Abbie Allen
Pronouns: she/her/hers
Research Mentor(s): Terri Conley
Co-Presenter: Rajendran, Sujithra
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Psychology / LSA
Presentation Date: April 20
Presentation Type: Poster
Session: Session 2 – 11am – 11:50am
Room: League Ballroom
Authors: Sujithra Rajendran, Abbie Allen, Terri Conley
Presenter: 37
Abstract
Narratives that are commonly accepted socially are called dominant narratives. Our study investigates people’s reactions to dominant narratives and alternative narratives. In this study, we will document participants’ reactions to a video about a dominant narrative and a video of an alternative narrative. We are interested in seeing the difference between these reactions even though the videos are identical. We created three pairs of videos corresponding to a dominant and alternative narrative. They are vegetarianism vs. meat-eating, homeschooling vs. public schooling, monogamy, vs. polyamory. Each pair is identical except for whether the participants are told that the narrative is dominant or alternative. A volunteer actor was filmed for each pair with them talking about the narrative they support. The script for the videos is vague enough to be used for the two narratives. Later on, these videos will be published on a form where we’ll have participants watch and react to these videos. The results will be gathered once the form is published. We hypothesize that when a response is labeled as the dominant narrative it will be perceived as less biased and more objective. We expect that participants will view the video labeled as the dominant perspective to be more objective than the other video, even if the videos are identical. We also suspect that participants would be more favorable towards the actor in the video when they believe the actor is supporting the dominant perspective. If our hypothesis is true, this implies that we have preconceived notions about people based on their narratives. Because of this, people are biased towards the narratives that they believe in. The goal of this research is to make people realize that they have biases. Acknowledgment of this bias is a step towards having constructive
Interdisciplinary, Social Sciences
