INQUIRY

INQUIRY • Volume 19, 2015
Motivation and Perception: Do Rewards and Costs
Direct Attention to Visual Stimuli?
Carrie Webb, Psychology
Sponsor: Professor Emily Balcetis, Psychology
What individuals wish to see can influence what they
really see. This study examines whether people’s motivations
affect the ways they perceive a basic feature of a visual
target, its color. This study investigated whether people
direct visual attention towards elements of a visual stimulus
associated with financial gain more readily than elements
associated with loss. It tested the psychological process
by which motivations affect color perception and whether
this happens because of a “perceptual readiness” to orient
visual attention towards a reward-associated color. Using a
within-subjects experimental design, this study examined
whether participants’ desires to see certain colors increased
their perceptual readiness to detect that color in stimuli that
are ambiguous. Results show that participants perceive more
dots of a particular color associated with reward and fewer
dots of another color associated with loss. The implications
of such motivated attentional biases for legal decisionmaking,
medicine and other disciplines are also discussed.
The Effect of Social Information on Reactions to Facebook
News Posts: A Survey Experiment
Leah Wiedenmann, Politics
Sponsor: Professor Anna Harvey, Politics
Americans increasingly get their news about political
events from social media. One consequence of this trend is
that individuals are increasingly exposed to the reactions of
others to news about political events. But do the opinions of
others about a political event affect individuals’ own reaction
to that event? Previous research suggests individuals’ social
context can in fact influence their beliefs and preferences.
But when individuals’ preferences appear to be correlated
with those of their peers, it is also possible either that peers
directly affect the individual or that individuals self-selected
into a peer group sharing their preferences. This project uses
a survey experiment to test whether respondents’ reactions
to Facebook posts are affected by the support each post has
received from others in the form of likes and shares. Results
show that respondents tend to not change their preferences
and that previous levels of information generally have insignificant
effects on opinion formation. That social media users
are not significantly responding to the amount of likes and
shares shows that people are influenced by more complex
structures that exist both in and outside of social media.
Learning to See
Carina Mia Wong, French, Journalism
Sponsor: Professor Jason Samuels, Journalism
Learning to See tells the story of the blind Brazilian
drummer Vanderlei Pereira who lost his sight at the late
age of 31. The documentary follows Vanderlei’s journey
of slowly losing his vision from the age of six and how he
learned to live with his blindness. Learning to See explores
how Vanderlei’s loss of vision has impacted his life and
informed his humanity. This film is told through the eyes
of Vanderlei, both literally and figuratively, as it plays with
visually representing what it looked like to go blind. This
creative representation will lend to the humanity of Vanderlei’s
story and, therefore, help humanize those who live with
disabilities for a greater audience.
Construal Level Theory in Teaching versus Learning
Vanessa Wu, Psychology
Sponsor: Professor Yaacov Trope, Psychology
There is a fundamental asymmetry between teachers
and learners in terms of where information ends up. Teaching
focuses on explaining knowledge the teacher already
has to other individuals (away from themselves), whereas
learners focus their attention on understanding the information
presented to them (for themselves). To understand this
asymmetry, this study explored Construal Level Theory
(CLT) under two conditions, teaching and learning. It looked
at how individuals perceive information on a global-level
(more abstract) or local-level (more concrete details) based
on their roles in an information-exchange relationship with
between subjects experiments. CLT postulates global-level
thinking with perceived distance; in the explored exchange
relationship situations, the distance evoked is social distance
to the information. There has been research on CLT within
material-exchange relationships such as gift giving and
consumerism, but understanding information processing in
teaching and learning has long term implications on areas
such as education, life skills like job training and clinical
treatment. The probability of participants classifying critical
information trials on a global-level was not different between
teachers and learners. However, a manipulation check
showed that the more individuals thought of themselves
as teachers, the more likely they were to classify objects
through global-level features. The more people perceive
themselves as teachers, rather than learners, the more they
process information globally.
Specialization or Displacement? Re-Examining the
Impact of Less Educated Immigration on U.S. Labor
Market
Nan Zhao, Economics
Sponsor: Professor Kevin Thom, Economics
A large number of less educated workers have immigrated
to the United States in the past two decades. Previous
literature exploiting comparative advantage models
demonstrates imperfect substitutability between immigrant
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