Tsinghua University · University of Geneva

Fan (Hugh) Su

Welcome to my homepage.

— Gandalf, The Lord of the Rings

About me

I am Fan Su (苏凡) and also go by Hugh. I am a dual-degree master's student at Tsinghua University and the University of Geneva, and a research assistant at the Neuroeconomics Lab at Peking University.

My research focuses on the processes and mechanisms that give rise to specific decisions and behaviors, viewed from economic, psychological, neural, and social-interaction perspectives. I am particularly interested in how social norms and behavioral interventions influence choice, why people respond differently to the same intervention, and how these effects change over time.

My research methods include field experiments, surveys, computational modeling, and econometric analysis. You can reach me at .

Education

University of Geneva (UNIGE)

September 2024–December 2026 (expected)

MSc in Innovation, Human Development and Sustainability · Dual Degree Program · Advisor: Rasha Shakra

Tsinghua University (THU)

September 2023–December 2026 (expected)

MSc in Public Administration · Public Policy for Sustainable Development Goals · Advisor: Junming Zhu

University of California, San Diego (UCSD)

March 2022–June 2022

Visiting Student Program

Zhejiang University of Technology (ZJUT)

September 2019–June 2023

BSc in Administrative Management

Lab Experience

Neuroeconomics Lab

PI: Lusha Zhu · Peking University
May 2026–Present
  • Developing behavioral models and experimental designs to study the cognitive processes underlying social norms and their influence on subsequent decisions

Sustainable, Inclusive, Innovative & Governance Lab

PI: Junming Zhu · Tsinghua University
September 2023–Present
  • Studied the implementation of “green utensil orders” and behavioral change in the food-delivery industryTurning green choices into green deliveries in two-sided markets (with Junming Zhu, Zhangming Ge, and Guojun He)Nature Human Behaviour · Minor revision
  • Studying how academic research cites and uses United Nations reports
  • Studying misconduct by hosts in financial livestreaming

Environmental Economics and Governance Group

PI: Wendong Wei · Shanghai Jiao Tong University
December 2022–August 2024

Climate Change Economics Team

PI: Zhifu Mi · University College London
May 2022–May 2023
  • Assisted in building a database linking IPCC report authors, academic publications, and citations

Center for Environmental and Energy Policy

PI: Kai Fang · Zhejiang University
July 2022–August 2022

Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT)

PIs: Thomas Hale and Anna Petherick · University of Oxford
May 2021–February 2023
  • China Subnational Team · Coded local COVID-19 policies in China each week, participated in regular research discussions, and helped recruit more than 30 team members. Received OxCGRT’s Contribution of the Month award and was recognized on the Blavatnik School of Government’s Instagram account.
Work Experience

UNEP Finance Initiative (UNEP FI)

August 2025–February 2026

Intern, Academic Engagement Team · Academic outreach connecting research with UNEP FI reports and translating academic evidence into training materials for the banking sector

Environmental Defense Fund (EDF)

June 2025–August 2025

Climate Corps Fellow at Kingfisher plc · Corporate decarbonization and low-carbon materials

Community & Public Engagement

Human Behavior Lab (人类行为研究室)

July 2026–Present

Founder and Editor · 1,000+ followers

China Public Management Community (公共管理共同体)

March 2021–September 2023

Editor in Chief, International Division · 100,000+ followers

Recent work
and agenda

Conference · Accepted poster

Society for NeuroEconomics 2026

October 9–11, 2026
Pasadena, California

Looking forward to sharing “Linking Decision Neuroscience and Behavioral Policy: A Mechanism-Constrained Diagnostic Tool” in Pasadena

In this project, I am trying to understand why some behavioral interventions last while others fade. I developed a computational model using longitudinal intervention data and a moral decision-making dataset, along with an interactive tool for exploring how people may respond to new interventions.

Manuscript · 2nd Revise & Resubmit

Nature Human Behaviour

August 2026

Our paper, “Turning green choices into green deliveries in two-sided markets,” is now under minor revision

“Why do people sometimes want to make greener choices, but find that merchants and platforms do not respond or follow through?” We investigate this question through a real-world randomized controlled trial with more than 2,000 participants and four additional experiments. Together, these studies examine how information asymmetry and misaligned beliefs can create this gap in two-sided markets.

Pre-registration

Research

Neuroeconomics Lab
Peking University

May 2026

Very happy to have joined the Neuroeconomics Lab at Peking University

Working with Prof. Lusha Zhu, I will continue developing my research on behavior and decision-making while exploring how it can connect with neuroscience.

Internship

UNEP Finance Initiative

August 2025–February 2026
Geneva, Switzerland

Looking back on six rewarding months with UNEP FI

I traced more than two decades of exchange between UNEP FI and academia by connecting its reports with the research they cite. It was especially rewarding to see this work inform UNEA-7 discussions in December 2025 and later share it at the Climate Leadership Conference in Harbin. I also enjoyed working with the Banking Team to turn academic evidence into useful material for developing business cases.

