Major Research Topics
Vicki's research interests have straddled the fields of social psychology, cultural psychology and communication. She is currently working on the following research programs.
Me and my object
Past research on the classic mere ownership effect usually showed how mere ownership of an object affects people’s evaluation of the object per se, such as judging the owned object more favorably (Beggan, 1992) (e.g., my book is better). Vicki is interested to look at this well-established effect in psychology from a new perspective: she wonders if mere ownership could also affect people’s evaluation of the self, such as judging the self as having greater efficacy (e.g., I am smarter). She had conducted a number of experiments to demonstrate this consequential aspect of the mere ownership effect. She found that participants would self-enhance via mere ownership of an object, for example, they would perceive themselves as more knowledgeable by merely owning the reading materials, more creative by merely owning a bottle of purported creativity oil, more able to combat sleepiness by merely owning a piece of coffee chocolate (Yeung, Loughnan et al., 2017), and became more resilient to pain by merely owning a placebo analgesic (Yeung, Geers, & Kam, 2019; Yeung, Geers, & Colloca, 2020; Yeung & Geers, 2021; Yeung, 2022). Vicki hypothesised that such new form of mere ownership effect would occur only when the functional value of the owned object is central to the self (self-centrality hypothesis). This is supported by the recent findings that participants perceived the self to be luckier only when they owned a lucky charm relevant to their zodiac sign (high self-centrality) but not when they did not own any charm (control) or when they owned a charm irrelevant to their zodiac sign (low self-centrality). Also, it is found that Chinese participants could restore their threatened self-esteem only when they merely owning an object whose functional value is central to the Chinese culture (Yeung, Chan, Yau, Lok, Lun & Chan, 2020). Such self-deceptive psychological illusion has implications on placebo effect and consumer psychology.
Socio-ecological environments and communicative behaviors
Inspired by Prof. Toshio Yamagishi and Prof. Masaki Yuki and currently associating with the Social Ecology & Psychology Lab at Hokkaido University, Vicki adopts a socio-ecological approach in her research. The socio-ecological approach basically argues that the so-called cultural specific behaviors are in fact adaptive strategies to survive in a certain social ecology. This socio-ecological approach is useful to explain variations in human communicative behaviours and cognition. For example, Vicki found that people will not automatically form impressions of the targets using stereotypes, rather they have an innate adaptive capacity to individuate the targets according to different communication contexts (Yeung & Kashima, 2010). Also, people would adopt different communication strategies adaptive to their corresponding socio-ecological environments. For example, Japanese communicated more stereotypical information while Australians communicated more counter stereotypical information (Yeung & Kashima, 2012). Relative to Americans, Japanese used more silence to avoid offending others (Yeung, Yuki et al., working paper), and in order to attract potential partners, Americans self-promoted by emphasising their uniqueness while Hong Kongers by creating a humble and self-depreciated image (Wan & Yeung, 2022). All these cross-cultural differences are linked to a socio-ecological variable, known as relational mobility.