“Research like this brings the psychological and sociological parts of being human together”: Studying human biases towards different social groups

(Photo provided by Sejal Sharma)

“Person perception plays a significant role in our social world, and group membership is an important possible factor that influences it. I believe that research like this would be very beneficial as it brings the psychological and sociological parts of being human together. ” ~Sejal Sharma 

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*In the following article, TS refers to The Synapse and SS refers to Sejal Sharma;

TS: Could you briefly introduce yourself, your supervisor, the topic of your research, and the field it contributes to?

SS: I am Sejal Sharma, an international student from Bhutan. I am in my 3rd year of a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and hope to do Honours in psychology in my final year. 

For my basic research this term, I worked in the Culture and Social Psychology Research Lab under the supervision of Dr. Elaine Perunovic and her grad student, Ms. Kyoungsil Nah. Kyoungsil’s research is on The Effect of ingroup/outgroup processes on activation of Spontaneous trait inferences (STIs). In simple lanaguge, STI’s describe how people form impressions of others. In-group and out-groups refer to social groups that a person considers themselves a part of or not a part of, respectively. In-group and out-group processes refer generally to how people from these groups think. 

This study will contribute to our understanding of how group interaction works on an unconscious level. Also, being aware of our social biases would be the first step to making conscious efforts to break them and alleviate group conflicts.

TS: What was your research project and your contributions? What drew you to pursuing this project?

SS: Earlier research on STIs has mainly focused on how STIs influences person perception (i.e., how people form impressions of others) but rarely considered how a person’s group membership (i.e., whether the person comes from an ingroup or an outgroup) influences the activation of STIs. This research aims to acknowledge this gap by examining how group membership influences the activation of STIs.

This research is conducted in two parts: an experiment, and a survey. 

The experiment is quite complicated as it involves a slight deception. Participants are randomly assigned to one of four conditions - ingroup-positive sentence, ingroup-negative sentence, out-group-positive sentence, and outgroup negative sentence. These conditions will serve to identify positive and negative attitudes about participants’ in-groups and out-groups. Specifically, participants are asked to read sentences gathered from UNB or STU student conversations. However, these sentences do not overtly show group biases, and participants have no idea that their group attitudes are being assessed. Instead, they are made to believe that their memory is being assessed. 

Participants read each sentence on a computer screen, then respond to a descriptive word appearing on the screen that may or may not have been part of the sentence. They click the "yes" or "no" key to indicate whether they believe the word was in the sentence. Bias is examined after the experiment by measuring the accuracy and speed of responding.

After completing the experiment, participants answer a survey about social attitudes towards in-groups and out-groups. 

We are still in the data collection phase so we do not have results as of now, but it is expected that STIs will be activated more in the ingroup positive sentence condition than the ingroup negative sentence condition, and more in the outgroup negative sentence condition than the outgroup positive sentence condition. In simple terms, this means that people are expected to show more bias towards statements that speak positively about social groups they are a part of and towards statements that speak negatively about social groups they are not a part of. 

I contributed to this project by revising the “script” used to guide participants through the experiment; there were several people running participants, so the script was to ensure that all participants had generally the same experience with the tasks. During term, I was trained to run participants, and then I started running participants as an experimenter. I am also writing and submitting a methods section as part of my basic research report. 

I was actually assigned to this project so it wasn’t a personal choice, but I have loved learning about it and feel that it is something that deserves attention in research.

TS: Are there any future studies that will be conducted based on your project?

SS: Person perception plays a significant role in our social world, and group membership is an important possible factor that influences it. I believe that research like this would be very beneficial as it brings the psychological and sociological parts of being human together. There probably will be future studies coming out from this area as there has not been much done yet. I am excited to see where it goes.

TS: Why did you choose to take the basic research course? To what extent did the research experience align with what you’d expected?

SS: I took the Basic research course to gain valuable research experience as I embark on my journey of making a career in the field of psychology. I hope to graduate with Honours in psychology, so this was one step towards getting a sense of how research is done. I have some experience with qualitative research, but this was my experience with quantitative research. Though I did not get time to get involved in analyzing the data, I became aware of the data collection process in quite some depth - there are so many tiny things to consider that I would not have thought about before I got this experience.

I also attended the lab meetings, which gave me a sense of the different projects going on in the lab. The problems some members were facing in their projects were brought out in these meetings and the discussions entailed different ways of tackling it, feedback, or suggestions. This greatly helped enrich my knowledge on the whole research process.

TS: Is there anything else you’d like to share about your research experience?

SS: It is very difficult to try and boil down my experience into a few sentences, but one thing I would like to say is that I have loved this experience. I got the chance to meet and work with very wise, yet humble people and have learned and gained valuable research experience. I hope to continue being a part of the team by volunteering in Dr. Perunovic’s lab after my basic research ends. Ψ

Created for The Synapse by Incé Husain.