Theses and Dissertations
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- Creators: Kwan, Virginia
For this thesis, 100 undergraduate and recent college graduates completed online self-report measures. Results of independent t-tests showed that there were no significant differences between South and East Asians in self-improvement, which is consistent with what was hypothesized. There were also no differences between South and East Asians in future self-connectedness or growth mindset. The two Asian groups were then combined and compared to North Americans. Further independent t-tests were run, and results found that while the trend was as expected and Asians exhibited higher levels of self-improvement than North Americans, they did not exhibit significantly higher levels. There were also no significant differences between North Americans and Asians in growth mindset, however, North Americans had significantly higher levels of future self-connectedness than Asians, contrary to expectation. Results of mediation regressions found that neither future self-connectedness nor growth mindset significantly explained the effect of culture on self-improvement.
In the past year, considerable misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic has circulated on social media platforms. Faced with this pervasive issue, it is important to identify the extent to which people are able to spot misinformation on social media and ways to improve people’s accuracy in spotting misinformation. Therefore, the current study aims to investigate people’s accuracy in spotting misinformation, the effectiveness of a game-based intervention, and the role of political affiliation in spotting misinformation. In this study, 235 participants played a misinformation game in which they evaluated COVID-19-related tweets and indicated whether or not they thought each of the tweets contained misinformation. Misinformation accuracy was measured using game scores, which were based on the correct identification of misinformation. Findings revealed that participants’ beliefs about how accurate they are at spotting misinformation about COVID-19 did not predict their actual accuracy. Participants’ accuracy improved after playing the game, but democrats were more likely to improve than republicans.