Yixian Xu | Team Profile

Yixian Xu is a Research Fellow at the Skills Lab, and an incoming PhD student at Harvard Kennedy School, beginning in Fall 2025. Her focus is on developing assessment tools to measure higher-order skills such as social perceptiveness and leadership.

Yixian holds a B.A. in Sociology from Wuhan University (China), where she received a national scholarship to study abroad at UC Berkeley. She also holds an Ed.M. in Human Development from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Selected Research & Projects

The Harvard Skills Lab  | Measuring higher-order skills

The Harvard Skills Lab creates new, performance-based, scalable measurement tools for higher-order skills. We contribute to the basic science of human potential by defining and measuring concepts like teamwork, leadership and decision-making skills, with a focus on the changing demands of the labor market.

Measuring leadership skills with AI agents  | Harvard Skills Lab

We introduce a novel, scalable method for measuring leadership skills by evaluating individuals’ ability to lead teams of AI agents. Performance on this “AI leadership test” strongly predicts the causal impact leaders have on human teams, which we identify by randomly assigning leaders to multiple groups of human followers and measuring team performance. Our findings indicate that AI agents can be effective proxies for human participants in social experiments, which could greatly simplify the measurement of leadership and teamwork skills.

Reading the Mind in AI (RMAI)  | Measuring emotional perceptiveness

The Reading the Mind in AI (RMAI) task is designed to assess an individual's ability to recognize emotional expressions on a diverse set of faces generated by AI. This skill is crucial for effective social interactions, especially in diverse team environments. The RMAI measures the capacity to discern both basic and complex emotions, which correlates with success in teamwork and leadership roles. Research suggests that performance on the RMAI task can predict leadership abilities in managing diverse teams, surpassing other factors such as personality, education, and gender. This underscores the significance of emotion perception skills in identifying individuals who enhance team productivity.