Drew G
- Research Program Mentor
PhD at University of Southern California (USC)
Expertise
Social psychology, consumer psychology, marketing, humor, comedy, influence & persuasion, authenticity, human-AI interaction, creativity, happiness, positive emotions, pride, misinformation, metacognition, social influence, conformity, person perception
Bio
Hi! I'm a social psychologist and I received my PhD from USC in 2026. I research how subtle factors influence our behavior and opinions. For example, my research finds that any variable that makes it harder to process a joke (i.e., poor venue acoustics, distracting background noise, poor lighting, cultural differences) tends to make the same joke less funny. The effect is so strong it can reverse people's preferences for different comedians. My research has also explored how funny AI (i.e., LLMs like ChatGPT) is compared to humans on the same humor production tasks. My research has covered areas including human-AI interaction, authenticity, humor appreciation, humor production, creativity, positive emotions, affective forecasting, misinformation, consumer judgments, marketing, and metacognition. Fun fact, my research has been mentioned on Jimmy Kimmel Live! I teach courses in Psychology at USC and I have mentored several undergraduate research assistants. Several of my research assistants have gone on to professional research roles (i.e, lab manager) and graduate school. I would love to share my passion and mentorship with others. Outside of research and teaching, I love music and comedy. I appreciate reading fiction in my downtime (Tolstoy, David Sedaris, Sally Rooney, & more) and learning new games. I love trying new things in general (e.g., food, creative projects). When I have more time in the future, I'd love to get back into performing standup comedy, gardening, and ceramics.Project ideas
Does time of day affect our sense of humor?
Comedy is mostly consumed in the evening rather than the morning (think late shows, live shows, etc). If you ask people, most seem to predict that the same joke would be twice as funny to them in the evening than the morning. However, I've run small-scale tests of this and almost seem to find the opposite. I think there's potential to test this on a larger scale, and I think people would be very interested in the results. The methods are pretty simple here. Assign friends/volunteers to rate the funniness of memes and comedy videos in the morning (8am - 9:30am) vs. the evening (6pm - 7:30pm).
License to Joke
People usually try to avoid making embarrassing mistakes like forgetting an important name, making typos, mixing up words, or showing a lack of awareness of their surroundings. In contrast to most people, comedians sometimes intentionally make fools of themselves to entertain others. Is it funnier when someone makes an embarrassing mistake if people know the person used to be a comedian? Are people punished less for making the same mistakes when they have a history of being a comedian? I.e., is it funnier when Trump forgets the Prime Minister of Japan's name and calls him "Mr. Japan" than if another politician did so, because he has an entertainer background? Would a non-entertainer come across as more awkward and less competent if they made the same mistake?
Do the NFL combine drills predict a college athlete's future success in the NFL?
There's a lot of open-access data on NFL (and more) athletes' prior performance in college and their NFL combine drill performance. We could gather this data on players and see whether and to what extent NFL combine drill performance or past college performance (i.e. yards received, etc) predict the NFL performance (or Fantasy points) of a player in their first year in the NFL.
When Are Jokes Funnier When AI Tells Them?
Past research shows that people often find art to be less creative and interesting when they're told "AI made it." My research shows, in particular, that comedians' jokes are rated less funny when audiences are told they used AI to write the jokes. We show evidence that this is because people find jokes to be less authentic when produced by AI. However, the jokes we tested involved human experiences AI would never have experienced itself. Would the results differ when AI tells a joke about experiences it likely has a lot of experience with (i.e., answering dumb questions, hallucinating, being forced to people-please)? Compared to a person who has never had to answer a million dumb questions or people-please, would jokes about these experiences be more authentic and funnier coming from an AI?
Do People Like You More When You Wear the Same Clothes?
Overconsumption of clothing contributes a large portion to yearly carbon emissions and waste. People intuit that every new occasion they may be photographed at (i.e., wedding, vacation, etc) calls for a new outfit and that it's a bad look to be seen wearing the same outfit. However, new outfits add change and deviation to our visual conception of another person. And a large body of literature (see Mere Exposure Effect) predicts the opposite - that we like things (and people!) that are familiar to us. This suggests that either 1) people may overpredict how much being seen wearing the same outfit is a "bad look" or 2) that the mere-exposure effect and fluency work differently in the domain of fashion. Either insight would be very interesting for Psychology and Consumer journals. This question could be explored through a series of experiments and more naturalistic non-experiments depending on the time and resources of the mentee.