"Whatever failures I have known, whatever errors I have committed, whatever follies I have witnessed in private and public life have been the consequence of action without thought." — Bernard M. Baruch
Psychology: Not an "Arts" Degree
During my time at the University of Michigan, I worked in the Institute for Social Research on many research studies. The difference between Psychology and most other forms of Bachelor of Arts degrees is that we focus on research and the link between science and human practices, which is very different from Humanities. These studies all apply to our everyday life, and also test the power of suggestion, cognitive thoughts, and human processing power. While we are often left with even more questions, as most good studies do, we also leave with a better knowledge of what motivates people, what influences them, and how to apply that to life.
Recent Research Projects
Hard or Soft? The Power of Implicit Suggestions
One of them was studying the effect of paintings on human emotions. The idea is, people will subconsciously prefer one thing over another depending on what they were exposed to previously. This is often useful for marketing, as certain types of exposure lead to more favorable impressions of that product, and eventually — consumption for the consumer.
For this study, we gathered numerous paintings of Christ where he was either depicted as muscular, dominating, and authoritarian (hard) or loving, fatherly, and kind (soft). Participants were split into one of three conditions: hard prime, soft prime, or control. Depending on the condition, they were shown words which were either Soft such as compassionate or Hard such as demanding. Participants were then lead to rank both hard and soft pictures of Christ, to which they ranked in terms of preference. Results were hypothesized to show favorability towards paintings for whichever condition they were previously primed for.
Video Games: Does Violence Carry Over to Reality?
Another study I ran was studying the effects of violent video games. I worked with Professor Brad Bushman (homepage | wikipedia), who is famous in the psychology world for his research on violence and media. This study soon became termed as the "hot sauce" deception study. Participants played 20 minutes of either a violent or non-violent video game. They were then asked to pour another participant (who hates spicy foods) a container of hot sauce to eat. The amount of hot sauce given became the objective measure of aggression; i.e. do participants who have just finished playing a violent video game give more hot sauce than those in the control condition?
This study addresses many of the debates of whether or not video games and other forms of media influence children negatively. Do the implicit messages of violence impact how people behave afterwards? Or even more importantly to marketing, what messages influence people's consumption choices? Does the media reach and impact people in ways marketers can adopt?
Marriages: Are People Egocentric at Base?
Previous studies have shown people to prefer, or sense a relationship between situations with similar sounding names as their own (i.e. people who had names similar to Katrina donated more towards the relief efforts). People generally associate positive feelings to their own names, and when similar names come up — they often feel positive relationships towards those names too. We hypothesized this could also extend to marriages: are people more likely to marry those with similar names with their own?
For this study we researched old marriage records dating as far back as the 1950's in Texas. All names were then categorized and sorted, the goal was to find the frequency of couples with same letter first names who got married.
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