When student and educator learning norms collide:

This paper is a collaboration between Ken and colleagues at the Australian National University. It is the first paper where we try to explicitly account for both peer and educator norms, and explore the latter using norm manipulation. Smyth L, Chandra V, Mavor K.I. Social identification and normative conflict: When student and educator learning norms … Read more

Bashar Albaghli completes his PhD

Bashar came to St Andrews supported by Kuwait University, after completing a Masters in the US. The focus of Bashar’s project has been to explore the links between different understandings of religiosity, political factors, and attitudes toward other religious and political groups.  The thesis title is “Religiosity and prejudice in a Western and Islamic context”. … Read more

Kerry O’Brien completes his PhD

Congratulations to Kerry for completing his PhD changes in time for the recent graduation ceremony. Kerry explored several ways of using framing to either make particular identities more salient, or to influence the meaning of those identities. Kerry’s PhD is titled “Framing issues and identities: Aligning the content of group identity with the meaning of issues … Read more

Learning behaviour and outcomes: Social influence and field of study

This is an article by Lillian Smyth, Kenneth I. Mavor,  and Michael J. Platow published in the Social Psychology of Education (2017). The research reported in this paper was part of Lillian’s PhD project on discipline identification, peer norms and approaches to learning. In this paper we confirm the association of both identity and norms with deep learning approaches as … Read more

Summer interns explore issues of identity complexity and wellbeing

We were delighted to have four volunteer summer interns working with the lab over the summer – three from St Andrews and a guest all the way from Turkey! The group spend the majority of their time exploring the issues around identity and well-being in the medical context. We also explored different models of self-complexity … Read more

Kerry O’Brien PhD submitted

Kerry O’Brien submitted his PhD at the ANU this week. Kerry’s PhD is titled “Framing issues and identities: Aligning the content of group identity with the meaning of issues to produce normative influence.”  The project was aimed at integrating the Social Identity model of normative influence with the political science literature on issue framing as … Read more

Sean Talamas PhD completed

Sean Talamas has submitted his PhD (Co-supervised by Dave Perrett and Ken Mavor) on various aspects of perceived intelligence and the attractiveness Halo. The thesis demonstrates that malleable facial cues can influence perceptions of intelligence, identifies individual differences that influence endorsement of the intelligence-attractiveness halo, and reveals the limiting effects of the attractiveness halo on … Read more

Lillian Smyth awarded PhD

Congratulations to Lillian on completing her corrections and submitting the final thesis for the award of her PhD!  Lillian’s thesis is entitled “Putting the Student in Context: A social and normative model of learning approaches and their outcomes”.  Lillian has one paper already published from her PhD: Smyth L., Mavor, K. I., Platow, M.J., Grace, D. … Read more