Psychology

Profile

I completed my BSc (Hons) in Social Science with Psychological studies with Open University in 2006.  Initially I added psychology to my Social Science degree to have both subjects under my belt but this has sparked a wonderful interest into psychology of personality for me. My final year project was on Hard-Easy effect, which I found extremely interesting and to this day, my passion lies in cognitive and psychological effects and biases.

After that I completed an MSc in Psychological research methods. My dissertation on Barnum Effect was supervised by Dr. Mark Turner, and concentrated on the sophistication of the participant. Unlike other Barnum Effect studies, my study found that older participants were more likely to accept negative statements about themselves as true. Studies in this area have mostly used college students as participants and the results were replicated many times. Young participants accepted bogus personality feedback that was positive, but rejected negative feedback. This raised an interesting issue of 'sophistication' in gullibility, with the age of the participant proving to be a major factor in gullibility. Conducting my first study of that scale made me even more interested in personality factors influencing gullibility and persuasion. Ideally I would love to pinpoint what makes someone gullible, which is no small feat due to lack of literature on this complex topic.

Early studies into gullibility had many shortcomings, such as opportunistic sampling of students as the only participants in these studies, and not actually looking into cognitive, situational, affective and personality factors that may influence gullibility. I am hoping to explore these factors in my PhD under Dr. Turner, Dr. Van Laar and Dr. Sonnenberg, looking into gullibility, persuasion and source credibility.