SOCIALLY
ACCEPTABLE SCIENCE
Bill
Von Hippel, psychology professor
Ever wanted to talk about sex
to thousands of people?
Bill Von Hippel is an associate professor at the University
of New South Wales. His research interests include prejudice
and stereotyping, social-cognitive ageing, self-concept, social
cognition and evolutionary psychology.
High point of my day: My summer research student prepared
a talk based on her project, which she is to deliver at a
conference in Brisbane next week. Today she came into my office
to give me a practice version, and I was very impressed by
her presentation, and by what a superb experiment she had
completed in the brief period of the summer holidays. We’ll
need to conduct follow-up research to be sure we understand
her current findings, but her research could prove to be innovative
and important.
This meeting is typical of the kind of work I do. Although
I don’t spend that much time in the classroom each day, I
spend a large amount of time working one-on-one with students.
Today, for example, I met with two other honours students
as we worked on final design issues for their experiments,
and I met with two of my post-grad students to discuss data
analysis of their current projects.
In addition, a visiting student from the Netherlands and I
finalized an experiment he is about to conduct. This sort
of teaching/research activity is not only one of the more
enjoyable parts of my workday, but it is also how I conduct
collaborative research with my students, eventually leading
to publications and grants.
Although I’ve always been interested in science, it wasn’t
until university that I decided to become a psychologist.
Prior to that, I had planned
to be a physicist. I¹m not exactly sure what changed
my mind, but I think the fact that psychology
has so many open vistas appealed to me, as I felt that
in psychology I wouldn¹t be competing with people in
other laboratories to get my research out first.
The positive features of being a scientist are fundamentally
the same in most disciplines: as faculty, we teach and collaborate
with students and other scholars; we attempt to solve puzzles
(in our case, involving human behaviour); and we regularly
have the opportunity to learn about other people¹s ideas
through colloquia, conferences, and research papers. I also
love that we get to work on whatever interests us as my interests
change, so do my research activities.
Homepage: http://www.psy.unsw.edu.au/Users/BHippel/
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