faculty on graduation), she has spent her career comparing minds across primate species and across child development: fieldwork on golden snub-nosed monkeys in Shennongjia, cross-species studies of self-control co-authored with a thirteen-country consortium, and a long research program on how Chinese children acquire theory of mind — documenting developmental timings that differ from Western norms and the role of family talk and cultural experience in the differences. A popular teacher (her developmental psychology MOOC has drawn tens of thousands of learners), she served as vice president of the Chinese Psychological Society from 2018 and succeeded Fu Xiaolan as the Society's president in October 2023.

Early Life and Education

Su was born in 1964 (family roots in Anping, Hebei). She entered Peking University's psychology program in 1983 — a cohort of about twenty students — completed a sociology double degree as an undergraduate, and finished her doctorate in psychology at PKU in 1992.

Academic and Professional Career

She has taught at Peking University's School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences since 1992, rising to professor and doctoral supervisor, with some eleven years of teaching administration at Yuanpei College, including as its vice dean. Her comparative program spans primate social behavior and cognition — from the Shennongjia field seasons to laboratory comparative cognition — and her developmental program tracks Chinese children's theory of mind, executive function and social understanding. She was secretary-general of the Ministry of Education's psychology teaching advisory committee (2013–17), elected vice president of the Chinese Psychological Society in 2018, and became the Society's president in October 2023. She is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and holds the State Council special allowance.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The evolution of self-control

The 2014 PNAS paper "The evolution of self-control," co-authored with dozens of laboratories across thirteen countries, placed her comparative work — and Chinese primatology — inside one of the field's broadest collaborative findings: that self-control capacities track ecology and sociality across species, humans included.

Theory of mind, developmentally

Her developmental studies showed that Chinese children's false-belief understanding follows a timetable partly different from the Western canon, and traced the differences to language, family conversation and cultural practice — empirical support for the cultural-psychology program of Kaiping Peng and Ying-yi Hong, grounded in child development.