By: Akshara Rajeshkannan and Maheep Chalwa
Preferred pronouns: She/her/hers
Year: 5
Major: BA Psychology, with a minor in Law and Society
Hometown: White Rock!
Fun fact: I like to travel a lot. I went to Marbella, Spain before the pandemic, and I loved it.
Could you give us a short overview of your directed studied project? Starting off with your research topic?
Our research was on God and religion, we wanted to see if thinking about God would increase people’s risk taking attitudes. If people were reminded of God before taking decisions on nonmoral risks—for example, Skydiving—then perhaps they would be more willing to do it. There have been a couple of past studies in this field, but most of them conclude that being reminded of God decreases risk taking behaviour. Instead, we hypothesized that perhaps being reminded of God would make people feel more protected, and therefore be more willing to take risks. The lab supervisor Dr. Kristin Laurin has conducted a couple of studies similar to this one in the past. We adapted the methods for this study using methods my grad student supervisor used in some of her past research.
How was your research framed, and how did you analyse risk behaviour?
We had 2 conditions for measuring risk. Within those 2 conditions, we had an implicit and explicit condition. One was an open-ended risk taking task, where we’d ask participants to type out a risk they wanted to take in the past but didn’t take, for example skydiving or hiking up a mountain. The second task was the *DOSPERT, which is a standardised risk questionnaire in which you rate how likely you are to take the risk listed there, on a scale ranging from ‘extremely likely’ to ‘extremely unlikely.’ Some examples would be gambling your last paycheck, taking other monetary risks, promiscuity/sexuality and recreational risks like whitewater rafting.
For the explicit condition, we asked the participants to simply think about God while making their next decision, while doing either of the two risk taking tasks mentioned above. For the implicit condition, we did a scrambled sentence task involving several sets of words that participants needed to unscramble and create a sentence with. Within each set of scrambled words, there would be one word relating to God and religion (e.g. ‘sacred,’ ‘God,’ ‘prophet,’). This was meant to prime the participants to think about God before doing one of the two risk-taking tasks.
*DOSPERT = (Domain-Specific Risk-Taking), a psychometric scale that assesses risk taking in five content domains: financial decisions (separately for investing versus gambling), health/safety, recreational, ethical, and social decisions.
Who were your target participants/demographic of people you tried to reach?
We put the study out on *Prolific. The one requirement we had for our participants before they participated in the study was that they had to be religious, because past research showed us that the experiment doesn’t work on people who aren’t.
*Prolific – online survey and research platform.
What sparked your interest in your research topic and how did you build your hypothesis?
The supervisors were already heading that direction, and I thought it was a really cool topic so I decided to join. I have no background with religion and I don’t know much about it, which means I wasn’t coming into the study with any biases. I was already part of the lab, and so they messaged me asking if I’d like to do a directed studies project on the topic and I thought it would be a cool opportunity to learn more about a topic I wasn’t familiar with.
What was your favourite part of the process?
Watching it all come together. In class, we always read about studies but we never really see how much time and effort goes into it. So it was really cool to actually be a part of a study and have my own opinion through the process.
I can imagine how much work it takes to work on a research project in the directed studies program – what is one thing that was hard about it and how did you manage to overcome it?
The data analysis is probably the thing I struggled with the most. I even found PSYC 217 to be quite a learning curve, but I liked how it challenged me. I kept my textbooks from PSYC 217, so those really came in handy for my project. In addition to that, feedback from my supervisors was helpful too. I also struggled a bit with time management, and the whole project took longer than I thought it would but at least now I know to start earlier and be more efficient with my time.
Is there anything you can share with us about the results that you found? What trends/conclusions did you observe?
We found the opposite of our hypothesis. As you know, we had an explicit and implicit condition – in our implicit condition, we didn’t find any significant results, but we did find that people’s risk taking behaviors reduced after being explicitly reminded of God in both the DOSPERT and open-ended risk taking measures. The DOSPERT is broken up into subcategories, and we found that risk taking in the ‘Health’ category of the DOSPERT decreased most after explicit reminders of God.
What was the most surprising observation from your study?
I guess it was surprising to see that the implicit condition had no significant results. With the explicit condition, I was not too surprised as I had expected the results to be significant. We are still going to elaborate on our research a bit—just to see if we can find significant results with an implicit condition later on..
What will you be doing with your data and conclusion now? How do you plan on presenting it?
I submitted my project to MURC (Multidisciplinary Undergraduate Research Conference), and am currently waiting for a response from them. Besides that, we have plans to continue the research further by submitting a pre-registered report to a journal which will replicate the methods we used in the pilot sample with a much larger sample. This will help us get more definitive results. However, we are not sure exactly which journal we will be submitting to yet.
How do you see the results of your study being applied in the real world?
Research on risk-taking helps us better understand human behaviour, and tying it to people who are religious further specifies how that certain demographic of individuals feel about risk-taking. Since we hypothesized that people who believed in God would feel protected by God and thus report a greater willingness to take risks, this area of research could also help us understand more about people’s relationship with religion. Taking it one step further, this research could also help impact programs like Alcoholics Anonymous and Gamblers Anonymous because the success of these programs depends on individuals’ relationships with religion/God to promote healthier risk-taking behaviours.
If you could do your study again, what would you do differently and why?
We released the study in late 2020 in the United States, which was around the time of the Presidential election. I hypothesize that might have impacted our study, because people might not have been so willing to take risks during such a politically heated time. I think we could have released our project at another time.
Tell us about your law and society minor. Why did you pick it?
I’m passionate about social justice. I was sort of interested in Law school for a while, and I like that the minor is not just about learning law but critiquing law and how it affects different groups of people as well. I’ve really enjoyed having it as part of my degree.
How has your directed studies project helped you grow, both personally and professionally?
It was a learning curve, but coming to a completion of it all was really inspiring for myself. Personally, overcoming the doubts I had about myself gave me a lot of self-confidence. I do have plans to go to grad school for Psychology, so both my lab work and my DS project have definitely helped me gain experience.
What course(s) do you think were most helpful in gaining background knowledge about your research topic?
Probably social psychology (PSYC 308), and PSYC335, which is about gambling and risk behaviour. Professor Luke Clark is great, and his love for the subject is contagious. But overall, research methods (PSYC 217) was the most helpful course.
Tell us about how you stay organised and manage your time while doing a directed studies project. How do you prioritise? How do you motivate yourself?
It was helpful to have deadlines. Before we even started, my supervisor gave me deadlines for each step: data analysis, the first draft of the paper, etc., so having them so far in advance was nice, because if I saw that I had a midterm or a paper for a class that was due around my deadline for my lab work, I knew that I needed to either study for my class midterm earlier, or start the paper for my director studies earlier. Just writing everything down and looking ahead so I don’t miss any deadlines was probably the most helpful.
How do you network within the psychology community, and where have you made your most valuable connections?
Definitely through volunteering in the labs. You work with professors and grad students hands-on, and you’re able to create a friendship with them rather than a teacher-student relationship. I’m also in a sorority which has helped me meet a lot of other people in Psychology, and we bounce ideas off each other.
What are your professional goals and plans for the future? What do you see yourself doing in 5 years time? 10 years time?
My goal is to get my PhD in clinical psychology, but I’m still figuring out what I’d want to specialise in. But I definitely want to be a practicing psychologist. I also like the idea of working in healthcare. A goal of mine on the side would be to advocate and help bridge the gap between physical and mental health because I think mental health services should be just as accessible as physical health ones are.