Profile

I’ve just moved to London for work, but I’m originally from South Africa (and have studied/worked in Taiwan, Scotland, the USA, and the Netherlands). I’m currently a postdoc researcher in the psychology department of Royal Hollow, University of London.

My interested in science started in high school with pop-science books about physics, but at uni, I realised I was more interested in language – how humans use this incredibly complex tool to communicate. I ended up doing a PhD in linguistics. But then I got interested in how the human mind handles all the complexity of language (and other complex problems), so now I work in a psychology department.

I’m a psychologist who does experiments with regular people. I get people to solve problems and study how they succeed (or fail, which is just as interesting). An experiment could involve people playing a game like Pictionary, or answering questions like “Why is the sky blue?”

What these both have in common is that we all know a lot of things about the world, and we have to use our knowledge to solve these problems. But each of us knows a huge amount, so working out which bits of our world knowledge to use for each task is itself a tricky question. I study how people make such decisions, and whether they do it better or worse in different situations.

I look at what kinds of people solve different kinds of problems (for example, creative people are good at games like Pictionary – but just what kind of creative people? How can the problem be changed so that different kinds of people can succeed?). I also study how various problems are similar or different to each other – it’s not immediately obvious that being good at Pictionary is similar to being good at answering questions like “Why is the sky blue?”, but there are some interesting similarities between these two tasks.

Currently, my main project involves looking at how everyday people can behave like scientists, but can sometimes fail to be good scientists. Sometimes people end up believing all sorts of nonsense about climate change or vaccines, but hopefully there are ways to counteract this.

I’ve just started a new project, so recently I’ve mostly been doing a lot of reading to see what others have already said about this topic.

But on a normal day, I spend most of my time using my coding skills to design experiment apps so I can collect data online; doing statistical analyses on the data; and writing it up to publish. I like the coding best – I can do it for hours and hours without losing focus. The stats is really fun when I discover interesting patterns in my data, but it’s hard work making sure that I do it rigorously, so I do sometimes resent it. Writing is my least favourite part because you have to write about something that you care a lot about, but have to be very, very careful, because part of doing science is sending your work out into the world to get criticised by other scientists. It can be like sending your baby into a lion’s den, so you have to spend a lot of time making sure it’s got a pretty solid coat of armour first.

I also get excited when I run into a new problem that I don’t have the skills to solve. Working out how to solve it and then teaching myself new skills is a fun challenge. And then I love doing workshops to share the new skills with fellow scientists who might not have developed them yet.