Northfield, MN (2019)
Social Psychology Research
Data and empirical research play a central role in how I process complex situations and act upon information within my community and education work. In addition to reading scientific literature, I have led two social psychology studies:
1. A correlational study investigating personality as a predictor of loneliness (2018).
2. An experiment testing how empathy influences people’s reactions to police violence (2019).
Read on to follow the journey through these two studies.
I
When is a Person an Island? Personality Correlates of Loneliness
I analyzed data from a sample of 68 undergraduate psychology students to find correlations between loneliness and personality traits. To perform this analysis, I used DeYoung, Quilty, and Peterson’s (2007) model to break down the Big Five Personality Traits (i.e., Openness, Agreeableness, Extraversion, Conscientiousness, and Neuroticism) into ten facets.
The results painted a nuanced picture of loneliness, especially within the traits of agreeableness and conscientiousness. Under the umbrella of agreeableness, more compassionate people tended to be less lonely, but more polite people did not. Meanwhile, within conscientiousness, organization had no relationship with loneliness, but industrious people were generally less lonely.
I presented the poster below at the national conference for the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.
Key Finding
“Our results align with an intuitive story—that loneliness relates less to surface-level traits like politeness or neatness and more to aspects shaping the fundamental nature of encounters. The data sketch a tentative portrait of loneliness—being vulnerable enough to make interaction aversive, volatile enough to impair interactions, and lacking the enthusiastic outreach, affective regard, and purposeful planning that encourage relationships.”
II
Imagining Justice: How Do We Take Moral Transgressors’ Perspectives?
For my senior thesis, I conducted an independent experimental study about empathy in the context of police violence. My research question was, “Does empathy backfire when someone takes the perspective of a person who has committed an unjustified moral transgression? Do people feel less compassion for the transgressor after trying to imagine to imagine what the transgressor had been thinking?”
To investigate this question, I asked 123 Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) respondents to read a story about a police officer shooting an unarmed Black man. In the control condition, the reader attempted to remain as objective as possible. In the first experimental condition, the reader used imagine-self perspective taking by imagining what they would have done in the police officer’s shoes. In the second experimental condition, the reader used imagine-other perspective taking to imagine what was happening in the police officer’s head. I hypothesized that perspective taking would backfire and decrease empathetic concern for the police officer.
Tentative Conclusions
The results diverged from expectations. While imagining being in the police officer’s shoes increased respondents’ personal distress, efforts to empathize neither increased nor decreased empathetic concern for the police officer.
Studies where perspective taking has increased empathic concern for moral transgressors have been ones in which the targets were portrayed sympathetically—a convicted murder who was justifiably angry at his neighbor, for instance, or a drug user who is struggling to redefine herself. In contrast, studies where perspective taking has backfired are ones in which people attribute negative intent to moral transgressors—like someone in the workplace who did something deliberately malicious. While some respondents condemned the officer, perspective taking may have had little effect for respondents who found it difficult to parse the police officer’s intent and character, even if they knew his actions were transgressive. This leads to a tentative explanation for the results:
“Perspective taking may amplify current judgments rather than alter them. When information is limited and the situation is distant, taking a moral transgressor’s perspective may facilitate neither condemnation nor compassion reliably.”
Much has changed since this study took place in 2019. Discourse on police violence has reflected a left-wing shift towards viewing police officers as people who abuse power and harm communities they were tasked with protecting. Future research should assess whether today’s readers would be more likely to ascribe negative intent to the police officer or whether efforts to empathize are more likely to backfire than at the time of data collection.