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Drew G

- Research Program Mentor

PhD Doctor of Philosophy candidate

Expertise

Social Psychology, especially The Psychology of Humor; Secondary Psychology areas: Affective Forecasting; Judgments of Truth and Misinformation; Influence and Persuasion

Project ideas

Project ideas are meant to help inspire student thinking about their own project. Students are in the driver seat of their research and are free to use any or none of the ideas shared by their mentors.

Does time of day affect our sense of humor?

Assign friends/volunteers to rate the funniness of memes and comedy videos in the morning vs the evening, and gauge whether jokes are funnier to people in the evening (when people are statistically less inhibited, and more cognitively flexible) vs the morning (when people are more focused, and show greater inhibition). Note: my research has already tackled this question, but we can come up with another very doable idea like this one!

Does learning about deepfakes put people in a distrusting mindset?

Have friends/volunteers take a survey where they learn about and watch deepfakes. Assign them to self-report on their feelings of distrust and see if they perform better on cognitive tasks that benefit from distrust either a) before learning about the deepfakes or b) after. See if learning about deepfakes led people to show greater signs of distrust. Note: my research has already tackled this question, but we can come up with another very doable idea like this one!

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.

Coding skills

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