By: Maheep Chawla and Mary Falade
Pronouns: She/they
Year: 4
Major: Double Major in Psychology Honours and English Honours
Hometown: Born in China but lived in Burnaby, BC for most of my life.
Fun Fact: I am in the top 1000 most active wikipedians by the number of edits.
Could you give us a short overview of your project? What the research topic was and what conclusions you found?
It was about how the COVID-19 pandemic affected people’s attitudes towards wealth redistribution. In the United States, I noticed that a lot of people were expressing support for COVID stimulus checks/payments, but typically we see a lot of pushback or lack of support for redistribution. A grad student and I ran a quick series of studies to test whether or not people actually support the stimulus checks more than other forms of redistribution and if so, what factors about the stimulus checks make them more appealing to people. We also wanted to see if we can actually use this information to promote support for other forms of redistribution (eg: food stamps, etc).
There were three kinds of studies: the first one was testing whether or not there was more support for stimulus checks during the COVID pandemic. That was a quick qualtrics survey we put on a platform called prolific. That was our pilot study with about 50 people. We tested this survey between liberals and conservatives. For the next study, we created statements that are varying along different dimensions; we altered the wordings to be framed as something that would promote economic growth or promote helping people in crisis and asked participants to rate their agreement with each of the statements. The third study was wrapping all that up and figuring out whether the wording actually did have an effect above and beyond the other dimensions. Unfortunately, we found that that wasn’t the case. However, it was kind of interesting, because we found the opposite effect of what we expected. Generally, if the participants were liberal, they liked stimulus checks as much as they liked other forms of redistribution. For conservatives, they liked the stimulus check way more than other forms of redistribution.
What sparked your interest in your research topic?
In general, I think it’s because my interest in psychology is overlapping with my interest in other fields, like English literature. I’m interested in how broader societal structures affect the micro level interactions between people. I thought that it would be quite practical and interesting if we could find something about stimulus checks to help promote pro-redistribution attitudes in people in the US, since there’s still no universal health care down there, and there’s a lot of pushback against any form of redistribution. So long story short, it’s in my realm of interest, and I thought that it could help improve people’s lives if we could find something worthy within this field. Even if the results did not come out the way we expected, it still teaches us something about how to approach the issue of redistribution.
Was there anyone who inspired you to look into this topic?
I don’t think that there was any one person but I was working with Holly Angstrom for this – she’s a PhD student. She was already working in this field when I met her and that’s when we started working on the project.
What was your favourite part of the process?
I really like the process of creating the actual surveys, because it’s kind of exciting to see the questions take shape and then imagine yourself in the participant’s shoes filling out the survey. Although, the data analysis is probably the most really exciting part. It probably doesn’t look very exciting, but it’s a very interesting feeling to have your first hypothesis actually proven to be supported (or not in our case). It’s also interesting to see what you can find about people through this process. Since a lot of the things I had seen were just anecdotal, having it supported by data on a larger sample size suggested that my anecdotal observations were perhaps based in truth. So, it’s always nice to have that validation.
What will you be doing with your data and conclusion now? How do you plan on presenting it?
We’re thinking of writing out a short report to get it published and we’re still working out what exactly to discuss about the findings. We’re still trying to figure out why we’re finding this pattern of results, so we’re also looking at some open-ended answers that we collected. We asked participants why they disliked the policy that they rated the lowest and why they liked the policy they rated the highest. It is kind of interesting to see people’s thought processes. It is useful to see where people are coming from with their beliefs and what they base their ideologies on, especially in these times. It’s hard to tell whether or not our assumptions based on the aggregates would really apply to how the individuals perceive things. We see these averages where people generally support the stimulus checks more, but when we look at the individuals they might feel very differently.
How do you see the results of your study being applied in the real world?
I think the main conclusion is that trying to convince people that redistribution is a good thing, or to change people’s attitudes about redistribution if they already dislike it, will be an uphill battle. However, it might be useful to frame it in a way that suggests that it is helping people, since it seems like a lot of people are against it, because they think it would not be helpful in various ways. So it might not be the quick and easy solution that we were hoping for, but nothing is when it comes to changing people’s minds!
If you could do your study again, what would you do differently and why?
If I were to do it differently, I might have started off by collecting qualitative data. These policies and issues are quite multifaceted and complex and it’s very hard to pin people’s attitudes toward them through a single number like we did in our initial data collection. I now think open ended answers shed more light on the details.
What course(s) do you think were most helpful in gaining background knowledge about your research topic?
Oddly enough, I feel like I’ve learned a lot from my English classes. There’s this one course I like to recommend to people studying psychology: English 309, which is the rhetoric of technologies and medicine. This course helped me with this particular study since I was concerned about the phrasing, framing, and wording of how to present the policies and how that would affect people. This course taught me about how scientific rhetoric is, like any other form of rhetoric, an art form and a communication medium which can be manipulated.
What is one thing that was challenging about it and how did you manage to overcome it?
The most difficult part was probably writing this project along with my current honours project, and also five other classes and working part time at the same time. What I’ve heard is that that is what happens in research. You usually have tons of projects going on at the same time plus all your other obligations in academia. I don’t really know how I did it. I think I just had to buckle down and use calendars and notebooks. Organization tools are a lifesaver. Google Calendar has saved me so many times. Having notifications to my phone whenever something is due or has to be done, that probably has boosted my grades by 20 percent.
Tell us about how you prioritise your time during the project? How do you motivate yourself?
I have a to-do list and I’m motivating myself to be able to finish the task so I can cross it off that list. For research projects, generally I am very excited about them so I want to get them done as soon as possible. I actually have to motivate myself to get away from them to do the other more important tasks. The stuff that I’m not actually particularly interested in, I put in on the list and tell myself I will soon have the satisfaction of removing it.
How do you network within the psychology community, and where have you made your most valuable connections?
I think I’ve made a lot of meaningful connections in office hours talking to my TAs because they are also usually doing a lot of interesting research. I would just usually ask them what they were looking into and they’ll just give you a slice of the cutting edge of the field that they’re in. That’s how I ended up in two of my labs. I think it was also quite valuable to be in the Honours Seminar cohort. It is a much more tight-knit group than your typical large 200 person psych class. You get to hear about everyone’s research during the entire year and there’s also a bunch of events that you can go to, including PURC. Everyone has to present their research there. So even if I’m really averse to attending conferences, I’m kind of pushed to do that and you do get to see a lot of interesting posters, cool research, and meet a bunch of presenters.
What are your other interests outside of Psychology? Are you a part of any clubs or teams?
I was a volunteer for the campus thrift store, Get Thrifty. Unfortunately, when COVID hit, I went on hiatus since I couldn’t travel to campus, so I haven’t really been active for the past year, but hopefully, when campus reopens later this year, I’ll be able to jump into that again. Besides that, I do like to read and write which are probably my favorite hobbies. I also enjoy gardening!
What are your professional goals and plans for the future? What do you see yourself doing in 10 years time?
I’m not a fortune teller! I can’t say with 100% certainty but my plan currently is to go to grad school. I want to maybe work for a public health organization or NGO and run research for them. If I go into academia, I would like to go into teaching since I’m very interested in being able to connect with other students. I’d like to teach my future students about things that I’m passionate about and offer them perspectives that they might not have thought of, like my teachers have offered me in the past. I’m not sure which path I will end up on but either one is good with me.