Student Supervision & Volunteer Opportunities

Join an existing project

For 2026 intake: I have many active projects, as well as some ideas that I haven’t had time or help to develop. It’s Psych Fourth Year (honours) season, so here are details on projects currently open for incoming students. First come, best dressed, you can pick project A or B. Upon request, we can consider one of the ‘backup’ projects listed below, but my priorities are A and B. Thanks!

Project A - How people use power

Leaders are urged to use power in a collaborative way (think Kamala Harris), but many leaders still use dominating power (think Donald Trump). Research isn’t entirely clear on whether coercive power produces negative outcomes, and it may depend on what kinds of outcomes we study. This project involves conducting an experiment testing how collaborative vs dominating leaders distribute rewards, and how their actions affect various outcomes. You’ll help design the study, run it, and analyse.

See:
• Pfeffer, J. (2021). The dark triad may be not so dark: exploring why ‘toxic’leaders are so common—with some implications for scholarship and education. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 41(7), 540-551. • Cunha, M. P. E., Clegg, S., Rego, A., & Simpson, A. V. (2024). Drawing on the Dark Triad to Teach Effective Leadership is Dangerous, Irresponsible, and Bad Theory. Academy of Management Learning & Education, (ja), amle-2022.

Project B - Responding to resistance

This project continues an earlier honours project on how people try to influence others. For this one, we will explore the kinds of tactics people use when they’ve tried to influence someone and run into resistance: Specifically, when others push back, do we tend to escalate our use of power (versus persuasion)? We will run 1-2 studies using an online chatbot program to simulate influence attempts and degrees of resistance, and to measure influence tactic preferences.

See:
• Fast, N. J., & Overbeck, J. R. (2022). The social alignment theory of power: Predicting associative and dissociative behavior in hierarchies. Research in Organizational Behavior, 42, 100178. • Bliton, C. F., & Pincus, A. L. (2020). Construction and validation of the interpersonal influence tactics Circumplex (IIT-C) scales. Assessment, 27(4), 688-705.

Backup Projects

• Who gets monitored? In a past series of studies, my colleagues and I found that low-power people are generally viewed as having poorer moral character than the powerful. We also found evidence that people think the powerless need to be monitored more carefully than the powerful. This study extends the line of research, using an online/remote work paradigm to test whether people are more inclined to monitor those with or without power. For further reading see:

  • Smith, P. K., & Overbeck, J. R. (2014). The leaders’ rosy halo: Why do we give powerholders the benefit of the doubt. Power, politics, and paranoia: Why people are suspicious of their leaders. In Van Prooijen, J. W., & Van Lange, P. A. (Eds), Power, politics, and paranoia: Why people are suspicious of their leaders. Cambridge University Press.

• How do people advance in power? One path to power involves being given opportunities by those who have more power than you. They offer advancement–but generally that advancement has strings attached. People may be asked to compromise their values, to carry out some unpleasant task, or to do harm to others. This project could use experiments, surveys, and/or a daily diary study to assess how often people perceive that they are offered opportunities with strings attached, whether taking up those opportunities is predicted by one’s lay theory of power and world view (competitive or hierarchical), and whether moral evaluations change over the study period for those who accept more opportunities.

• Participatory agency - After the 2016 US election, scholars debated whether economic or racial concerns motivated support for Trump. This project explores whether uncertainty about one’s social status may motivate a desire for “participatory agency”–joining with others (or following a leader) to take actions (particularly around excluding or denigrating others) to bolster one’s own sense of status. This project requires higher-level tech skills; some programming would be desirable. We will run an experiment (online, most likely) where participants interact with “bots”. For further reading see:

  • de Leon, R. P., & Kay, A. C. (2020). Political ideology and compensatory control mechanisms. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 34, 112-117.

Someday, I’ll also explore:

• Is power a solution to the tradeoff between freedom and relatedness?
• How does destabilisation of job opportunities in one’s local region predict compensatory power behaviours?
• Are cultural logics really lay theories of how power works?
• Several more!

Propose your own idea

Please be sure to read my work and review current projects and talks to be sure that your interests have some degree of overlap with mine. I am open to diverse ideas and working with independent-minded students…as long as there’s good fit between us!