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Volume 8, Issue 1 (March 2018)
Announcements
 

BSI Director Professor David Chan has been appointed as the Singapore representative for social sciences and member of the Singapore-Japan Joint Committee on Science and Technology. The committee is co-chaired by Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR). The committee serves to review the existing science and technology cooperation between Singapore and Japan and advise both countries on future areas of cooperation.
   
Professor David Chan has also been reappointed as a member of the Singapore Social Science Research Council.
 
BSI Outreach
 
The following are some BSI outreach activities that took place in January-March 2018.
 
At the Giving Matters Forum organised by the National Volunteer & Philanthropy Centre, which was attended by over 300 participants from public sector, corporates, non-profit organisations and social enterprises, Professor David Chan delivered the Keynote Address where he spoke on the science and practice of giving in Singapore.
 
At a forum organised by the European Chamber of Commerce, which was attended by over 50 industry leaders, academics, technology experts, and policy makers, Professor David Chan moderated a discussion on the disruptive innovation and the role of regulation in Singapore.
 
At the Economics Student Symposium organised by the Ministry of Education, which was attended by over 120 pre-university students enrolled in higher-level economics, Professor David Chan delivered the Keynote Address where he spoke on behavioural sciences and policy making in Singapore.
 
Highlights of Recent BSI Seminars
 
16 January 2018
Anirban Mukherjee, Assistant Professor of Marketing, SMU, presented a seminar titled “Plebeian Bias: Selecting Crowdsourced Creative Designs for Commercialisation”. He discussed issues in crowdsourcing and examined the differences between users with an established fan base and track record and those without.
 
30 January 2018
Grace Park, Assistant Professor of Psychology, SMU, presented a seminar titled “Why Being Bored May Not be a Bad Thing After All - Effect of Boredom on Creativity and Deviant Behaviour”. She discussed the role of motivation in understanding the consequences of boredom.
 
6 March 2018
Liu Pan, Research Fellow of BSI, SMU, presented a seminar titled “Effects of Cultural Tightness-Looseness and Social Network Density on Expression of Positive and Negative Emotions: A Large-Scale Study of Impression Management by Facebook Users”. He discussed the effects that Facebook users’ culture and network density may influence their emotional expressions.
 
13 March 2018
Albert Lee, Assistant Professor of Psychology, NTU, presented a seminar titled “The Role of Self-Construal in Threatened Morality and Cleansing”. He discussed how people’s reactions to moral violations may be influenced by their self-construal as independent self or interdependent self.
 
27 March 2018
Chiang Yen-Sheng, Associate Research Fellow of Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, presented a seminar titled “Rising Inequality, Worsening Economic Status? Evidence from a Numeric Experiment and a Survey Study”. He discussed how inequality could change a person’s economic status despite income remaining unchanged, consequently affecting the evaluation of the individual’s subjective well-being.
 
Insights from Behavioural Sciences
 
In this regular section on Insights from Behavioural Sciences, we feature a write-up, published in Asian Scientist on 2 March 2018, on the keynote speech by Professor David Chan at the BSI Conference where he spoke on the psychology of public trust in Singapore. He explained that public trust is a complex and dynamic phenomenon, and why governments today need to go beyond the economics and politics of public trust to focus more on its social-psychological aspects [Link]
 
Applications from Behavioural Sciences
 
In this regular section on Applications from Behavioural Sciences, we feature an invited commentary in which Professor David Chan discussed the psychology of giving including volunteering and donating. He explained why it is not irrational when we give unconditionally. Elaborating on the science and practice, he related the 4Gs of giving (goodness, generosity, governance, gratitude) to impactful outcomes for givers and recipients, organisations and communities, and society at large. The article was published in The Straits Times on 3 February 2018. [Link]
 

About BSI
 

The Behavioural Sciences Institute (BSI) is a multi-disciplinary research institute for creating, disseminating and applying scientific knowledge about human behaviours in various social, organisational and cultural settings. For more information on BSI, please refer to our website. Should you have any further enquiries, do contact us with the email or phone contact details provided below.

 
:http://bsi.smu.edu.sg
:bsi@smu.edu.sg
:+65 6828 0300