Zhou Xiaolin

Introduction

Zhou Xiaolin (周晓林, born 1963) is one of the experimentalists who made Chinese a central language of cognitive science. Trained at East China Normal University and then at Cambridge — PhD in experimental psychology, 1992, followed by research years in London — he spent two decades at Peking University building its psychology department into a research powerhouse (he chaired it from 2008 to 2013), before moving in 2022 to lead the School of Psychology and Cognitive Science at East China Normal University. His research ran on two rails: the cognitive science of Chinese language — word recognition, spoken-word processing, and the influential 1990s collaboration with William Marslen-Wilson on how readers of a non-alphabetic script access sound and meaning — and, later, the neural economics of social decision-making, including PNAS studies on inequity aversion and distributive fairness and a 2024 Nature Communications paper on the psychology of indebtedness.

Early Life and Education

Zhou was born in December 1963 in Yangzhou, Jiangsu. He took his bachelor's (1985) and master's (1988) degrees in psychology at East China Normal University, then went to the University of Cambridge, completing his PhD in experimental psychology in 1992.

Academic and Professional Career

After postdoctoral and research fellow years at Birkbeck, University of London (1992–98), he joined Peking University as professor at the end of 1998, led its psychology department (2008–13), directed its Center for Brain Science and Cognitive Science (2001–18), and worked in the McGovern Institute at PKU. Since September 2022 he has been dean of the School of Psychology and Cognitive Science at East China Normal University, directing the Shanghai Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Crisis Intervention. He served as president of the Chinese Psychological Society (2018–19), chairs the Ministry of Education's teaching committee for university psychology programs, and edits the journal Psychological Science (《心理科学》).

Major Contributions to Psychology

How Chinese readers reach words

His work with Marslen-Wilson on Chinese lexical access — published through the 1990s in the Journal of Experimental Psychology and Language and Cognitive Processes — established how readers of characters compute phonology and meaning, and helped overturn the assumption that reading science could be generalized from alphabetic scripts alone. It is a cornerstone of the Chinese cognitive psychology of language built on Peng Danling's foundations.

Fairness in the brain

His social-neuroscience program used economic games and imaging to trace inequity aversion and distributive fairness (PNAS 2018; PNAS 2022) and gratitude (Emotion 2017) and indebtedness (Nature Communications 2024), connecting Chinese experimental psychology to the computational study of social decisions.