“There is no such things as a stupid question.” As common as this saying is, it has defined my inquisitive nature and became my core motto in my career. My educational background is diverse, having first completed a Diploma in Pharmaceutical Science in 2014, and then a double major Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Web Communication in 2019. The learning experience garnered from having a hand in various scientific and professional disciplines have equipped me with the ability to draw and integrate ideas from multiple perspectives in the increasingly multi-disciplinary field of academic research. I am now pursuing a Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology at Singapore Management University, not only to satisfy my innate curiosity of the human nature, but as the vehicle to push the frontier of human knowledge.
On the weekends, you can find me barrowed deep in my fantasy video games or in the outdoors, hiking and cycling. I am yet to burn down my kitchen making dinner, and the product is usually edible.
My research interests and the research projects that I had been involved in are generally multi-disciplinary in nature, each sharing the ultimate goal of tackling societal challenges. While diverse, they can broadly categorise as below.
My early research career is heavily influenced by evolutionary psychology, owing to the emphasis of evolutionary thinking in the social psychology syllabus of my undergraduate studies. The concept of universal psychological mechanisms alludes that social and cultural input amplify and attenuate the activation of psychological mechanisms that produce cross-culturally variable behaviour to address adaptive problems present in the environment. This entails that societal issue faced by humans today could potentially be addressed by altering inputs to the evolutionary-endowed psychological mechanisms to elicit malleable behaviours. These principles have been applied to explain racism, criminal justice, and attraction, and I hope to extend them to explain the origin of differences in personality traits, potentially offering new insights to societal problems with personality correlates, e.g. problem gambling, chronic stress, and birth rate.
I am also particularly interested in how technology use impacts us psychologically. Given that technology use is ubiquitous and how we use technology is continuously evolving, psychological research on technology use should also be ever-expanding. Within this topic, I am currently interested in two specific issues, the psychological effect of video gaming and misinformation.
Further understanding of the psychology behind technology and media consumption would allow us to tackle the known issues that come alongside technology use and information exchange, such as problem video gaming and the proliferation of online falsehood. The force of technological advancement is unstoppable, hence we should seek to gain psychological mastery over their use to adaptively take advantages of what technologies can offer.
As a youth who is privileged to be in the empowered position to change the course of the world, I recognised that part and parcel of research is the responsibility to seek and employ scientific evidence to change attitude and minds for a better collective good. Climate change remains as one of the biggest societal challenges that need immediate attention and address to avoid a global catastrophe. As such, I seek to understand the various psychological aspect of climate change behaviour and explore psychological antecedent to design interventions that facilitate motivation to engage in climate change adaptation and mitigation behaviour.
This project aims to build on contemporary understandings of evolutionary personality psychology to uncover the origin of personality traits. We hope to test the framework put forth by Nettle (2006, 2011), Buss (2009; see also Buss & Greiling, 1999) and Lewis (2015; see also Lewis, Al-Shawaf & Buss, 2019) in studies planned in this project. We agree with these researchers that existing theories in this topic are not mutually exclusive, and that they are complementary. If personality traits are behavioral strategies to adapt optimally in the individual's local ecology, then personality can be calibrated based on the individual's immediate condition (Lewis, 2015). Through experimental studies planned in this project, we hope to elucidate an origin story of personality.
Fake news can be defined as "news articles that are intentionally and verifiably false and could mislead readers" (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017, p. 213). Fake news in current times have been at the core of recent political events in the United States. More recently, reports on the dissemination of fake news over the outbreak of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) are regularly surfacing, potentially exacerbating the outcome of the outbreak. Despite the apparent relevance of Terror Management Theory, exploration of its applicability in explaining fake news have been limited. Building on the argument made by Vosoughi et al. (2018) that humans contribute to the proliferation of fake news by sharing them, the current project seeks to explore the antecedents of fake news sharing intention, by manipulating the mortality salience on pieces of misinformation against established factors of news sharing behaviours.
Extant research on climate change related behaviors has identified affects such as threat appraisal as one of the key motivational antecedents to adaptation behavior when facing climate change. (e.g., Dang et al., 2012; Grothmann & Patt, 2005). However, existing findings have yielded inconsistent results, with some studies showing evidence for negative affect as a positive predictor of climate change related behaviors and other studies showing no significant relationship between negative affect and climate change related behaviors (van Valkengoed & Steg, 2019b). A recent meta-analysis found that negative affect, in general, yielded a moderate effect size on motivating adaptation behavior (r = 0.29; van Valkengoed & Steg, 2019a). Of interest, researchers have started to distinguish between climate change mitigation behavior (i.e., behaviors that reduce impacts of climate change) and climate change adaptation behavior(i.e., behaviors that help adapt to or modulate effects of climate change). The current meta-analysis aims to expand upon current understanding by providing a comprehensive summary of the motivational role of both positive and negative affects in climate change mitigation and adaptation behaviors.