Social Identity, Norms and Approaches to Learning: Presentation at Exeter Psychology

Ken visited Exeter Psychology to present our work on Social Identity in Educational contexts, and to meet with colleagues and postgraduate students.  The talk focused on our research on discipline-based social identity (for example, as a psychology student), peer norms, and instructor norms about approach to learning.

We now have a substantial line of work on this. The collaboration started with Michael Platow, and then became the main focus of Lillian Smyth’s PhD work. Lillian and Ken have continued this focus, extending the norms work to instructor norms.  It was nice to have time in the talk to summarise what we have learned over the last 8 years and published in the following papers:

The talk also presented new work, (1) extending the focus to identity incompatibilities that might arise when students life at university clashes with their life where they have come from, and the impact on approaches to learning and on procrastination and academic self-handicapping. (2) testing a possible normative intervention mechanism.