About & Contact
Youngjae Cha / 차영재 / 車榮載
Ph.D. student in psychology
University of Chicago
A life of learning new things
I like following my curiosity and learning new things.
In middle school, my physics teacher asked me to close my eyes, then asked my classmates to raise their hands if they thought my questions were slowing the class down. I was sent out of the classroom.
That experience made me attentive to the tension between curiosity and efficiency.
Why is learning new things so often asked to serve another purpose?
Later, I encountered a related puzzle in research. Across societies, people who prefer a psychologically rich life over a happy or meaningful one are a minority. Yet in our university sample, that preference was more common among first-year than fourth-year students. Why? As people acquire a major and a specialty, might their interests shift from what they would like to learn toward what they need to know?
What constrains it, and what expands it?
I look for answers in the structure of modern society. The division of labor separates what we need to know from what we can leave to others. Inequality can intensify competition and anxiety, making exploration feel like a luxury. Structures that make a society more productive may not make its members’ lives more psychologically rich. I study how these conditions shape not only what people can explore, but what they come to want.
I also look for ways to reopen exploration. Can a different way of interpreting the same situation awaken a new interest? This is the social-psychological question of construal. And what happens when the surroundings themselves change? Which neighborhoods and places free our curiosity and let us enjoy something that serves no immediate purpose? The Good Life Atlas and steered language models approach these questions through places and conversations.
My interest also draws me to Mill’s “experiments in living,” Dewey’s ideas about experience and growth, the wanderings of Hesse’s Goldmund, and Romantic poetry that celebrates inquiry and adventure. Shigehiro Oishi’s concept of psychological richness gave that interest a language within psychology. Working with him, I combine experiments with large-scale and historical data, natural-language processing, and spatial analysis to study how the wider social world constrains—and sometimes opens—a life of curiosity and learning new things.
My current dream is to become a good psychologist. One day, I hope my research on the interplay between environments and the mind will lead me to become an architect, too.
I’ve also collected some of my favorite theories and papers on my reading page. Below are photos from the ecologies I explore.