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
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.