Ying-yi Hong

Introduction

Ying-yi Hong (康螢儀) changed how psychology models culture by asking what happens inside people who live in more than one. The static view treated culture as a trait — you have an individualist or a collectivist self. Hong, with Chi-yue Chiu, Michael Morris and Verónica Benet-Martínez, proposed in their landmark 2000 American Psychologist paper "Multicultural minds" that culture works instead as distributed knowledge: bicultural individuals carry both frames and switch between them as situations cue Chinese or American icons, values, and languages — the phenomenon of cultural frame switching. The dynamic constructivist program that grew from this — bicultural identity integration, cultural attachment (relocating the attachment system from persons to cultures and their icons), and identity dynamics through Hong Kong's political transitions — made her one of the field's central figures, with an editorial and award career spanning HKUST, Illinois, Singapore, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where she now holds a Choh-Ming Li professorship.

Early Life and Education

Hong took her bachelor of social science in psychology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and her PhD in personality and social psychology at Columbia University, in the years when cultural psychology was assembling itself as a discipline.

Academic and Professional Career

Her faculty career has run through the field's Asia–America axis: the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (where the 2000 frame-switching studies were done), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore — where she helped build the culture-science research programs and won the Nanyang Award for Research Excellence in 2013 — and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where she is Choh-Ming Li Professor of Psychology and an associate dean in the business faculty. Her service roles track the field's infrastructure: editor of the Oxford Handbook of Advances in Culture and Psychology series, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Pacific Rim Psychology, and a member of the SPSP board (2025–28).

Major Contributions to Psychology

Dynamic constructivism and frame switching

The "Multicultural minds" program replaced culture-as-trait with culture-as-knowledge-structure, demonstrated with priming experiments: Hong Kong Chinese students bicultural in Chinese and Western cultures attribute events more like Chinese or like Westerners depending on which cultural icons they have just seen. It is among the most influential empirical programs in modern cultural social psychology, and it reframed acculturation as competence rather than replacement.

Bicultural identity and cultural attachment

Her later work measured how biculturals blend and manage their two identities (bicultural identity integration), and — with a series running from 2006 — proposed cultural attachment: that people seek security from cultural symbols as from attachment figures, with direct implications for migration, sojourning, and identity under political change.