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In the second year of their psychology BSc degree, our students take part in a term long hackathon, using all the tools of psychological science to solve real world problems.
The term begins with them meeting stakeholders: non academic partners from across industry, charities, education and health care. The stakeholders present a problem that they face. The students then break into groups and, supported by a faculty mentor, discuss how psychological theories and ideas can be applied to the problem. They develop hypotheses, and then create novel behavioural experiments. They choose experimental paradigms, create stimuli and then collect behavioural data from participants online. The term ends with the stakeholders returning to UCL and the students present their findings at a poster session.
What sorts of behaviour can be studied?
Our students use an experimental platform called Gorilla, that can implement a huge number of paradigms studying memory, decision making, information processing and perception. In addition, we can study specific online behaviours with full experimental control.
The social media tool allows us to create realistic instagram or facebook like posts, experimentally control information about the sender, likes and reactions, and track how users respond to the content.
What is required from the stakeholders?
We are looking for partners from outside of academia who have interesting problems or research questions that our students could investigate. The time commitment is simply to present the problem in a session at the start of the term and answer students’ questions, and to return at the end for a poster session to see what they discovered. All research costs are covered by UCL.
What if the stakeholder has a specific experiment in mind?
In this project, the students take the lead in deciding how to use psychological science to address the research question. If a stakeholder already has a particular experiment in mind, or a data set that needs to be collected, then an collaborative Behavioural Insights Exchange BIX project at UCL would be a better fit.