Profile

I’m trying to understand how humans use social information in different sorts of situation. For example, from an evolutionary point of view, it would be a good idea to be able to figure out whether someone is aggressive or not just by look at them, rather than have to get up close to them!

To do this, I use a motion capture system – like the one that they used in films like Avatar and Beowulf – to record movies of people walking in different ways. I then get the same people to answer lots of different questions about themselves, so I can figure out what their personality is like. This means that I can run experiments where I show other people the videos, and ask them what sort of personality they think the person in the video has. I’m interested in whether or not the viewers answers match onto what the walkers in the videos said about themselves.

Testing is quite a big part of what I do; typically I might be collecting videos and questionnaires from two people a day, and it takes each person about 3 hours to finish my study. In between testing, I’ll be writing up research from other experiments that I’ve been running. Writing papers involves a lot of reading; you really have to understand the area that you’re talking about, which means reading and understanding all of the experiments that have been done before yours. I also teach quite a lot at the minute, which is great fun!

Lots of people know stuff about some of the more well-known stuff in Psychology – things like visual illusions, how we form groups, how we conform when we’re told what to do by a scary-looking authority figure, and so on. But Psychology is so much more than that! I’d like to develop a series of short, 5-minute videos where researchers who are at the top of their field have to explain big ideas or crazy concepts in an easy-to-understand and engaging way. I’d love everyone’s input one what they’d like to see!