By Jia Zhang, PSA student life interviewer
Jia Zhang: Good morning, Oliver! The first question we get for you is: tell us the research projects you’re working on right now.
Oliver Bontkes: I have a couple of projects going on right now.
I work in a memory lab, and I am doing two things there. One of them is a project where I’m examining how people construct memories for repeated events in general. That one is in a data collection process stage right now. And another one is a project on future thinking and how we imagine simulations of the future that have different emotional valences and whether there are any differences between them. In another lab, a social psychology lab, I’m doing a third project that’s attempting to generate a data-driven taxonomy of belief systems as opposed to getting people to self-report their beliefs, although we’re comparing them to self-report. We are trying to see if there are any patterns in how people report their beliefs and whether there are broad belief systems that can be extracted.
Jia Zhang: You kind of mentioned this already, but what areas of research have you been involved in UBC so far?
Oliver Bontkes: At UBC, I started out in a social psychology lab, mostly working with a grad student on his projects and then gradually doing my own stuff with him where he’s mentoring me. Most of my work has been done in the Memory & Imagination lab. I’ve also recently just started getting involved in a psychedelics lab, although I’m not necessarily involved in any research projects yet. It’s just helping out with RA tasks at this point.
Jia Zhang: What specifically does psychedelic mean?
Oliver Bontkes: There are certain substances that induce psychedelic experiences, which can be spiritual. It can relate to a loss in the sense of self or ego at higher doses. They’re often characterized by the word hallucination, like imagining things that aren’t there, but that’s not necessarily the case. It’s more like an altered perception of reality.
Jia Zhang: Your research journey, as you mentioned, has covered quite different fields in psychology. What made you more interested in doing research in cognitive psych?
Oliver Bontkes: As I mentioned, I started out on social, and it’s hard for me to find something that I’m not interested in. I don’t know if you can call it a problem, but it definitely makes it hard to decide what I want to do. I found the social psychology stuff really interesting. The reason I switched to memory partially has a practical spin because there was a co-op there that I was able to do. But it’s more at the interest level. Even though I’ve thought a lot about social psychology, I think a lot about how we remember and why we remember, so that was just a bit more aligned with my personal curiosities. It’s also about what opportunities have arisen to me. It’s interesting that you end up somewhere and your interests end up aligning with it.
Jia Zhang: For people who also have a lot of interests in different fields of psychology, do you have anything to say about how to determine which area to go?
Oliver Bontkes: A lot of it is opportunity-driven, so you have to get aware of what is actually out there. Not all labs have openings, and generally speaking, when you’re first starting out in research, you’re probably going to have to volunteer at first – at least I did. Second of all, think about what kind of questions you are asking yourself. What are you actually thinking about in your day-to-day the most? Maybe it’s everything, but it’s probably more likely related to a more specific area. Be aware of your own curiosities and what your mind seems to think of.
Jia Zhang: This advice adapts to a lot of situations, like occupation.
Oliver Bontkes: Fore sure. First, you have to see what jobs are out there and second, what do I actually want to do? You can take the route of being driven by your interest first. It might end up being a bit tougher, but if you’re really passionate, usually you can make something work out.
Jia Zhang: What got you interested in research initially?
Oliver Bontkes: I’ve just been an inquisitive person for my whole life. I’ve always enjoyed learning at school. I’ve always been trying to be here for the knowledge rather than grades, for example. So, I think my personality or temperament swayed me more to research because knowledge generation is generally something that’s really interests me.
In terms of how I got involved initially, I was asked by one of the TAs in one of my courses if I wanted to do research with him. It was nice to have an opportunity coming up like that because eventually I would’ve started seeking out for opportunities. I’m also sometimes a bit too comfortable just doing my own thing, so it was nice that it happened that way. Once the opportunity rose, I was like, “that is definitely something I want to do”, and here I am a couple years later.
Jia Zhang: What was your first research project?
Oliver Bontkes: The first research project that I did was, again, with this grad student who studied social psychology. He developed a “values-about-belief scale”, which essentially refers to the specific justifications people might give for holding beliefs about the way the world is. Typically, the assumption is that we hold beliefs because it’s due to evidence. That’s an assumption of how academics has been conducted because if you’re in academics, you want to form your beliefs based on the evidence.
However, practically speaking, that’s not the only justification people use. In fact, a lot of research has shown that you form beliefs not just because of evidence. You have personal biases. If you’re in psychology, you’re definitely aware of them. So, in his “values-about-belief scale”, these relate to things like evidence, which is still a value people hold. There are also moral values people can use, and there are emotional values – whether the belief makes you feel good or avoid feeling bad. There are also what he calls affiliative value, which is believing things because your group believes them. So, we basically wanted to see how the explicit endorsement of these values might relate to the process of motivated reasoning, and this ended up being my Directed Studies project.
