• Question: Where does the money go towards?

    Asked by anon-215933 to Laura, Kathryn, Ian, Chris, Bogdana, Alex on 10 Jun 2019. This question was also asked by anon-215132.
    • Photo: Chris Fullwood

      Chris Fullwood answered on 10 Jun 2019:


      If I was lucky enough to win the £500 prize money, I’d spend it on sponsoring a group of school children across the country to come and spend some time working in my cyberpsychology lab with me to come up with some interesting experiments with the kit I have, including virtual reality and gaming consoles.

    • Photo: Ian Cookson

      Ian Cookson answered on 10 Jun 2019:


      It goes towards buying sets of infographics for schools that are produced by a company called believe perform. These are great for describing psychology in a number of different ways

    • Photo: Kathryn Atherton

      Kathryn Atherton answered on 11 Jun 2019:


      If I won the prize money, I would lobby for my organisation to run a trial in which young female scientists from disadvantaged backgrounds send letters to girls at their old school, encouraging them to pursue science.

      I would expect this to be effective because people are particularly receptive to messages from relatable role models.

      Currently, disadvantaged students are massively underrepresented at prestigious universities and girls are massively underrepresented in physics, computer science and engineering-based fields.

      This matters because (a) our society has a critical shortage of people with skills in these areas and this shortage is worsening, (b) who you are and where you come from should not dictate your opportunities and (c) as our society becomes increasingly reliant on technology, people with these skills with play an increasingly important role in shaping our lives, so it is important that these people are diverse and representative of the population.

    • Photo: Bogdana Huma

      Bogdana Huma answered on 11 Jun 2019:


      The prize money would go towards organising a workshop to teach people how to identity and resist being persuaded (or one could even say manipulated) in everyday life.
      If you think about it, on a daily basis, we are the target of so many influence attempts from TV ads, to influencers on social media, to politicians on talk shows, to ‘cold’ callers who try to sell us stuff over the phone. Many of these people or organisations hide their attempts to influence us; this is why recognising when someone is trying to influence you is crucial – that would be the first half of the workshop. The second half would focus on strategies for resistance that I have identified through my research.

    • Photo: Alex Lloyd

      Alex Lloyd answered on 11 Jun 2019:


      If I won I would use the money to help fund a group of teenagers to come and research risk taking with me. I would help the students to develop their own research project, carry it out and present it back to their schools at the end of the project!

    • Photo: Laura Fisk

      Laura Fisk answered on 11 Jun 2019:


      If I won (how lucky I’d be!) I’d want to use the money to support a group of young people to help me create online and offline formats for sharing psychology information so that we can all better understand how people work. I passionately believe psychology knowledge should be shared as widely as possible – because it’s not fair that it’s tied up in fancy words that make things hard for non psychologists to understand, because I think it can be useful for all of us in understanding each other better, and because I don’t think I have all the answers – I need some young people to teach me (and so on and so on!)

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