1  Research Topics

Each student, together with the help of their group members, will be responsible for picking a topic for their research project. There will be one topic per group project, so groups must work together to choose a topic that best suites their mutual interests. Despite having a single focusing topic, it is still quite likely that your group might investigate multiple hypotheses.

Groups will have a certain degree of choice in their research topic. However, all groups will choose topics that are circumscribed by the following constraints:

  1. Judgment and Decision Making: Every project will be expected to include some aspect of the psychology of judgment and decision making. For a review of some of the major findings of research in judgement and decision making, check out Fischhoff & Broomell (2020), available on Canvas.
  2. Cyberpsychology: Topics must also fall into the scope of cyberpsychology. Broadly speaking, cyberpsychology is the study and application of psychology in the context of online and connected spaces such as social media, the Internet more broadly, as well as human-technology interfaces. See below for a variety of examples of this research space.

1.1 Possible Methods

Important

All groups are required to utilize a survey in their methodology. Group are permitted, and encouraged, to supplement this survey with additional (optional) research designs.

The cyberpsychologist has many tools available to them. Here are some possible data collection approaches that you can consider when trying to answer your research questions:

1.1.1 Naturalistic Observation

Much can be learned simply by watching. Perhaps you are interested in how people walk about in the world with their phones. You could set up an observation point and record what fraction of people cross the street while looking at their phones out of the total who cross the street. As long as your data acquisition is non-invasive privacy wise, you might be able to answer your question by simply observing.

1.1.2 Focus Group

If you want to know a great deal about how people feel/act in situations that are difficult to monitor, you might recruit a small group of knowledgeable individuals and do an in-depth interview to gain more complete qualitative information.

1.1.3 Survey Questionnaire

One of the easiest ways to find out what people think is to simply ask them. There are very real risks and limitations of the survey, and so building an effective questionnaire requires care. But don’t underestimate the value of this method. All groups must include a survey as part of their research design.

1.1.4 Existing Data

This is an often overlooked approach to answering research questions. There is already copious amounts of data available to the observant researcher. Often, just taking the time to look at what is already out there can lead to surprising answers. Here are a few examples of existing data approaches:

1.1.4.1 Meta-Analyses

Good science never answers a question with a single study. Most topics of interest have been studied and published by multiple authors across time. Sometimes the results disagree. A meta-analysis involves finding the published results of all (or at least many) published studies and doing an analysis of those results to look for consistency across results.

1.1.4.2 Social Media Data

Many social network accounts are public. You can collect and analyze the posts/comments of the billions of available online data points to answer questions. This is a recent and quite powerful tool in the cyberpsychologist’s tool belt.

1.1.4.3 Other Available Sources

There are countless other data points that could be examined. For example, imagine that you want to study the privacy policies of social networking sites. You could read the privacy policies of many of these platforms, coding for certain attributes (e.g., are posts public or private by default?). Your analysis would focus on the coded results that you manually harvested.

1.2 Example Cyberpsychology Topics

The following is a non-exhaustive list of possible topics that you could focus your project on. Remember:

  1. This is not a complete list. You are welcome and encouraged to work from your own ideas!
  2. These are broad topics, and as such should not be your actual project topic. These are meant to be starting points. You will need to focus on something more specific and narrow for your actual project. Use these as jumping off points for brainstorming sessions.

1.2.1 Social Comparison Effects

  • Is everyone happier than me?
  • What is normal these days?
  • Self-esteem ramifications

1.2.2 Depression & Anxiety

  • Increased social media use correlates positively with both increased anxiety and depression
  • What are the causes and consequences of this

1.2.3 The Chilling Effect

  • We have the right to free speech, unless social and/or governmental pressure “encourages” us to hide our true feelings for fear of losing social capital.
  • Can you truly be yourself online?

1.2.4 Social Conformity versus Impression Management

  • Impression management is normal and adaptive, but when does it become coerced social conformity?

1.2.5 Social Isolation

  • How and when do online environments increase or create feelings of ostracism?

1.2.6 The Negative Effects of Online Relationships on In-person Relationships

  • Digital and text communication are fraught with problems that do not occur in in-person relationships (I’m sorry, are you being serious right now?!? –> No! I was being sarcastic!)
  • How do these affect our relationships online and offline?

