Ke 'Kay' Fang
Ph.D. Student in Psychology, admitted Autumn 2024
Bio
I am a PhD student in the Cognitive Science Area of the Department of Psychology. My research focuses on computational approaches to understanding how distributed individual minds give rise to emergent collective phenomena, including cooperation, norms, and polarization. Before Stanford, I got my master’s degree at New York University, where I worked on topics in social psychology. Prior to that, I received my bachelor’s degree in Management from Lanzhou University in China.
Education & Certifications
-
MA, New York University, Individualized Study (Psychology, Computational Social Science) (2024)
-
BA, Lanzhou University, Management (2022)
All Publications
-
A megastudy of behavioral interventions to catalyze public, political, and financial climate advocacy.
PNAS nexus
2026; 5 (1): pgaf400
Abstract
Addressing climate change depends on large-scale system changes, which require public advocacy. Here, we identified and tested 17 expert-crowdsourced theory-informed behavioral interventions designed to promote public, political, and financial advocacy in a large quota-matched sample of US residents (n = 31,324). The most consistently effective intervention emphasized both the collective efficacy and emotional benefits of climate action, increasing advocacy by up to 10 percentage points. This was also the top intervention among participants identifying as Democrats. Appealing to binding moral foundations, such as purity and sanctity, was also among the most effective interventions, showing positive effects even among participants identifying as Republicans. These findings provide critical insights to policymakers and practitioners aiming to galvanize the public behind collective action and advocacy on climate change with affordable and scalable interventions.
View details for DOI 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf400
View details for PubMedID 41608136
View details for PubMedCentralID PMC12836310
-
The International Climate Psychology Collaboration: Climate change-related data collected from 63 countries.
Scientific data
2024; 11 (1): 1066
Abstract
Climate change is currently one of humanity's greatest threats. To help scholars understand the psychology of climate change, we conducted an online quasi-experimental survey on 59,508 participants from 63 countries (collected between July 2022 and July 2023). In a between-subjects design, we tested 11 interventions designed to promote climate change mitigation across four outcomes: climate change belief, support for climate policies, willingness to share information on social media, and performance on an effortful pro-environmental behavioural task. Participants also reported their demographic information (e.g., age, gender) and several other independent variables (e.g., political orientation, perceptions about the scientific consensus). In the no-intervention control group, we also measured important additional variables, such as environmentalist identity and trust in climate science. We report the collaboration procedure, study design, raw and cleaned data, all survey materials, relevant analysis scripts, and data visualisations. This dataset can be used to further the understanding of psychological, demographic, and national-level factors related to individual-level climate action and how these differ across countries.
View details for DOI 10.1038/s41597-024-03865-1
View details for PubMedID 39353944
View details for PubMedCentralID PMC11445540
-
Addressing climate change with behavioral science: A global intervention tournament in 63 countries.
Science advances
2024; 10 (6): eadj5778
Abstract
Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an effortful tree-planting behavioral task. Across 59,440 participants from 63 countries, the interventions' effectiveness was small, largely limited to nonclimate skeptics, and differed across outcomes: Beliefs were strengthened mostly by decreasing psychological distance (by 2.3%), policy support by writing a letter to a future-generation member (2.6%), information sharing by negative emotion induction (12.1%), and no intervention increased the more effortful behavior-several interventions even reduced tree planting. Last, the effects of each intervention differed depending on people's initial climate beliefs. These findings suggest that the impact of behavioral climate interventions varies across audiences and target behaviors.
View details for DOI 10.1126/sciadv.adj5778
View details for PubMedID 38324680
-
Emotionally savvy employees fail to enact emotional intelligence when ostracized
PERSONALITY AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES
2022; 185
View details for DOI 10.1016/j.paid.2021.111250
View details for Web of Science ID 000701694800005
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0374-9706