Hi everyone!
Wow, week 7! It’s been great to read about everyone’s successful data collection. Due to a number of setbacks, Amira and I won’t be at that point for some time yet, but we plan to be in the next few months. We certainly have had no problem keeping busy though and we know that all our work and revisions behind the scenes will pay off.
This week, we had the absolute pleasure of attending a talk by our mentor, Susanne. She spoke to a committee of experienced researchers about her latest work; the effect of foreign accents on moral decisions. In short, she presented listeners with a moral dilemma spoken in either their native language or their native language with a foreign accent. She found that when speech was accented, participants were more likely to choose the less emotional or less personal result of the dilemma.
We had a great discussion about what motives people have for making decisions the way they do, and this brought up ideas from a class I took at Penn State this past spring called Multicultural Psychology. One of the primary ideas was the concept of ingroups and outgroups. Ingroups are people that have anything in common, ranging from a cultural identity to a language. Outgroups are created when people see someone that has differences to their identity and personal labels and therefore considers the outgroup individual to have less in common. There is ample research on these topics, showing that people use ingroup/outgroup status to determine if someone is worth assisting in a circumstance, trusting in uncertainty, or as Susanne’s research shows, deciding in a moral dilemma.
If this were to be the proven motive behind Susanne’s results, it would mean that participants heard the accented speech and labeled the speaker as an outgroup. Because they then interpreted the speaker’s identity as different than their own, they had less connection and emotion involved in their decision making and chose the more logical of the options. In the future, this is the kind of research I could see myself doing. I have a great amount of interest in understanding people’s behavior and the motivations behind the decisions they make. If I can connect those emotional and logical components to my interest in psycholinguistics, as Susanne is doing, I think I would be in heaven.
Anyway, here’s to our last week! Hope everyone has successful final days and safe travels home.