“Storytellers of PLNU” is a weekly column presented in The Point focused on highlighting faculty and students at Point Loma Nazarene University. The art of storytelling is alive and well among the PLNU community. Although slightly editorial, this column’s purpose is to spotlight the works our students and faculty are creating.”
When I called her a storyteller at first, her facial expression shifted in disagreement.
“Psychology is such a unique field, it’s such a joy to be a part of. I wouldn’t have thought about it this way but it is absolutely storytelling,” Alexandra Bitter, professor of psychology at PLNU, said.
Bitter, a PLNU alumna, is an experimental and social psychologist who got into the field because of her fascination with people and desire to help in some way. This transformed into returning to PLNU to teach in 2022. Through her courses, she interlaces the research she has done, focusing on motivation, bias and stereotyping.
Her love for research stemmed from being enamored with its ability to explain everyday behavior and give names to the things we take for granted. Through her research, she has been able to apply motivational concepts to technology, self-compassion and jury decision making, focusing on minority groups.
“We have this incredible opportunity to grab snapshots of human behavior and in doing so we get to inform people, ourselves and even systems,” Bitter said smiling.
Although much of her job entails research, Bitter considers herself a storyteller.
“As a social psychologist, I feel like a storyteller of reflecting humanity back to itself,” Bitter said.
Based on her research done in bias and stereotypes, Bitter described the difficulty of researching this topic, going into detail on one of the stereotypes many students at PLNU tend to be grouped into.
“Sometimes those biases shift across time, cultures and groups,” she said. “So we are in this interesting microcosm biome of Point Loma where the stereotype is that a lot of our students come from very rich backgrounds. Certainly, that could be true but also it’s really not. As an alumni of the university, I have experienced a variety of things as a student and in my own life and was fortunate to come to Point Loma.”
Bitter has maintained a lengthy background in research and has recently been working on two projects alongside colleague Max Butterfield, a psychology professor at PLNU, who specializes in social judgment and decision making.
The first project Bitter mentioned focuses on stereotypes in clothing.
The two have been researching perceptions of people who use hygiene products that are made for the other gender. When looking at women using men’s deodorant, they found that they believed it to be of better quality and value. When they looked at men using women’s deodorants, they noticed there was a different kind of judgment.
“For women, we say, OK this is about quality and fiscally related things, but for men, it’s all social judgments. We think that those men are part of the LGBTQIA community, which is really interesting,” Bitter said.
“We put such constraint on men and this masculinity and of course, for women we have historically fought for moving past this. But for men, socially we are so stringent,” Bitter said.
In their findings, Bitter noticed a “constrainment of expression,” which has changed the way in which she interacts with men, making her more thoughtful in her interactions.
Following the data that was collected, the next step in their research was to find its effect size.
“There’s this idea of finding significance in psychology, meaning finding something noteworthy, but there’s also effect size, meaning we know this matters but how much does it matter?” Bitter said.
She said that the effect size on their research on clothing stereotypes was significant due to both the degree of judgment between men and women and the large difference between the judgment itself.
Since graduate school at the University of Wyoming, Bitter has been researching self-compassion and compassion. To publish on this subject, she has been extending her research to the classroom, co-teaching a course on self-compassion with Butterfield. The two have brought students in on the process of compiling and writing out the research, allowing for students to have their names published with the paper.
The structure of the class included creative writing exercises which became one of Bitter’s favorite parts of the course. Teaching alongside Butterfield has been a full circle moment for Bitter as he was her advisor and mentor when she was completing her undergraduate degree in psychology at PLNU.
“We’ve done all kinds of research on the disparity of self-compassion … where we are just not kind to ourselves in a variety of contexts but much more kind to our friends,” Bitter said.
Some of her research has been in the context of disordered eating behaviors, specifically over-exercising, food restriction and binge eating.
Within her research, Bitter posed the question: Should we feel shame if we do these things? She received responses stating: “Yes, we should feel guilty.” She then posed the question: Should your friend feel guilty? The responses showed that compassion was much easier to give out than to give to yourself.
Through her dedication to exploring the human condition within psychology, Bitter becomes a storyteller. She is relatable and hilarious, mentioning her recent “pump up” song “New Noise” by Refused after we sidetracked from a previous conversation on motivation. She cares about making a change and about people, making the work in research she does that much more meaningful.
Grace Chaves 
Tessa Balc