1.2.7 Fear of Missing Out (FOMO)

  • Social media often creates an urgency to check what everyone else is up to
  • This reinforces a fear of missing out–that if you don’t check often you’ll miss out on life

1.2.8 Sleep Deprivation

  • This one speaks for itself–but consider the ways in which healthy sleep patterns are interrupted

1.2.9 Eating Disorders

  • When everyone’s online pics are carefully selected and/or enhanced with filters, they all look great while you don’t (in your own mind). This can create/increase eating disorders

1.2.10 Privacy

  • Privacy does matter. Those raised on social media often do not realize why. But it matters.
  • Our online systems are eroding any hope of privacy
  • What are the costs to society?
  • What are the costs to individuals?

1.2.11 Social Credit Systems

  • Governments and corporations are quickly using mass surveillance and data collection to create social credit scores for individuals. These can and are being used to determine who gets access to what (cheaper loan rates, permission to travel overseas, etc.).
  • What will this mean for our future?

1.2.12 Attention

  • When everything is fighting for your attention, how can you focus?
  • Difficult tasks in life require the ability to stay focused for long periods of time. Is modern technology undermining our capability to accomplish worthwhile goals?

1.2.13 Social Skills

  • Many social skills are learned best in-person, using, among other things, empathy as a teaching signal. What happens when a generation is raised online?

1.2.14 Cyberbullying

  • Bullying has moved into the digital world
  • What are its forms and consequences?

1.2.15 Outrage

  • We often hear on the news that “people on Twitter are upset/angry/calling-for-action/etc” and these reactions often dictate the news cycle. But how many people are we talking about? Often, a small number in the 1000s or even 100s are responsible for this “public outrage.” What does it mean for our public and political conversations to based around the conversations of so few?

1.2.17 Social Media Driven News

  • Lazy journalism abounds in the social media age. It takes this form: see what’s “trending” and then write a news article about it. This has several problems:
    • See “Trending Topics” above for why these topics may not be of interest to most people
    • These articles often focus on unimportant topics, are driven by the opinions of random individuals, oversimplify things, etc.
    • These replace good journalism, such as investigative reporting to hold those in power in check.

1.2.18 Virality

  • Some topics/hashtags/etc become very popular. Others, however important, do not. What are the mechanisms of viral events?

1.2.19 Effects of Relying on Technology for Assistance

  • Taking pictures of events reduces your ability to remember those events (even if you delete the photos). The assumption is that this is due to offloading the work of memory onto your camera. Calendars do the same for your schedule. What are the consequences of becoming essentially cyborgs on learning and memory?

1.2.20 Technological Knowledge is Power in a Technopoly

  • If you are technologically capable, what advantages does it bestow upon you in a digital society?
  • Who loses in a technopoly?

1.2.21 Echo Chambers and Thought Bubbles

  • Algorithms online customize your news feeds (and which of your friends’ posts) you see.
  • This actively supports the already dangerous confirmation bias that we are all guilty of.
  • Echo chambers arise full of like-minded people
  • What are the consequences of never having your beliefs challenged? Hints:
    • You won’t know yourself as well because you’ll never have to defend your beliefs against a knowledgeable critic
    • You won’t be exposed to new ideas that could improve your own beliefs and way of life
    • The world will appear overly-simplified. The real world is complex–it’s never as simple as “the other guys are just wrong”

1.2.22 Information Glut

  • In a technopoly, information glut/overload is a problem. How do you know what to believe when there is so much information to process?
  • How can anyone hope to process all of the information that’s available? They cannot…
  • Solutions arise that deliver “good” information to us and filter out “irrelevant” information. Who creates these solutions? What are these creators’ goals?
  • What are we missing out on while we focus on something else?
  • Are we entertained to death rather than informed?

1.2.23 Fake News

  • Combing the problems of confirmation bias, information glut, and echo chambers (see above), fake news finds great traction in today’s society. What can we do?

1.2.24 Online Activism

  • People care and that is fantastic. But what happens when all of your caring is spent on posting messages of support for various causes? Where/when does the real work get done? How are important causes aided and hindered by online slacktivism?

1.2.25 Shifts to Shared Experience

  • Shared cultural experience plays an important role in creating and maintaining in-group and out-group boundaries. We are social creatures and feel a comforting sense of oneness with others when we share recognizable language, jokes, pop-culture references, music, etc.
  • In the past, the media landscape was smaller (and easier to consume fully), and the lack of internet meant that those living around you likely consumed nearly the same information.
  • Today, people are more free to seek out content that suits their individual personalities rather than simply consume information provided to them by local media outlets. This, combined with far, far more available movies, games, etc., has led to a society in which you might share little to nothing meaningful with those living close in proximity to you.
  • What has this done to our sense of social cohesion with our neighbors?

