 Hello and welcome to this Fairfield University Innovative Research Symposium Spotlight. I'm Dr. Michael Andrejczyk, Associate Professor in the Psychology Department, and today I have the pleasure of introducing Emma Antoine Portnari. Emma began as a supervised research student in my lab in the spring of 2019 helping me to design and conduct studies related to intergroup relations, implicit bias, and the connection between empathy and helping behavior. And after that supervised research experience, Emma went on to design and conduct her own very interesting independent research project and she's been kind enough to offer to share that project with us today. Emma, thanks for joining us. Thank you Dr. Andrejczyk, happy to be here today. All right, well we're proud to have you here to show your great work. Let's start with a presentation of your research and then we'll follow up with a short conversation. Yes, definitely. So my project was designed to further investigate a phenomenon known as the pro-black bias. And this is a social bias in which people demonstrate bias favoring blacks over whites in social judgment tasks. And while trends in society as well as the majority of evidence in the psychological literature suggests that people will often show bias against blacks and in favor of whites, more recent research has actually challenged this notion. Using a test called the social judgment bias task, researchers, acts and colleagues observed a social judgment bias favoring black applicants over white applicants for admission into an academic honor society. They termed this bias in favor of blacks, the pro-black bias. However, this bias has only been shown to be within the context of honor society selection. And thus I was curious to see how widespread this bias might be. During the time that I was designing this research, I was actually taking a class called gender, race and ethnic relations. And in the course we were learning how there are higher incarceration rates for black offenders versus white offenders. And some further research that I found demonstrated that black offenders often get sentenced to harsher sentences than white offenders for crimes of the same severity. And thus I was curious to see if the pro-black bias would also be prevalent in a criminal sentencing domain. We viewed this research really as exploratory research and thus we weren't sure what exactly the outcomes would be. However, we predicted that if in fact the pro-black bias was prevalent in this domain, that participants would sentence fewer black offenders to long criminal sentences than white offenders for crimes of the same severity. To adapt our research to a criminal sentencing domain, we recruited 123 participants through the Fairfield University undergraduate psychology student participant pool. And then we were actually tasked with transforming the honor society selection task to a criminal sentencing domain. And thus we created the criminal sentencing judgment bias task. In this task we created 64 unique offender profiles and we built 32 of them to be more severe and 32 to be less severe. As well we varied the race of each profile, assigning half of the profiles to offender profiles that were black pictures and half the profiles to pictures that were of white people. And this allowed us to make sure that there were an equal number of black and white offenders who committed less severe and more severe crimes. As well, participants also completed a measure of their perception of performance on the criminal sentencing judgment bias task and as well measures of implicit and explicit bias. So participants were told that they would be tasked with taking on the role of a judge who would have to perform sentencing decisions for offenders of different crimes. They were presenting with the screen like this so they were shown each offender profile individually provided with a picture of the offender and then criteria that described the severity of their crime. As well they were then tasked with either choosing the short sentence or long sentence for each profile. Overall our biggest result that we found was the fact that there is no prevalence of the pro-black bias in the criminal sentencing domain. But one interesting finding that we did find was the fact that participants were pretty good at judging their performance. And so what exactly does this mean? So while our results suggested that there's no pro-black bias in the criminal sentencing domain they do suggest that people were partially aware of whether or not they did show a pro-black bias while completing the task. And further our results suggest that the pro-black bias might not be especially widespread and that at the very least it is in fact domain specific. We did have a few limitations to our study. We found an overall lower accuracy rate on our task than in the previous research and we also found concerns with the generalizability of our study as our participant pool was only college students. Thus going forward we've actually decided to address these issues and run our study again and we're focusing specifically on changes that will address our low accuracy rates and the generalizability and we're excited to see what our future research will find. Great yeah thanks for that rundown. A couple questions that I had for you as I was listening to this and that we've spoken about a little bit before but where you go with these findings is very interesting but how do you see this as you know really contributing to the literature? Yeah definitely so it's really interesting. In particular it kind of indicates that we might need to be more precise when we're talking about bias for and against minority groups. So rather than asking is there bias we might have to ask in what specific domains does bias exist. This insight in itself is really important since people always sort of assumed that regardless of the domain people will show bias against minority groups and in favor of majority groups. So it really changes the way that theoretical model should look at bias. As I mentioned before we also are making changes to our criminal sentencing task as despite the fact that our original task did function pretty well we want to make the changes to improve