About

Cecilia Hyunjung Mo is an Associate Professor of Public Policy and the Judith E. Gruber Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on public policy and political science, contributing to the understanding of governance, policy-making processes, and the social impacts of policy decisions. She is involved in academic activities that aim to advance knowledge in these areas and to inform policy development and implementation.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Economics
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Data science
• Medicine
• Engineering
• Economic growth
• Psychology
• Internet privacy
• Demographic economics
• Social psychology
• Public relations
• Socioeconomics

Selected publications

• Growing Awareness to Reduce Labor Abuse: An Experimental Test of a Migrant Domestic Workers’ Rights Awareness Campaign

  The Journal of Law and Economics · 2026-05-01

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Anti-poverty programmes can change how people see the state and each other

  2026-02-04

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Micro-Inequities Against Asian Americans: Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Experiment

  OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2026-01-20

  other
  Publisher

• Do Virtual Museums Highlighting the Experiences of Minorities Persuade Visitors? Evidence From a Study on Bias Toward Asian Americans

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Comment les programmes de lutte contre la pauvreté renforcent la confiance entre citoyens et Etat

  2026-02-18

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Day 3: Reproducible workflows

  OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2025-02-07

  other
  Publisher

• Trigger Incident: A Study of Behavioral Interventions in Virtual Reality

  Open Science Framework · 2025-04-24

  otherOpen accessSenior author

  Virtual Reality is a powerful immersive tool for placing users inside a virtual avatar's body that is markedly different to their own. Yee and Bailenson's Proteus effect, derived from the polymorphic Greek God Proteus, demonstrates participant behavioral modulation based on the respective avatar they are embodying: embodying attractive avatars led to reduced interpersonal distance, while taller avatars led to more confidence in a negotiation task - independently of how others perceived them. Another key tenet of Yee's Proteus effect is that virtual embodiment is the most effective way of inducing self-other merging and pro-social behaviour towards out-groups. However, not all user experiences - nor levels of prior experience - are equal. When analysing a user's experience of virtual reality (VR), factors such as their level of technical familiarity, proficiency with immersive technology and concomitant degree of physiological arousal inside a VR experience can have a significant impact on their performance, sense of presence and engagement. We have designed a modular narrative system that can manipulate a user's levels of arousal in order to generate an optimal performance margin, which we hypothesise to be between not too stressed (high arousal) and not too bored (low arousal). We do so by instantiating an increasing number of simultaneous tests and environmental changes at different points during a VR experience, based on the user's biological signals. Changes in these autonomic signals - such as heart rate, heart rate variability, galvanic skin response, and skin temperature - reveal changes in the levels of participant arousal and can be modified accordingly. Within our narrative system we have constructed a way of embodying the user in a gender-specific out-group (Muslim) avatar that is subjected to an increasingly stressful event (a series of verbal Islamophobic attacks from a non-player character, NPC). We measure performance in a series of simultaneous multiple choice listening comprehension tasks (averaged to create a "narrative task score") undertaken as the scene unfolds, as well as a post-treatment recall task. Our experiment aims to build on all of the above research to assess two key measures: the degree to which embodiment in out-group avatars can affect user perspective-taking towards their avatar's group identity; and whether that sense of embodiment is modulated by the real-time level of arousal (or, if taken to an extreme, stress) they face during their embodied experience.

  PublisherDOI

• How Do International Service-learning Programs Change Students' Minds and Paths?

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2025-04-03

  datasetSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Day 2: Pre-registration and Pre-analysis Plans

  OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2025-02-07

  other1st authorCorresponding
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• Day 1: Introduction to Open Science

  OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2025-02-07

  other
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Frequent coauthors

• Neil Malhotra

  36 shared

• Katrina Kosec

  18 shared

• Matthew Graham

  Pennsylvania State University

  15 shared

• Gregory A. Huber

  Yale University

  14 shared

• Edward Miguel

  11 shared

• Aleksandar Bogdanoski

  11 shared

• Yotam Margalit

  King's College London

  11 shared

• Margaret Boittin

  York University

  8 shared

Awards & honors

• American Political Science Association (APSA) Franklin L. Bu…
• International Society of Political Psychology Roberta Sigel…
• APSA Best Paper Award from Elections, Public Opinion and Vot…
• APSA Emerging Scholar in Elections, Public Opinion and Votin…
• Best Article Published in Political Behavior Award (2016, 20…