Dr. Venus Jin, Professor in Residence and Director of the Communication Program at Northwestern in Qatar, describes herself as a social scientist committed to interdisciplinary research on emerging technologies, branding, social media marketing, and consumer behavior. Over her academic career, she has published more than seventy peer-reviewed journal articles, including seven in the last year alone. She came to Northwestern in Qatar after serving as assistant professor of Communication at Boston College, tenured associate professor of Communication at Emerson College, and then tenured associate professor of Marketing at Sejong University Business School. Associate Dean for Faculty Dr. Zachary Wright caught up with Dr. Venus Jin for a conversation about her evolving research trajectory. The following interview has been edited for the sake of brevity.
Question: First of all, Dr. Venus Jin, it is an honor to have you here at Northwestern University in Qatar. You came to Northwestern in Qatar from a very reputable PhD program (University of Southern California) and then also after having been tenured at prestigious US and Korean universities. What attracted you to NU-Q?
Answer: NU-Q is a very unique and promising research institution. Until I actually came here, I didn’t realize that research environment at NU-Q would be this promising and supportive. And it’s not only about grants or [other financial] support, its more about the interdisciplinary nature of the school. We are open to discussions and open to collaborations between and among programs and also with students. And Qatar itself is also a very supportive research environment, with the QNRF grants and many other opportunities. And again, it is not only about the availability of funding but also about this intellectual curiosity of the whole country. In particular, I found the Qatar 2030 vision really intriguing and stimulating of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research collaborations. Beyond NU-Q, I have developed a number of collaborations within Education City universities, and also with Qatar University. This actually has been an eye-opening experience for me, allowing me to think beyond my discipline and to expand the scope of my research, both in terms of depth and breadth.
Question: What are the key questions that animate your research?
Answer: I identify myself as a social scientist and a data scientist, meaning I am working on social phenomenon, but I approach human and social phenomenon from a socio-psychological angle. And I also am a data scientist, meaning that I am a quantitative data researcher who is driven by tangible data sets. That doesn’t mean, however, that I ignore interpretive frameworks in approaching data. I believe in theory-driven research so that data is analyzed and interpreted from a solid and robust theoretical angle.
So, I am a social scientist and data scientist who wants to answer the key research question: how do media and innovative technologies impact human psychology and human behavior?
For example, how does ChatGPT impact how we think about ourselves, how we define creativity, and how we actually interact with other humans? So, I am interested in how computer technology mediates human communication, and how humans interact with machines. To better understand how people interact with emerging technology and digital media we first need to understand how humans think because the ultimate goal of AI and smart media is not to replace but mimic human intelligence.
Question: Your engagement with the question of artificial intelligence speaks to a noticeable agility in your research trajectory, no doubt necessitated by the broader study of emerging media technologies. What in particular motivates your research with AI and how does this relate to your previous research?
Answer: Thank you for highlighting that. I am grateful to have grown as a scholar since I joined NU-Q. Since I joined NU-Q, I learned much about the impact of emerging media and AI not only globally but also on the Qatari society. Partially because I was the lead principal investigator for grant analyzing emerging media in Qatar, I learned from this data collection and research that Qatar is actually the country with the highest internet penetration rate. So I realized that with the transition to a knowledge economy, it is crucial to investigate and invest in emerging technology, especially AI. That actually motivated me to further examine the social, cultural, psychological and even economic impact of AI technology, not only in Qatar as a country but also in the academic community.
Question: Coming back to the question of interdisciplinarity, what particular disciplines do you find most generative in conversation with your own?
Answer: That is a good question, and one I frequently ask myself. I am a social scientist by training and I majored in Mass Communication, Journalism and Media Arts as a college student. Then I moved to Los Angeles to study Communication, and I did a PhD in Communication. But my focus was more about communication technology. Believe it or not my first research passion some twenty years ago was human-robot interaction.
I was inspired by my advisor who actually saw towards the future of emerging technologies. During my graduate studies at USC I studied the impact of computer games, interactive media and virtual reality, and robots, and their impact on people’s perception of reality – whether rosy or dystopian views of the future.
