Growing up as an immigrant, I was always fascinated by different perspectives. I wanted to learn the sociological, economical, and political factors that caused people to believe in what they do. Coming to Penn, I wanted to explore this passion in an academic perspective through the lens of behavioral economics and cognitive science, as I believed that regardless of the industry and field of work, understanding the way humans think and behave at a deeper level can bolster any type of business and improve workplace relationships. I was fortunate enough to be accepted into PURM to do research and work alongside knowledgeable professors and post-doc researchers at Platt Labs. At PURM, I wanted to create an experiment on my own, equip myself with the technical skills I needed in almost any industry, and work as part of a larger community. Given the COVID era has forced the entire world to adapt to a remote work environment, my mentor suggested an independent project where we explored the factors that contribute to workplace connectedness in an online setting.

The primary goal of our study is to create an application that measures whether revealing emotion or personal information can increase connectedness between individuals of different backgrounds. We hypothesized that revealing personal information with emotion will improve connectedness between individuals. Our application displays slides with portrait photos of men and women across 4 ethnic groups, paired with an associated sentence that conveyed biographical information. We used diverse pieces of personal information, including education, occupation, and interests to prevent bias of a particular area. With the conditions equally randomized, we asked participants to rate the connection they felt with the individual from a scale of 1-7. The participant is then followed up with more questions regarding work chemistry, work trust, leadership, and salary ratings. We calculate significance by comparing the mean of ratings across different conditions using R.

Having to plan and code the entire experiment from scratch, I was able to expose myself to many research and technical skills, including coming up with research questions, hypotheses, and designing the experiment using Python(PsychoPy), JavaScript(Pavlovia), and R(Data analysis). I acquainted myself with GitHub to work on the project simultaneously with my peer researcher Jerry Cai, and learned to use Qualtrics to obtain demographic information of the participants of the study. In terms of soft skills, I was able to comfortably present our experiment ideas to the lab for feedback, and learned to work alongside my PURM mentor and peer researcher and accommodating for everyone’s time.

Overall, my PURM experience helped me solidify my passion for the behavioral sciences and data science. It also prompted me to actively search for new learning materials and ways to contribute to the research effort at Penn. I am planning to continue to work with Platt Labs and my mentor Vera Ludwig with my Fall2020 work-study grant, and I hope to contribute more to the technical sides of the research and keep on improving my hard skills, which will allow me to take on a bigger role in the lab while at the same time prepare me for many industries that I may find interest in.