A new medium can change what trust depends on.

I use experiments to ask how a new medium changes the conditions under which trust is formed. My training in behavioral and experimental economics — incentive-compatible designs, causal identification, pre-registered analysis — lets me compare physical laboratory, virtual reality, and AI-mediated settings directly, treating the medium as the treatment variable.

Selected work

Trust Formation in AI Delegation: The Interplay of Explainability and Anthropomorphism

Chenyang Li · Zhixuan Deng · Hao Ling · Xu Zhang

CHI 2026 · Honourable Mention (Top 5%)online experiment N=900 · eye-tracking lab study N=57

Interpersonal Trust and Trustworthiness in a High-Immersion Virtual Environment: A Trust Game Experiment

Hao Ling · Xiangyu Xu · Xu Zhang

Working paper · SSRN · pre-registeredthree-group between-subjects design, N=180

Cognitive Load as the Hidden Cost of Empathy: VR for Inclusive Design

Dawei Xiong · Zhijun Ma · Hao Ling · Xun Wu · Mingming Fan · Xu Zhang

IJHCI · Revision invited (R&R)three-condition experiment, N=90

All work, grants, and talks on the CV →

At a glance

Position: Ph.D. Candidate in Economics, HKUST (Guangzhou). Defense expected in the second half of 2026.
Research: Behavioral and experimental economics; trust and prosocial behavior; VR and human–AI interaction.
Advisors: Prof. Xu Zhang (primary) · Prof. Mingming Fan (co-advisor)
Contact: Full CV on this site
ORCID 0009-0007-6212-3267
Email

Updates

2026 · 03ConferenceReceived the CHI 2026 Honourable Mention notification; presented in Barcelona in April. 2026 · 07 · 01CVUpdated the CV for its July 2026 version.