Ting Lei

Ting Lei grew up in a multi-ethnic environment in Taiwan, where he received his B.S. in Psychology in 1980. His honors thesis was based on his empirical study of the socio-moral reasoning of 53 students who came from different SES and cultural backgrounds. Lei earned his M. A. at the University of Minnesota with a thesis entitled “The development of moral, political, and legal reasoning in Chinese societies” in 1981.

He completed his doctoral study with developmental psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg and cultural anthropologist Robert LeVine at Harvard University in 1983. In the following decade Lei worked as a research fellow with anthropologists, sociologists, as well as psychologists at the Institute of Ethnology at Academia Sinica. During that decade, Lei participated in cultural/semiotic anthropologists’ field research projects on aborigines and minorities which resulted in several documentaries at the Margaret Mead Film Festival. He also collaborated with sociologists in a comparative study of the value changes of Chinese students, and extended his initial explorative study of socio-moral reasoning to a longitudinal study that included 212 participants of different ages and ethnicities.

In 1993, Lei was recruited by sociologist Alex Inkeles at Stanford University to join a research project on the democratic reasoning of Chinese people, and relocated to New York, where he has been teaching Developmental Psychology at the City University of New York and Cross-cultural Psychology as well as Anthropology at St. John’s University. Lei has been involved in a comparative study that includes African-Americans, Chinese, and Dominicans, as well as an in-depth research project headed by Uwe Gielen on the adaptation of Chinese immigrants in New York City. Currently, Lei is the only naturalized citizen serving on the Steering Committee (Advisory Board) at the New York Academy of Sciences. He is also an Associate at the Institute of International & Cross-Cultural Psychology in St. Francis College. Lei’s immediate family is rainbow in color, including children of Armenian, Chinese, German, Jewish, and Russian descents.