“Examining the Effects of Framing a Reward as ‘Won’ or ‘Owed’ on Probability Discounting”
Presented at Ryerson University’s 48th Annual Ontario Psychology Undergraduate Thesis Conference, May 4, 2018
During my time in Toronto, I had the opportunity to present my honor’s thesis to a group of undergraduate students and faculty at the Ontario Undergraduate Psychology Research Conference hosted at Ryerson on May 4th. The conference ran over the course of the day, with a keynote speaker in the morning and a host of oral presentations taking place concurrently with poster sessions throughout the day.
My thesis was a project that I had been working on for over a year, and while the results were insignificant, the experience of planning and conducting an experiment of this nature was extremely valuable to my future education. For that reason, it was nice to be able to share that experience with my fellow students from across Ontario.
I presented an oral presentation in the morning, during the social psychology session of the conference. I was given the chance to describe my research, rationale, and hypotheses as well as offer some suggestions for why the hypotheses were not supported in the results. The audience challenged my methods in a constructive way, and I learned more about my project through this discussion. For instance, one person suggested that gender differences in the way people choose money may have played a larger role in people’s decision to take a smaller or larger reward than the effects of the frame. For that reason, a future study should control for those gender differences, or work to make the frame more powerful to minimize the effects of gender. This as well as other potential confounds were discussed. I left with a better understand of my research than when I went into the conference.
More broadly, I learned how to present at a research conference in general. While I had previously presented my research at CURL conferences etc., it was good to learn the structure at culture of a research conference with people from all over. I was initially nervous about presented to a room of strangers, but focused on being professional and clear, and left with a better understanding of how to present to peers. These skills will be immensely valuable in my future as an academic, because it is important to be able to articulate my research. If I do not know how to present at conferences, then I will never be able to get my ideas out to the academic community.
Finally, by attending this conference I got to see what my fellow students did for their theses. It was interesting to see what kinds of research were coming out of other institutions. As someone who wants to carry on in the research field, I was particularly interested to see how my fellow students tested their hypotheses and analyzed their results. In some cases, I had not even considered some of the research methods they were using, but would certainly find it helpful to know them in the future. I also got to support my fellow Huron thesis students as they presented their research. Together we represented Huron as a strong research institution given its size.
I hope that this conference was just the first of many in the years to come. I have attended academic conferences with my parents over the years, but it meant a lot to me that I was able to present my own research in my own field for the first time. I look forward to what the future holds from this.