Over the course of the summer, I contributed to various studies focusing on alternate choices and underdogs in the workplace, the effects of prior discrimination on future performance, and the international impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on people’s job search. With such a varied project scope, I found it particularly interesting that Professor Nurmohamed’s research truly seemed to center around the theme of the “flipside,” that is, the unconventional result of hardships, low expectations, or other workplace obstacles that individuals overcome.

This poster focuses primarily on the Underdog Narratives and Discrimination study that I worked on for the majority of the summer. The purpose of this project was to further prove effects of discrimination on individuals that had already been observed in prior studies. For this project, the data was collected through surveys that were built using Qualtrics and later launched on mTurk or Prolific. However, given the current circumstances created by COVID-19, including an overall increase in anxiety and negative feelings, as well as high unemployment and greater usage of the mTurk platform by new participants and/or bots, there were a multitude of potential confounding factors. The team attempted to control for these across study versions, but still found it difficult to produce results that were comparable to the original study. As a result, the project is still ongoing. 

Although the studies have not been completed, this research serves to demonstrate the importance of studying the “flipside” effects of seemingly negative phenomena on how feelings such as motivation, discrimination, and inequality play out in the workplace.