What we found didn’t necessarily follow the trend that’s normally identified in motivated reasoning literature that suggests motivated reasoning is an unconscious process. That’s not to say biases aren’t unconscious, but what we found was that only people who actually endorsed affiliated value and emotional value, specifically emotional value, seem to engage in the motivated reasoning that we were trying to elicit in our study. People who reported endorsing evidential value and moral value didn’t really engage in motivated reasoning that much.
I thought the results were really interesting because we usually view biases as unconscious – and certainly there are unconscious biases that inform how we view the world. But the study shows how biases can sometimes just be a conscious thing that we endorse and actively engage in. Also, oftentimes science might assume that something is unconscious because it doesn’t align with their personal views about how you ought to, for example, reason. But other people might just hold different beliefs and actively engage in these biased reasonings and do not see a problem in it.
Jia Zhang: That’s interesting! Did your study also investigate why people endorsed emotional values engage with bias more?
Oliver Bontkes: Since our study used purely self-report surveys, we didn’t really get into questions like if there are specific differences that make some people more likely to both believe in emotional value and engage in emotional reasoning, or in other words, use emotions to guide their reasoning. That’s definitely a question for further research. Our study was just identifying that when people engage in emotionally motivated reasoning, it can be the case that they are using that reason consciously rather than unconsciously, which was a break from previous literature. However, we should definitely not take these findings too far. It’s not like we’ve completely knocked down this idea that motivated reasoning is something that people engage in.
Jia Zhang: For sure. It’s interesting that even though it was a social psych study, when you look into the conscious or unconscious aspect, there is already an overlap with cognitive psych that you are doing right now.
Oliver Bontkes: Yeah. There are different factors that might inform why people hold the beliefs they do. When we try to uncover what’s going on beneath the surface, there could be things in your head. I have certainly found that my research in social psychology has informed some of my perspective and has given me some tools to conduct research in psychology of memory, which is a bit different than how someone might conduct it if they were to go straight into memory.
Jia Zhang: Right. Could you tell us one of the fascinating projects you did?
Oliver Bontkes: I find all projects to be pretty fascinating, but the one that I’m doing right now on repeated events is the one that I’ve probably done the most work on. It’s the project that I’ve had the most of my own personal hypotheses and had the most involvement in coming up with the ideas. Oftentimes we divide memory into implicit versus explicit memory. The implicit one would be things like conditioning or associative learning. We remember them but they are unconscious. Explicit one would be something that we can actually say, they are declarative. We divide the declarative further into this semantic memory, which is memory for facts and information, and episodic memory, which is memory for specific situations, localized in time and place. A lot of research follows this, categorizes and conducts research on one of those systems, so someone studying semantic memory may ask questions based on episodic memory.
The repeated events research is seen as an intermediate form of memory that’s between semantic memory and episodic memory. When we think about our personal lives, a lot of them have to do with repeated events, like when we’re going to school or when we structure our day around habits. Yet comparatively speaking, repeated events are generally under-studied in comparison to the other forms of memory I talked about, like pure semantic memory or pure episodic memory, so it’s an opportunity to uncover some new knowledge about a form of memory that is very prevalent in in our personal lives, and I definitely find the research fascinating and exciting.
Jia Zhang: That’s wonderful! The next question is how working in research enhances your psych degree?
Oliver Bontkes: I think the biggest thing it gives me skills that are applicable to the workforce afterwards. There is this trope that’s not necessarily true that Arts degrees don’t really make you employable, so all us Arts students are anxious about that. But research is a great way to make yourself more employable in the sense of applying the knowledge you’ve learned and developing skills to use it in a practical way. For instance, since I have started research, I’ve learned how to code R. It’s a very employable skill since data analysis is huge in the modern world. So, I think in terms from a purely practical perspective, research definitely gives a lot of extra practical application to my psychology degree.
Furthermore, in terms of knowledge generation, it really helps instantiate concepts when I use them. When you learn concepts in class, they can be a little bit abstract and often is only a piece of knowledge that floats by. But when I’m actually in research and see how these ideas get applied in the questions we ask and the designs of our studies, it really reinforces the learning and teaches you. For example, we haven’t figured out the brain at this point. What we know right now about the brain could be changed in the future, so research is really a transitory process. In the future, it’s going to advance more, and what we know now is a limited version of what we’re going to learn in the future. Following these paths of research can lead to greater knowledge generation.
Jia Zhang: You mentioned that statistics is very important in doing research. Is there anything else that you find very valuable?
Oliver Bontkes: I think statistics is one of the most practical and useful things I’ve learned because it applies across a range of situations and projects. For example, I use the statistics I’ve learned in social psychology in the memory psychology lab in a novel way. As intimidating as statistics class is, I think you should really ground it in the concrete and think about what the statistics are actually saying. Don’t just look at the numbers. Thinking about what the numbers mean in terms of something else is useful. A lot of psychology students don’t necessarily like to do math. R is a great way to avoid math, and it does all the calculations for you. As long as you have a basic understanding of what things mean, it’s a really useful tool for analyzing data in a practically efficient way. So, I think those are two of the most practical things I’ve learned through research: statistics and coding.
