PSYC Lab Presents at National Conference

June 14, 2022

Rebecca Christiansen, Rachel Espinosa, Julia Hansen, Alexis Klein, Dominic Morris from Dr. Josh Woods's PSYC Research Lab recently presented research at the Association of Psychological Sciences (APS) research conference in Chicago. APS is one of the most prestigious psychology research conferences in the world. These Grand View students presented their research in the same session as researchers from Harvard, University of Hong Kong, University of Geneva (Switzerland), University of California Berkeley, and Johns Hopkins University. 

All five students presented data and results from a study titled: Are they lying: Believing victims of sexual assault is predicted by experience, personal connection, and political ideology. In short, they found personally knowing a victim of sexual assault and more liberal political perspectives predicted someone was less likely to believe myths about rape. Rachel and Dominic additionally gave a research presentation titled: Racism Through a Political Lens which showed how political bias influences perceptions of racism. That is, self-identified Republicans had a lower threshold for racist statements compared to self-identified Democrats except for anti-White racist remarks.  And overall, instructions about political correctness lowered both groups' threshold for all types of racist remarks.