Research Profile
Stephanie Hong
Stephanie is a senior double majoring in cognitive science (decision track) and business and is interested in behavioral marketing research. She first got involved in research her sophomore year through her COGSCI 200 and PSYCH 240 GSI Hyseue Jang in the Cognition and Aging Lab under Dr. Cindy Lustig.
After a semester in the lab, Stephanie decided to pivot toward more behavioral research, so she joined the Behavioral Sciences Lab at Ross under Dr. Shalena Srna and the Emotion and Self Control Lab under Dr. Ethan Kross. In these labs, Stephanie began to narrow her research interests toward consumer behavior, specifically in the context of social media. Her experiences in these labs also helped to provide a wide variety of experiences with collaboration, lab culture, and research agendas.
Summer of 2021, Stephanie did research at Harvard Business School as a PRIMO fellow with Dr. Navid Mojir and doctoral student Jimin Nam. Being immersed in a research environment for a summer and working alongside others who were enthusiastic about the field was a transformative experience and solidified Stephanie’s plans to pursue a PhD in behavioral marketing.
Research Project
The project that Stephanie worked on at HBS was about AI-Induced biases: how do subjects interpret recommendations from an AI algorithm differently depending on the gender of the individual who communicates the advice? As a part of onboarding to the project, Stephanie conducted a literature review on papers relating to AI biases and human-computer interactions and also familiarized herself with a field study Dr. Mojir had conducted prior. Throughout the rest of the summer, Stephanie worked alongside Dr. Mojir and Jimin Nam to design research studies, compile surveys in Qualtrics, preregister studies online, submit IRBs, and run analyses in STATA. Being embedded in a project at its very conception allowed Stephanie to better understand how research progresses, and it also helped to set the tone for her thesis she’d write the following semester.
Thesis
This past year, Stephanie has been working with her advisor Dr. Shalena Srna on her thesis titled “The Instagram Reels Effect: How the viewing order of emotions impact willingness-to-pay and perception of advertisements.” Stephanie’s inspiration for this paper stemmed from observations about her own behavior while on TikTok and Instagram Reels and it also draws from the research agendas of other labs she is a part of. While writing a thesis can be challenging, Stephanie recommends it to anyone who is considering it! Weinberg has played a large role in the success of her project via funding and faculty mentoring, and Stephanie is excited to continue to grow as a researcher in the future.