Jia Zhang: For those who want to be engaged with statistics but find it hard, do you have any tips to share?
Oliver Bontkes: For sure. For me, statistics have been a challenge, but I’m lucky in the sense that intuitively, they make sense to me. The more I work with them, the more instantiated they become in terms of what they’re saying. As I mentioned, the biggest thing that helps me is not worrying about the numbers but grounding it practically in the thing you’re trying to say about a population. For example, if we’re comparing the variability of two samples, practically speaking, we’re just trying to see if one group is higher or lower on a variable than another group, and numbers are just backing up after a fact. So again, instead of going in and getting lost in numbers and calculating things, what am I trying to say here? Try to get an understanding of what things mean rather than ways to calculate it.
Jia Zhang: Right. The next question is if you have any tips to share with people who want to start their own research projects.
Oliver Bontkes: In terms of research projects, the most important thing has been cultivating a general interest in learning. You don’t have to constantly taking in new knowledge, but it is important to have curiosities, follow them, and try to gain knowledge. For me, podcasts and YouTube videos have been really useful. They stimulate my curiosity and teach me things that I wouldn’t necessarily learn in school. So, having that general interest in learning and a relatively constant intake of new knowledge helps you ask questions and hone your intuitions.
There is an additional thing of not taking things at face value. Your research result is not necessarily a set-in-stone finding, it’s just a statement that one study has come up with. The conclusion you get could be true, and it could also not be true. Also think about what else the result might imply, so it’s really helpful to use the current knowledge you have to generate new questions.
In terms of starting a project, as I mentioned earlier, you’re probably going to have to start with volunteering and are not necessarily going to get to do your project unless you’re in honours. I’m not personally in Honours. I’ve found a different route, but if you want to do a research project, Honours is a pretty good way to do it. In terms of volunteering, I think a good process would be starting volunteering in a lab and eventually using that to both gain knowledge and start generating your own questions. Then you can try to do a Directed Studies since it ties you with an ongoing research project or sometimes your own project. Directed Studies also gives you a really good mentor who can guide you through it. I would personally recommend that, if you’re going to do a Directed Studies, don’t do one semester. If you want to get involved in research, you have to understand that it does not happen quickly, so do a two-semester Directed Studies if you can, and take it from there. What I’ve found is that usually, once you get involved in a lab, as long as you maintain, they’re happy to keep you there because you have more experience than a new person coming in. So, once you have an opportunity, hold onto it, and don’t think that “oh, this is only a four-month thing where I’m working in this lab briefly and then I’m going to leave”. For me, it’s been useful to keep at it for a while. For example, I studied social psychology two years ago and memory around a year ago.
Jia Zhang: It’s important to keep thinking about it.
Oliver Bontkes: Yeah. The most important thing is having general inquisitiveness and wanting to learn. To me, that’s been the heart of it. If you come to the table with ideas, that itself will impress people. Asking questions is also important. A lot of new lab members at lab meetings don’t think they know enough to have their own opinions on a topic, and that’s completely reasonable. But asking questions is really valuable. Don’t just allow yourself to take things at face value, especially in a research context where it’s smaller and you actually have the opportunity to do things. Unlike classrooms, where most people are pretty scared to ask questions in a lecture of 100, 200 people, a lab has only about 10 people.
Jia Zhang: The last question we have is, do you have any plans for your future research?
Oliver Bontkes: Yeah, as I said, I have trouble narrowing down things I’m interested in, and there are a lot of ways I could go in the future in terms of research. I’m definitely going to grad school for something. My main goal is clinical psychology, but part of where it goes is contingent on grad school or what supervisor I get for grad school because obviously their research informs what your research is going to be. But generally speaking, I really want to continue learning about repeated events into the foreseeable future. I also want to see through those social psychology projects I’m involved in. I think the main thing I want to do is generating research that is practically applicable in everyday life, which is sort of why I want to go into clinical psychology. I like the idea of doing research that can be applied in practice and is used to improve people’s lives. I don’t really like the idea of just doing a study, which will get lost in scientific papers. Some people read it, but it’s only academics.
Jia Zhang: Thanks for sharing! Do you have any final thoughts that you would like to share with the readers?
Oliver Bontkes: Be interested in things. The biggest thing that has helped me throughout my degree and research is trying to be here for the knowledge, not the grades. I mean, it’s hard to not worry about grades because we feel it has a big sway in our future, even though it doesn’t necessarily. So, stop worrying about grades and start worrying about learning things, getting the knowledge in your head, and keeping it there because how useful is it to learn something for a test and forget it in two weeks?