Arnold Bae ’09 (Psychology) may have sold you a concert Glo Stick a few years back. He also ran a scooter shop and worked as a sushi chef. He took a lot of road trips.

By the time Bae gravitated to Cal State Northridge from Pierce College, he was closing in on 30. But his entrepreneurial experience had taught him self-reliance and perseverance, two qualities that came in handy for his ambitious 2008-09 Presidential Scholars project.

The Northridge native always had assumed California was a very liberal state. “The vote to ban same-sex marriage came as a shock to me,” he said, “following on the heels of the election of our first African American president.”

Following the vote, Bae became curious about how diversity functions as a societal influence. Counseled by assistant psychology professor Robert Youmans, he set out to discover whether diversity on a college campus “shapes students’ implicit attitudes about race and explicit behaviors towards those of different racial backgrounds.” Specifically, he wanted to examine voting behaviors.

He researched scientific journals, designed his study and created mock ballots to be tested at two California State University campuses, one diverse and one decidedly less so. He wrote the proposals for the Internal Review Boards of the participating campuses—“a pretty brutal process.” He ran his study on political science students at the two universities and crunched numbers until he began to dream in digits.

Bae was in the lab daily from sunrise to midnight. “There were times you just felt like giving up; there was so much on your plate you just wanted to take a break.”

At the end of it all, “the findings surprised me,” he said. When it came to voting behaviors, his study showed that the diversity of a campus “didn’t actually make a difference.” His minority subjects tended to vote largely for minority candidates, and white subjects tended to vote for white or minority candidates based on differing factors.

In mid-April, Bae presented his findings at the prestigious Western Psychological Association Conference in Portland, Ore. He has begun doctoral studies in industrial/organizational psychology—“studying people in work settings”—at Colorado State.

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Presidential Scholars