Research outreach

Human Behavior Lab

A Chinese-language WeChat publication about recent research in behavioral science, decision-making, psychology, and neuroscience. Articles are selected regularly from journal websites and introduced to Chinese readers. The publication has received more than 20,000 cumulative views.

Scan the QR code with the WeChat app to read and follow. WeChat must be installed on your device.

WeChat QR code for Human Behavior Lab
Browse the first 50 issues Chinese title · Original title · Journal · DOI

Click an English title to visit the original paper. Chinese adaptations are available through the Human Behavior Lab WeChat account. If you need help accessing a PDF or reading the academic paper, please .

  1. Neural circuits for valence updating in social memory
    被亲近的人伤害后,我们为什么只躲他,不躲其他人
  2. People use fast and flat simulation to reason about new games
    面对没玩过的游戏,你的直觉为什么又快又准?因为它浅,但足够
  3. Divergent philosophical commitments in neuroscience: Evidence from a global survey
    神经科学家的哲学自白:心智就是大脑,却不肯放弃自由意志
  4. Depression stigma
    别人没有想象中那么排斥你:抑郁症患者得知真相之后……
  5. Coarse Memory and Plausible Narratives
    政治叙事如何利用选民记忆里的空白?
  6. Canonical decision computations underlie behavioral and neural signatures of cooperation in primates
    合作不是一拍即合:大脑要先从对方的动作里攒够证据
  7. Aha! moments correspond to metacognitive prediction errors
    啊哈!突然顿悟的那一刻,为什么这么爽?
  8. Moved by the lightest touch of meaning: Even minimal significance matters for motivation from childhood
    让做过的事留下来,也让我们更愿意向前一步
  9. Misinformation as strategy: Epistemic consequences and the undermining of shared truth
    谎言只是为了让你相信吗?它可能会让你开始怀疑一切
  10. Why human societies adopt rigid moral rules: The efficiency–robustness trade-off
    人明明懂得变通,为什么社会偏爱“死规矩”?
  11. In Their Shoes: Empathy Through Information
    看见别人的痛苦,为什么还不一定产生共情?
  12. Wired for coherence: A network theory of self
    每天都在改变的你,为什么仍觉得自己是同一个人?
  13. How Institutional Distrust Breeds One-Sided Leadership: A Consistency-Based Account
    公共机构让人失望后,我们为什么更想要一个“说了算”的领导?
  14. The social-class gap in negotiation: Lower-class individuals negotiate less and face more backlash
    为什么越需要为自己争取的人,反而越难开口谈判?
  15. Neural and computational mechanisms of effort under the pressure of a deadline
    DDL不是生产力,而是让你的“进度”更值钱
  16. Experience reorganizes content-specific memory traces in macaques
    睡着以后,大脑怎样把新记忆编进旧记忆?
  17. Politics of Food: An Experiment on Trust in Expert Regulation and Economic Costs of Political Polarisation
    只换个总统的名字,人们对科学结论的信任就会下降吗?
  18. Throwing good effort after bad: Evidence for a sunk-cost effect in cognitive effort-based decision-making
    脑力也有沉没成本:为什么越费脑,越难放弃?
  19. Beyond representational alignment with brain-guided language models for robust reasoning
    大语言模型能像人脑一样推理吗?
  20. Social dynamics of AI adoption in parents’ educational decisions
    别人家孩子都在用AI,你还敢让自己的孩子不用吗?
  21. Gaming the Marketplace: Consumer Opportunism and Beliefs about Societal Hierarchy
    越相信强者在上,越爱对商家耍“小聪明”?
  22. Economic preferences predict higher-education choices
    选大学和专业,本身就是一场耐心与冒险的考验
  23. Encapsulation of the Visual Perception of Social Events From Semantic Priming
    语言会改变我们“看见”的人际关系吗?
  24. Needing Others to Know You’re Good: Narcissists’ Pride in Success Is Contingent on Peer Reactions
    自恋的人赢了还不够,为什么还要别人服气?
  25. Claims of sex-dependent effects in the behavioral and brain sciences are infrequently supported by valid statistical comparisons
    很多“男女有别”的研究,可能根本没有比较男女?
  26. Hybrid spatial organization and evidence for magnitude-independent neural coding of linguistic information during sentence production
    大脑如何把几个词,变成一句话?
  27. Human ticklishness is a widespread, culturally shared and bodily organized sensory experience
    为什么人们普遍怕痒?
  28. Psychological barriers to improving carbon competence
    越在意环保,可能越把环保做偏?
  29. Reassurance through normalization inadvertently suppresses treatment
    医生说的“正常”,为什么和患者听到的不是一回事?
  30. Dissociable roles of prefrontal plasticity in decision-making strategy and execution of habitual behavior
    当你想放弃时,好习惯如何帮你渡过动力低谷?
  31. Implicit biases change more slowly in larger cities
    京爷?沪爷!为什么大城市里的偏见更难改变?
  32. Do animals use names? Conceptual and empirical criteria
    动物真的会给彼此起名字吗?
  33. Fighting Fire with Fire: Infusing Artificial Intelligence into Peer Review to Sustain Quality Scholarship
    AI写论文,AI来审?关于AI审稿可能性的讨论
  34. Neural basis of compositional control
    同时追两个目标时,大脑怎样混合并切换策略?
  35. Hierarchical resource rationality explains human reading behaviour
    为什么你能够“一目十行”,自动脑补没读的内容?
  36. Developmental changes in memory structure and precision alter the use of retrieved episodes during decisions for reward
    为什么长大以后,一张旧照片能让你想起更多往事?
  37. The dynamics of costly norms
    人人都在为坏规矩买单,为什么没人敢先停下?
  38. Propagation and preservation of AI-discovered problem-solving strategies in human culture
    AI教给人类的方法,能在人类社会里传下去吗?
  39. The Intrinsic Valuation of Biodiversity Loss
    重新评估生物多样性的价值:动物的感受算不算?
  40. The neural basis of laughter
    “真笑”和“假笑”到底哪里不一样?
  41. Why Context Influences Preferences Elicited with Willingness to Pay Less Than Preferences Elicited with Choice
    情境如何让你的二选一不那么理智?
  42. Music evokes shared neural representations of imagined narratives across sensory modalities
    没有歌词,音乐为何能在不同人的脑中“写出”相似故事?
  43. One Click Away: AI Tutoring with Khanmigo in a Two-Year School Experiment
    AI家教进了课堂,为什么学生还是很少向它求助?
  44. Reusable modular architecture enables flexible cognitive operations in the mouse brain and artificial recurrent networks
    大脑能像搭积木一样,重复使用同一套计算吗?
  45. How experience shapes extraordinary beliefs
    为什么荒诞的信念,也会有真实的体验作证?
  46. Does slow strategizing indicate optimal behavior or uncertainty?
    慢思考更理性?这次想得越久的人错得越多
  47. Drops in confidence precede symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder
    自信心下降,可能是强迫症状出现的先兆?
  48. Is Impulsivity Simply a Failure of Self-Control? Evidence Based on Multi-omics Analyses of Genomics, Metabolomics and Brain Imaging
    冲动只是没管住自己吗?奖励系统也在推着你走
  49. When coordination is avoidable: A monotonicity analysis of organizational tasks
    很多会议和审批,其实并不是“把事做对”所必需的
  50. Asymmetric prefrontal representations for leader–follower dynamics
    谁在带路、谁在跟随?大脑为伙伴画出了两张不同的地图

