Samuel R. Sommers
Assistant Professor of
490
(617) 627-5293
Manipulating Racial
Diversity in Group Interaction Studies
My social psychology research lab is interested in the ways in which group
composition affects the information processing and cognitive performance of
individual group members. More precisely, we're examining some of the
ways in which racial diversity affects individual members of a group.
Right now we're running studies examining how people process information
differently depending on whether they're placed in a racially homogeneous or
heterogeneous group which is about to interact.
Running group studies like these is practically difficult and methodologically
messy. Eventually, we'd like to manipulate group composition in a more
controlled way, by using a web camera interface to convince participants that
they are either part of a homogeneous or heterogeneous group. In other
words, we want to be able to convince individuals that they will be interacting
via web camera with either diverse or non-diverse groups to see how these
expectations influence them. Specifically, we'd hope to sit an individual
participant at a computer terminal with a web camera. The participant
would then see the web camera images of several other "participants"
on the screen, which would actually be prerecorded video. Everyone in the
"group," including the actual participant in our lab, would go around
and give a quick hello, but the other "hellos" would be
prerecorded. Then the participant would be given some information to read
to prepare for a later group discussion that would never happen. The webcameras, ideally, would stay on so that if the
participant looked up from his/her reading, s/he would see all the other group
members also reading their background materials.
In sum, the idea is for us to be able to manipulate an individual participant's
perceptions of how diverse his/her group will be through a web camera
interface. At this stage of the research project, the group would not
actually interact nor have a conversation.
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