the task and as I mentioned we're in the process of gathering that new data looking at a larger sample of adults and making sure that our task fixes the limitations that we had before. And one thing you said as well was that maybe one limitation is that you're looking at college students here largely in this first study. So where are you going to get the participants for this new study that you're designing? Yeah so we're actually using a software it's called Amazon M-Turk and it's an online software where you can upload your research and it's able to recruit people online who are interested in completing the study. So it allows us to get a larger demographic and a more representative sample of the general population. Great okay great yeah so thanks for the rundown. One other question that I that I had for you. The project itself is very interesting I think you did a nice job of sharing that with us but how do you see this as fitting with your goals your professional goals going forward? Yeah definitely so engaging in this research project I've gained skills that will be essential in helping me with my professional goals. I'm a psych major and I also am a minor in marketing so I really look to combine these passions into a career and pursue a job in marketing. This independent research project has had a direct connection to those professional goals in the marketing world as the overarching focus of the project is on attitudes and behavior which are really two key components a marketer must understand to successfully market to a target consumer. So also through my studies of social judgment bias I've furthered my understanding of attitudes and behaviors and the different context and the facts that influence them. Further I've also developed some really valuable skills that will be vital for my future job whether this is how to conduct research, how to communicate information via different mediums, how to problem solve, how to take an evidence-based approach and really how to understand the relationship between various phenomenon and further I've also just really improved my project management skills. So sadly as my time at Fairfield approaches a close I do look forward to utilizing the skills I've gained during this experience to help me achieve those professional goals post-grad. Great perfect so another thing I like to always ask students about almost any project can you tell us maybe one particularly interesting or surprising or challenging thing that you encountered as you work through this project? Yeah so one of the most challenging aspects I actually found while working on this project was adapting the academic honor society judgment bias task to our domain of criminal sentencing while the overall premise was rather straightforward and researchers who made this honor society task provided a set of instructions on how to create your own judgment bias task it still took a lot of work to adapt it to our paradigm we went through various options for the criteria that would create each profile we played with different categories of information that would be provided we changed the scale that each category would be presented on and really it was just figuring out what would be the most understandable and realistic to the average person who might not have the most in-depth knowledge of criminal sentencing then further crafting each of the individual offender profiles proved to be a little bit more difficult as we went through the different criteria options as for what would constitute a more or less severe profile and then also trying to make each of the 64 offender profiles unique was a challenge and as we drew from our conclusions even though we feel that the task we created might not have been the best adaptation and thus that's why we're going back to the drawing board and redesigning it before our next round of data collection I have to say prior to this research experience I don't know that I really understood how much work goes into a study like this and how each study can often lead to a lot of new questions so it's a really cool experience to experience that and really learn what it's like to conduct a study such as this one great well you did a great job with it so thank you very good just one last thing so I know on the page itself we didn't have a lot of time to talk about this in the rundown but I know you mentioned some terms pre-registration is something that I saw on there and open science I was just wondering if you could tell us or tell people a little bit about this because I think they're important and sometimes we're a little underappreciated so what are those exactly and why did you incorporate them into your project yeah so the open science framework is actually an open source project management tool that encourages and facilitates open collaboration and research so by allowing researchers a platform to upload and make public all aspects of their projects from materials to data to analysis the open science framework thus helps to increase the accessibility integrity and reproducibility of research pre-registration is a part of the open science framework and it involves laying out your studies hypotheses materials method and data collection and analyst plans prior to actually collecting your data so this was something that we decided to complete in addition to the other open science framework capabilities and by documenting your research plan through pre-registration prior to collecting your data it helps to reduce researcher bias that can occur once you have your data in front of you while also providing you and the other scientists with a clear record of the research choices you set out to follow and why you made the particular decisions that you did great yeah sounds like best practices in science which are always always good to follow definitely well yeah thank you so much for taking us through the project and joining us today I think this work is a really good example of the really nice collaborative student faculty research that we have going on in the psychology department so thanks again and on behalf of the the department and all of the fairfield community we thank you for taking some time to sit with us and hear from Emma today thanks thanks