Jing Xu (she/her/hers)

I am a cognitive & socio-cultural anthropologist with broad, interdisciplinary interests. To understand what it means to be human, my work examines this central question, moral development in humans––and at the era of AI, in machines. Interested in culture-mind interaction, I put anthropological and psychological theories in conversation, combine ethnography, experiment, and computational methods, and draw from Chinese thought. I have published extensively on on morality, child development, family, and education in contemporary China, martial-law era Taiwan and cross-cultural comparison. Lately my inquiry has expanded into AI, specifically, how AI ethics intersect with human development and value transformations in contexts of social change and global crises. I am Co-Director of the UW Center for Globally Beneficial AI.

My first monograph, The Good Child: Moral Development in a Chinese Preschool (Stanford University Press, 2017), based on fieldwork in Shanghai, it integrates ethnography and experiments to examine preschool children’s moral development under China’s one-child policy and a widely perceived societal “moral crisis.” It was translated into Chinese as part of a popular ethnography series "Mint Experiment" (East China Normal University Press, 2021).

My second monograph, "Unruly" Children (Cambridge University Press, 2024), traces how rural Han children learn morality at the height of Taiwan's Martial-Law era. It is an unconventional ethnography, a re-analysis of a unique set of historical fieldnotes collected by renowned anthropologists Arthur & Margery Wolf. Combining ethnographic and computational approaches such as NLP and social network analysis, I highlight children's active learning, including learning from and with peers, rather than parenting. Writing through and about fieldnotes, I connect the two themes of this book, learning morality and making ethnography, in light of human social cognition, and invite all of us to take children seriously.

I am a co-investigator of two new, interdisciplinary projects on learning and cultural transmission. One project, funded by Templeton World Charity Foundation, examines children's and youth's truth-seeking and truth-communication behavior in a polarized world, i.e., Northern Ireland. Another project, funded by Economic and Social Research Council (UK), examines imitation and knowledge transmission from early childhood to adolescence in America (Chinese American children in Seattle), Congo and Scotland. 

My work strives to make anthropology more relevant, not only to other disciplines but also to the people we study. I do so through experimental writing on ethnography, organizing discussions on China anthropology, engaging the public, and collaborating with evolutionary anthropologists, psychologists, computer scientists, historians, mathematicians, etc. Currently I serve as an Associate Editor of American Anthropologist and editorial board member of Ethos.