PANGEA lab manager Fiona is on a roll! Fiona’s 4th year honours thesis – written in the PANGEA Lab – combined a culturally-immersed archival data collection approach with state-of-the art machine learning algorithms to explore variation in Tightness (i.e., how stringent social norms are, and how rigorously they get enforced in a given cultural context) across the Caribbean, a fascinating part of the world, yet, largely uncharted territory in psychological research. Fiona’s newly developed Tightness index unveil significant differences throughout the region, with The Bahamas emerging as the tightest country and Saint Kitts and Nevis as the loosest. Her work further showed that the antecedents of cultural Tightness in the Caribbean partially deviated from those observed in other parts of the world, calling into question the universality of the causes of Tightness around the world.
Since then, Fiona has – very deservedly – won a slew of awards for her thesis, including UBC’s Morris Belkin Prize for the best Honours Thesis (see UBC Psychology’s official announcement here) as well as a Recognition of Academic Excellence for best Honours Thesis from the Canadian Psychological Association (see UBC Psychology’s news story here).
We are very happy for Fiona and truly glad that we managed to keep her on as our lab manager for the current academic year!