Moments

A few places, people, and experiences beyond research.

Fan Su presenting at the Climate Leadership Conference in Harbin
Presenting at the Climate Leadership ConferenceHarbin, China · July 2026
UNEP FI Academic Team at the 2026 Global Roundtable in London
UNEP FI Global RoundtableLondon, United Kingdom · 2026
At Busan X the Sky
Busan X the SkyBusan, South Korea · 2026
Working beside the sea in Santorini
Working by the seaSantorini, Greece · 2026
At the Parthenon in Athens
The ParthenonAthens, Greece · 2026
Happy hour with UNEP FI colleagues in Geneva
With UNEP FI colleaguesGeneva, Switzerland · 2026
Snowboarding in Thaiwoo, Zhangjiakou
Snowboarding in ThaiwooZhangjiakou, China · February 2026
Christmas at Rockefeller Center in New York
Christmas at Rockefeller CenterNew York, United States · 2025
Fan Su at the United Nations Office at Geneva
Joining UNEP FIGeneva, Switzerland · 2025
A group of friends by the sea in Nice
With friends by the seaNice, France · 2025
Paragliding above Interlaken
First time paraglidingInterlaken, Switzerland · 2025
Traveling with friends in Grindelwald
With friends in the AlpsGrindelwald, Switzerland · 2025
At the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco
Golden Gate BridgeSan Francisco, United States · 2025
Landscape in Appenzell
On the trailAppenzell, Switzerland · 2025
Tulip season in Amsterdam
Tulip seasonAmsterdam, Netherlands · 2025
Windmills at Zaanse Schans in the Netherlands
WindmillsZaanse Schans, Netherlands · 2025
Snowboarding in Chamonix
SnowboardingChamonix, France · 2025
At the Eiffel Tower in Paris
ParisParis, France · 2024
At the Matterhorn
The MatterhornZermatt, Switzerland · 2024
Email copied