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Utah's Foremost Platform for Undergraduate Research Presentation
2022 Abstracts

Does Viewing Media Depicting Conflict and Unity Affect Global Identity?

Presenter: Christian White
Authors: Christian White, Jadyn Bohn, Marissa King, Cody Stirling, Brooklyn Oberhansly
Faculty Advisor: Julie Pynn
Institution: Southern Utah University

Global identity is "a sense of belonging to humanity" and has an impact on how connected we feel towards other groups of people (Mansoory, 2012). While research has been conducted on economical and environmental impacts on global identity, there have been very few studies about the impacts that unity or conflict have on global identity. Given this gap in the research, we are curious about whether or not viewing images of global unity or global conflict can increase one's sense of global identity. We hypothesize that when participants are shown images of global unity, their sense of global identity will increase whereas, when shown images depicting global conflict, their identity will decrease. We predict this because unity has been shown to be positively correlated with feelings of global citizenship, and conflict has been shown to detract from global citizenship (Reysen & Miller, 2013). This research is important because in times of crisis, it could be useful to know whether media depicting instances of conflict or unity could be used to unite people on a global scale. A 2x2x2 two-way mixed ANOVA will be used to test the effects of student nationality status on global identity.