Kwok Leung was an influential social psychologist whose work changed the field of cross-cultural psychology. Kwok did his bachelor’s in biology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, then chose psychology for his graduate studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Drawing on Chinese culture, he sought to understand both cultural-specific and overarching trends.
Kwok was instrumental in advancing the notion that the ways people physically distribute their resources, time, and effort is heavily influenced by their culture. He also did groundbreaking work on social axioms – suggesting that it was beliefs, moreso than values, that shaped the way cultures are formed and expressed.
Kwok was an important player in the creation of the Asian Association of Social Psychology (AASP), the International Association of Cross-Cultural Psychology, and the Academy of International Business. He organized the inaugural AASP conference at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1995, and the impact of the work he and his colleagues did around that time is still being felt in both the field of psychology and in global culture itself.