Research
Social Psychology
Understanding people in their social context
How are people's thoughts, emotions and behaviour influenced by others? How do people coordinate with others to ensure productive relationships and effective communication? How do the groups people belong to shape their identity? How are people affected by stigma? What drives the evolution of social norms?
We investigate these questions using a range of quantitative and qualitative methods, including experiments, surveys, interviews and focus groups, and naturalistic observation. Our work has important real-world application across a range of domains, including addressing the spread of misinformation, promoting more environmentally sustainable behaviour, improving team performance, and promoting inclusion and wellbeing of people from marginalised groups.
Research laboratories
Social Psychology researchers work across the following laboratories:
- Social Influence Laboratory
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The greatest influence on people's thoughts, emotions and behaviour is other people. Research in the Social Influence Laboratory examines the ways in which people are influenced by other people, groups, institutions and society. We use a range of methods to investigate human social influence, including laboratory experiments, computational simulations and social network analysis.
Current research topics include:
- Informational Influence: How should information be designed to maximise influence and transmission?
- Interpersonal Influence: How do people create shared understandings during social interaction?
- Group Influence: What are the dynamics of decision-making groups, and how can group performance be optimised?
- Cultural Influence: What factors drive cultural (including language) evolution?
- Malign Influence: How can we curb the spread of misinformation and promote a healthy information environment?
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- Associate Professor Nicolas Fay
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- Interpersonal Dynamics Laboratory
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Research in the Interpersonal Dynamics Lab is concerned with the fundamental processes by which people coordinate their social lives. We examine how cognition and behaviour unfold during real-time social interactions using a range of experimental methods and techniques (e.g., motion tracking, virtual reality, modelling). A prominent focus is on the interplay between synchronised movement and the effectiveness of social exchange and collective behaviour.
Current research topics include:
- How do people coordinate their behaviours, thoughts and feelings with others?
- What impact does interpersonal coordination have on our social relationships?
- What influence do differences in mental health have on the capacity to coordinate with others?
- How do team members best coordinate their efforts to ensure effective collective performance?
- When do differences between competitive and cooperative motives shape group dynamics and productivity?
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- Morality, Identity and Social Change (MISC) Laboratory
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Societies change and develop across time and space regarding what attitudes and actions are considered acceptable and/or morally laudable. We know that some practices once considered fringe have become mainstream and ‘normal’ (e.g., recycling one’s household waste). Others, once considered totally normal and acceptable, have become morally and/or legally sanctioned (e.g., smoking in public or smacking children). However, understanding the processes of social influence through which such changes have, do, and might happen is a complex and fascinating area of research in social and developmental psychology that has broad implications for a range of social, health and environmental issues.
In the Morality, Identity and Social Change (MISC) Lab we are interested in investigating (often interdisciplinary) research questions that attempt to unpack the social and developmental factors that underlie societal change across various domains, with a particular focus on the moral and social identity dimensions of these processes. Current domains we are exploring include environmental sustainability (climate change, water conservation, waste behaviours, biosecurity), human-animal relations (and their implications for both animal welfare and public/One health), and road safety.
We explore these questions using a wide variety of methods, which include both quantitative (i.e., lab/field-based experiments and large-scale community surveys) and qualitative (i.e. interviews/focus groups and analyses of naturally occurring talk and text) approaches.
Much of our qualitative research utilises our unique Remotely-Moderated Focus Group (RMFG) method. By completely removing the researcher (moderator) from the room/conversation, our bespoke RMFG lab allows us to generate unique forms of insight not previously available through traditional qualitative methods. We are currently using this method to provide policy insights for state government agencies such as the Department of Water and Environmental Regulation (DWER), the Road Safety Commission (RSC), the Water Corporation and the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DPIRD).
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- Associate Professor Tim Kurz (Lab Director)
- Jo Watson (Research Associate/PhD researcher)
- Dr Karri Neldner (Adjunct Research Fellow)
- Dr Kevin Vezirian (Honorary Research Associate)
- Memory and Cognition Laboratory
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Research in the Memory and Cognition Laboratory investigates human memory and reasoning, using mainly behavioural experimentation.
The main topic of interest is misinformation: How does incorrect information affect memory, reasoning and decision-making even after it has been corrected? What individual (cognitive, social, affective) factors influence people’s misinformation susceptibility? What aspects of the information environment play a role? How can effective interventions be designed?
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- Parent and Child Laboratory
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As children develop, they and their families face a range of challenges.
Mental health professionals have developed a range of interventions to address various social, emotional, and behavioural needs of children and their parents, and decades of research attest to their value in improving child and parent wellbeing. However, simply having programs available does not mean that parents and children will access and engage with them.
Only about a third of families who could benefit from these support programs initially engage in them, and of these, about half drop out. There is a range of reasons why parents do – and do not – seek and engage in help for their child, and knowing these will enable us to better plan accessible interventions in the future.
In the Parent and Child Lab, we are interested in researching questions that relate to these aspects of child development, parenting, and support interventions, such as:
Understanding the range of mental health and social challenges that children can experience, and how they come to develop these challenges.
Understanding how children get to therapy, and the barriers families face in doing so. * Parents’ perspectives on and experiences in how they support their children.
Stigma that parents and children with mental health problems and neurodevelopmental conditions face, and how they cope with this stigma.
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- Uncertainty, Measurement and Modelling in Health & Medicine (UMM-HM) Lab
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How do people understand risk and make decisions when uncertainty is unavoidable?The UMM-HM Lab investigates how individuals and communities understand and navigate risk and uncertainty, and how these impact their physical and mental well-being. While our methods and insights apply broadly spanning everyday decision-making contexts, we focus particularly on health and medicine, where decisions are often complex and uncertainty is unavoidable: from clinical trials and informed consent to disease management and public health more broadly.
Our interdisciplinary approach integrates psychology, ethics, medicine, public health, cognitive modelling, and advanced statistical methods, giving us the flexibility to tackle problems across contexts, cultures, and healthcare systems.
We develop and validate measurement tools that assess risk and uncertainty attitudes, decision-making, and experiences among patients and communities, and that are built for practical use in clinical, research, and policy settings.
We collaborate with international networks and community partners to co-develop culturally responsive approaches that aim to improve the quality of informed decision-making and strengthen community trust across diverse populations.
Our goal is to produce evidence, tools, and frameworks that help patients, communities, healthcare professionals, researchers, and policymakers navigate uncertainty with better-informed decisions.
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- Western Australia Centre for Road Safety Research (WACRSR) Laboratory
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The WACRSR has been established to conduct research across the Safe System approach. The cornerstones of the Safe System Approach are — safe roads and roadsides, safe road use, safe speeds, safe vehicles and safe post-crash care.
This approach represents a paradigm shift in road safety and takes a holistic view of the road transport system and the interactions of its various elements to create a road transport system in which human error does not result in death or serious injury.
At WACRSR, our research focuses on road safety including: driver behaviour, vehicle safety, road and other infrastructure safety, speed, general causes of road crashes and trauma, new, emerging and existing safety solutions to prevent and/or reduce road trauma, contributing factors to injury and death in road crashes, injury prevention in road crashes and post-crash.
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