Spotlights
Humans of St. Norbert: Sydney Fetkenhauer '23
Research
Student
Humans of St. Norbert: Sydney Fetkenhauer '23
Humans of St. Norbert:
“My first funded research project was in the spring of 2021 and that project was entitled ‘Personality and Projection and Politics.’ I got to see how students’ personality traits are politically aligned and if that matched up with prior research by professors and researchers at other universities.
“Then, I did the SURF (Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship) program this past summer and that was my second funded research endeavor. This project was more specifically about immigration and how people's personality affects how they respond to different threats. Immigration can be perceived by some people as a threat and I was really interested if there were personality traits that more so indicated that. So I designed an experiment that assesses personality traits and then exposes participants to a threat stimulus. I wrote different scenarios about a fictional immigrant, coming from a different country to the United States, and I implied cues of economic or cultural threat. After they were exposed to that scenario, I measured the change in immigration attitudes in each person. I think this research, overall, will help further the conversation and address questions that will help us understand how personality threat and attitudes interact.
“I think it's really interesting to get inside someone's brain and think about what traits they have or what they have experienced that would make them believe something. I feel like it's important to have more empathy for people and understand why they believe something rather than say what they believe is right or wrong. There should be more emphasis on understanding.
“As someone who is looking to attend graduate school and get their political Ph.D., [research is] a great way to be involved in what I would be doing as a career. I am now working on acquiring more funding for a larger experiment that is more diverse for age, race and everything like that. It would be a goal for me and my mentor to have something to present at the International Society of Political Psychology Conference this summer in Athens, Greece.” – Sydney Fetkenhauer ’23
“My first funded research project was in the spring of 2021 and that project was entitled ‘Personality and Projection and Politics.’ I got to see how students’ personality traits are politically aligned and if that matched up with prior research by professors and researchers at other universities.
“Then, I did the SURF (Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship) program this past summer and that was my second funded research endeavor. This project was more specifically about immigration and how people's personality affects how they respond to different threats. Immigration can be perceived by some people as a threat and I was really interested if there were personality traits that more so indicated that. So I designed an experiment that assesses personality traits and then exposes participants to a threat stimulus. I wrote different scenarios about a fictional immigrant, coming from a different country to the United States, and I implied cues of economic or cultural threat. After they were exposed to that scenario, I measured the change in immigration attitudes in each person. I think this research, overall, will help further the conversation and address questions that will help us understand how personality threat and attitudes interact.
“I think it's really interesting to get inside someone's brain and think about what traits they have or what they have experienced that would make them believe something. I feel like it's important to have more empathy for people and understand why they believe something rather than say what they believe is right or wrong. There should be more emphasis on understanding.
“As someone who is looking to attend graduate school and get their political Ph.D., [research is] a great way to be involved in what I would be doing as a career. I am now working on acquiring more funding for a larger experiment that is more diverse for age, race and everything like that. It would be a goal for me and my mentor to have something to present at the International Society of Political Psychology Conference this summer in Athens, Greece.” – Sydney Fetkenhauer ’23