1.3 Example Judgment and Decision Making Topics

1.3.1 Biases

Check out Wikipedia’s fairly extensive list of cognitive biases.

1.4 Advice, Recommendations, and Warnings

As you can see, the area of cyberpsychology has a large footprint, providing opportunities to research a diverse set of topics. However, there are a few things to consider before choosing your research topic. Please read the following list carefully.

  • Gender: You cannot use gender as your main quasi-independent variable. As enticing as this is, there are several problems that will likely cause your project to fail. It is OK to include a question about gender as an extra question. But do not plan to have any serious hypotheses depend on responses to this question.
    • You will not get equal numbers of men and women. You will get far more female respondents.
    • If you’re hoping to study non-binary genders, you will not get enough respondents.
  • Race: Similar to gender, this topic is often interesting to researchers. However, your participant pool will likely have poor diversity, making it impossible to draw any conclusions about group differences.
  • Religion: Most of your religious participants here at Capital will adhere to some form of Christianity. You might be able to compare “religious” to “non-religious” people, but I would avoid any questions that compare different religious faiths—you simply won’t get enough participants in other religions.
  • One possible methodology involves multi-part studies. You might, for example, ask participants to fill out a life-satisfaction survey, and then take a week off from social media. After that 1-week break, you could have them once again take the same life-satisfaction survey. This would provide very interesting pre/post data to help understand if quality of life is affected by social media.
    • This type of study, while very powerful, should only be attempted if you are a conscientious student. This will require you to deploy your study faster/earlier than other groups to ensure that you can get enough participants, and to allow for the extra time needed for participants to take a break (as in this example anyway). In short, ambitious projects require a little more from researchers, so only pursue this if you have the time and willpower needed to follow through.

1.4.1 Topics to Avoid

There are a few topics that should be avoided. These topics either have a history of not working well, are already too well understood, are too predictable, are too difficult to achieve under the time and resource constraints of this class, etc.

  • Anxiety: It is well documented that social media usage is linked to anxiety. This “low hanging fruit” has already been plucked from the tree of opportunities enough times that it just isn’t worth pursuing in this class. This doesn’t mean that anxiety cannot be a small component of your study, or that there isn’t some possible idea that would be brilliant. But as a rule, you cannot use anxiety as your dependent measure for this project.
  • Depression: Similar to anxiety, this topic’s relationship to social media use is fairly clear: the more you tie social media into your life, the greater your risk for depressive symptoms. This topic should be avoided.
  • Finsta: A family of fascinating ideas surround the topic of secret accounts, such as finsta accounts. However, history has shown that getting quality data in this topic area is challenging. These accounts are hidden by design, which makes direct comparison with open accounts impossible. This leaves self-report questionnaires as your only means of getting access to this content. However, most of your participants won’t have Finsta accounts, so you won’t be able to get much data this way either.
  • Academic Performance: It is tempting to think that technology use might play a roll in students’ academic performance (e.g., their grade point average might be affected). While there probably are negative influences on academic success, (1) there can also be positive effects, such as using technology to organize notes, help with accessibility issues, etc., and (2) there are many other factors outside of technology that contribute to success (or a lack thereof). In short, academic success is rarely predictable using any single, obvious metric.
  • Online Dating Apps/Websites: While this topic isn’t outright banned, I would avoid this topic unless you’re certain you can propose a clever idea. There are several reasons:
    1. It has been well studied already
    2. Many questions that you want to ask likely have obvious answers
    3. The interesting data, such as dating habits, site usage behaviors, etc. can be difficult to get
    4. Your survey participants will be mostly women (due to Capital’s demographics), but most dating app users are men. Men and women have very different dating app habits and usage behaviors, so even if you’re not studying gender, your results won’t be very generalizable.
  • Phone Usage: This tempting topic area takes many forms, but typically involves questions regarding how much people use their phones, when they use them, if they feel addicted to using them, checking phones during social situations, etc. There isn’t much in this topic area worth investigating, as the results are either already well researched (yes, many people display addicted behaviors with respect to their phones), or the outcome is obvious (e.g, Do people use their phones when they should be paying attention in class? Do people use their phones more today than in the past? Do people use their phones before going to bed, and are they the first thing they check when they wake up? Yes, yes, yes, and yes.)
  • Sleep Habits: Does amount and quality of sleep go down with increased social media usage? Yes. This obvious question has been answered many times, and frankly could be answered without conducting any research. Please avoid this topic.