In my first job at Boston College, as an assistant professor of New Media, and I did a lot of research on the virtual environment and virtual avatars. At that time, people questioned why I was doing this research, but I believed in the future of virtual reality like the Metaverse. In fact, during the pandemic we actually benefited a lot from virtual technology, such as virtual Zoom meetings.
As for my passion for marketing research, I was motivated by wanting to look beyond the impact of technology on human communication, but also marketing communication. This explains my move to Emerson College to serve as an associate professor of Marketing Communication. It was really helpful for me to learn more about marketing, branding and consumer psychology theories to better understand human behavior and human decision making. Of course, this was also an integral part of understanding the human brain and how humans make decisions based on ideological and emotive components. This eventually led me to transition to a business school, where I became interested in questions of entrepreneurship, since entrepreneurship is often driven by digital transformation and innovation.
Question: Reference to your graduate studies and early career reminds me to ask about what first launched you on this path of intellectual inquiry? What are the personal motivations, if any, for your chosen research trajectory?
Answer: I was born and raised in Korea, which is a very tech-savy and technology driven society. Korea is also similar to Qatar in that it is a small country that has one of the highest internet penetrations. I was born and raised in a knowledge economy where human capital and technology matters a lot in the society, not natural resources. But Qatar is lucky to have both.
Korea is a very competitive environment, so you have to keep up with emerging technologies: that was my environmental factor that shaped my research interests. And when it comes to family, my beloved father had an engineering background, and I learned a lot from him, so that also inspired my interest in technology.
Question: In order to understand your research methodology and questions, it might be useful to take a look at a specific publication. Let’s talk about your 2022 article in the Journal of Consumer Affairs, “The Greedy I that Gives – the paradox of egocentrism and altruism: terror management and system justification perspectives on the interrelationship between mortality alience and charitable donations amid the COVID-19 pandemic.” I understand this article has just been nominated as one of three finalists for the JCA 2023 Best Article Award. Congratulations! Can you walk us through your research methodology for this project?
Answer: I collected two sets of data. One set was survey data, meaning that I asked questions using questionnaires. The second set was an online between-subjects experiment in which people were assigned to two different groups. One group was exposed to mortality salience manipulation stimuli where they were given a scenario and primed with the threat of death – for example the possibility of dying from COVID. In the experiment, people were assigned to two different groups; the mortality salience group and the control group. Then they were asked questions that allowed us to understand relative levels of narcissism, greed, and materialism. I was more interested in these as personality traits, although admittedly sometimes a person might have a narcissistic disorder, for example. We found that the more narcissistic a person was, the more they were inclined to give more of their time and money to others when faced with the threat of death. They seemed to cope with this mortality salience by wanting to demonstrate to others that they were people of worth.
Question: This is really fascinating research but it doesn’t seem to relate to emerging technology at all. How do you make the connection between this work and your previous work?
Answer: This research was actually purely driven by my intellectual curiosity. During the COVID-19 lockdown, I was staying home and was thinking about what could matter in this time of crisis. But I also see that the idea that narcissism and greed are not irreconciliable to charitable giving to have important implications on consumar behavior research, a field in which I have previously published.
Question: You have this beautiful final sentence in your article: “Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, we make a life by what we give: not only to others’ lives but also our own lives.” Do you care to explain any further?
Answer: We think we give back to others to help them, but we do it for ourselves. This might appear to be a very selfish statement, but I believe it’s true. If you feel some sort of existential threat, if you feel like you don’t mean anything in the world, if you feel like your self-worth has been threatened, you will do something meaningful to make yourself feel meaningful. Helping others actually boosts your self-esteem and self-worth.
Question: So it sounds like your work here also engages with the discipline of Religious Studies…
Answer: [laughing] Yes, that is true. Perhaps an opportunity for future collaboration in this field will present itself.
Question: You have spoken about how your research positionality has shifted over the years. Do you have any predictions for how your research might adapt or shift going forward?
Answer: I think the central theme will stay the same – the impact of emerging technologies and digital media and digital transformation in people’s lives. That would be the macro-level, umbrella theme. But as a social scientist and data scientist, I will certainly be delving more into AI machine learning and AI-powered Metaverse technologies and how these technologies actually impact people’s decision making.
