SPSP 2020!

With the generous funding from the National Research Foundation Singapore under its AI Singapore Programme, I was able to attend the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) conference 2020 in New Orleans, Louisiana. Being the first international conference that I have attended, it was an eye-opener for me – being able to interact with professional social psychologists from around the world while learning about the different innovative research conducted in the social psychological field.

On the first day of the conference, there were many topic-focused pre-conferences that one can choose to attend. The “Attitudes and Social Influence” pre-conference was a clear choice for me as I wanted to learn and to be updated with the latest developments in this field. I am glad that I made this decision as the pre-conference was one of the highlights for me! I can still recall my excitement as I listened to the many presenters, including Prof. Leandre Fabrigar on how vocal pitch can influence persuasion, and from Prof. Sharon Shavitt on how cultural differences are an important consideration. The pre-conference had made it clear that being in GPEP has fostered a strong interest in attitudinal research in me!

Over the next two days, several symposiums and poster sessions were held relating to a wide range of topics presented by established social psychologists, graduate students, and undergraduate students. I was also able to present my work in one of the poster sessions that was done under the guidance of Prof. Michelle See. It was informative to see the different interesting attitudinal research, including those related to moral concerns and those that utilized a big-data approach.

Another exciting session was the SPSP presidential address which highlighted how Machine Learning can be one analysis approach to consider in future research. This made me realized the importance being updated with new cutting-edge research tools and methods to enhance the research work that we already have been doing.

Overall, SPSP 2020 was a great learning and gratifying experience. I would like to thank Prof Michelle See and the National Research Foundation Singapore again for their support!
-Reiner Ng (2020)

Note: I was not affected by the Covid-19 virus prior, during, and after the SPSP2020 conference.