Akshaya Raghavan

This summer, I worked with Professor Jannay Morrow of the Psychological Science Department to conduct research in social psychology. Professor Morrow was also simultaneously working on a few URSI projects with Professor Baird, so we all met as a group and discussed our areas of interest in psychology and helped each other brainstorm regarding our research.

Professor Morrow allowed me to choose the direction of our research, which led me to be even more passionate about the project. I began short-listing certain topics that piqued my interest and reviewed articles published in Social Psychological journals to understand the scope of previous research and look for areas that are under-studied.

The topic I landed on was a sociological concept called “Marketized Mentality,” which we wanted to study in a psychological manner. A Marketized Mentality, or MM, is a value system in which one sees wealth as the ultimate indicator of success and may even resort to crime or unethical behavior to achieve it. One with an MM puts the economy over all other institutions such as family, polity, or education. We were interested in studying the relationship MM had with prejudice, particularly toward supposedly “unprofitable” groups of people like the disabled, homeless, or unemployed. We also were curious to see whether those with a MM dehumanized these groups.

Next, I worked on writing down my predictions for the results of our research and fine-tuning all our questionnaires. It was a lengthy process, but I learnt a lot about creating a study. Once we finalized our design, Professor Morrow launched the study online and we finally began collecting data! Unfortunately, 8 weeks had already passed by then, but I look forward to analyzing the results when I am back at Vassar.