‘It’s part of the fight back, to make our links much more tangible, physical, visceral’

Why did you want to get involved in the European Congress, on the scientific programme committee?

Two reasons. Firstly, being a local, I wanted to welcome a lot of psychologists to Brighton and to the University of Sussex, and to be able to facilitate the conference and make sure everyone has as good a time as possible. Brighton is a wonderful city. But also, it's so important that we reach out to our European brothers and sisters post-Brexit and at times of conflict, hence the theme of 'uniting communities for a sustainable world'. I was excited by that, that it's an international conference… we won't only have European visitors, but it's what unites psychology in Europe at a time when it needs uniting.

Is the event grounded in Sussex, Brighton itself, as a university and as a place?

One of the fathers of Psychology, Henri Tajfel, had very strong links with Sussex. And I think this notion of social identity, very much captures the essence of Psychology at Sussex. More broadly, it is, as I mentioned, a very cosmopolitan city. Prior to Brexit, it was the world leader in teaching English as a foreign language… hundreds of thousands of students coming over, so it has this feel to it that impacts the university. Around 35 per cent of our students are still from overseas, post-Brexit. So it feels welcome to the world.

Do you feel like a European psychologist?

I feel both a European psychologist and an international psychologist. During my career, in my own area, cognitive psychology, the idea of it being the remit of the United States and the United Kingdom has very much changed. A lot of the leading researchers are coming from European universities, Australian universities. I'd love to see more coming from African and South American places. The true globalisation of psychology is the frontier still to be crossed, but we do see much more involvement with European researchers. I'm going to Geneva tomorrow, to a week that has creativity researchers coming from across Europe. In fact, there are many more in mainland Europe than there are in Britain.

The true globalisation of psychology is the frontier still to be crossed, but we do see much more involvement with European researchers.

Do psychologists from other countries in Europe bring different perspectives, different values?

I think they do. One of the things that I'm always impressed by when I talk to my European colleagues is how they they'll take a more philosophical view of psychological questions. Quite a lot of the UK and US focus is on methods and scientific rigour, and that's sometimes done at the expense of thoughtful analysis. Some of our European colleagues bring a philosophical thoughtfulness to their work. It's a good complementarity.

Does your own work speak to that overall Congress theme, of uniting communities?

Yes, I think it does. I've done a lot of work on information gathering through interviewing. Some of that has been focused on the criminal justice system: for example, in detecting deception in interviews, detecting security threats. But a lot of it more recently is looking at things like how you can ensure public safety, for example, monitoring offenders in the community.

I've worked in various areas, but the thread is this idea of being able to assess the quality of information you get from someone else. That runs from are they telling the truth, through to are they expressing themselves in a way that is most meaningful to them? For example, in a medical consultation, how do you ensure that a patient is able to express to you the nature of their symptoms?

You've also looked at breast cancer treatment.

That's as a PhD student of mine, Daisy Neal, who is working on a project supervised by myself and Malcolm Reed, who is the head of the medical school here. Malcolm's an oncologist specialist. It turns out that women over the age of 75 tend to get far fewer recommendations for surgical interventions, even though the lifestyle and health outcomes are basically the same as the younger women. So Daisy has been doing a PhD looking at whether there's an unconscious or conscious bias in treatment decisions. Again, it's an information gathering thing… if you ask a consultant, 'do you have an age bias?', they will say no. And if you do implicit attitude tests, they're ambiguous. But if you actually look at the decisions they make statistically, they are biased. Trying to understand why that is, that's a really difficult problem… even more difficult is trying to change it. But Daisy has had some real success in looking at medical students and training medical students to be more aware of the issue of age… to not make quick and easy heuristic judgments about an old person's response to a surgical intervention. Quite often, surgery gives a better quality of life outcome than chemical-based treatment.

That interdisciplinarity, which is also a key part of the European Congress… has that always been there in your research?

Absolutely. I remember seeing Donald Broadbent, who many people think of as the father of UK cognitive psychology, give a talk, about pilots trying to land safely as the inspiration for his theories of attention. I thought that was a really interesting starting point. In my own work, I've always been an applied psychologist. I did my PhD on the psychology of learning computer programming, so many years ago. It made me a better theoretician, because the sorts of studies I did had to have a realism to them, they had to be real tasks done by real people in real contexts. So this interdisciplinarity has always been central to my work.

One of the major changes that's happening to the experimental side of psychology, particularly cognitive psychology, is that it's much more about situated performance.

One of the major changes that's happening to the experimental side of psychology, particularly cognitive psychology, is that it's much more about situated performance – performance in the workplace, performance in the home, performance as you age, that kind of thing. It makes complete sense to work with others to understand complex contexts. That's one of the interesting things about the European Congress, that it does actually provide a forum for people to come together and form those interdisciplinary connections.

I've been to a couple of European Congresses, and come away with the impression that some other countries have more of an applied and interdisciplinary focus than the UK. Do you think that's true?

I think so but I think it's changing in Britain. And I think that the Research Excellence Framework has played a role in that change. When that first came out, applied psychology was treated very badly, I think. It was very hard to get interdisciplinary work recognised, it had to be 'pure psychology'. That's changed with the significance of impact cases. You're generally going to get much more impact if you do interdisciplinary work.

I'm doing some work at the moment with recruitment companies on job interviews. Recruitment is one of the least researched areas – there are millions of books out there, and methods, but there's actually very little empirical data. I'm working with companies to do that, but I'm also working with computer scientists to build tools to support the process of job interviewing. At the end of a round of interviews you might have four sets of CVs, and several people sitting around making judgments about them and the interview forms and the references and whether they map onto the job description and the person specification… all usually at the end of the day when they're tired. We're trying to build technologies that support this incredibly complicated decision-making tasks. It's artificial intelligence meets computer science meets psychology. To have real impact, those kinds of collaborations are more and more important.

In relation to that theme of conflict, diplomacy and peace, you must turn on the news every day and see things that are related to your own research?

One of the challenges is the relationship between legislation and research. A lot of the research we do shows that there are much more effective ways of doing things like managing prisoners, managing offenders in the community, doing security, screening, etc. But the legislation that's in place doesn't always keep up with that research. That's a problem.

Brexit has made people like me try harder to stay united with overseas and particularly European colleagues.

Skipping to the other end of the continuum, it's quite problematic to do work on values and integrity when your leaders don't have it. I'd like to be able to have conversations with our European visitors about how as psychologists we can help to put values and integrity back in their place. Many European nations now have leaders, whatever their political persuasion, who have dubious levels of value. How do we change that zeitgeist, because I feel we can see that negative leadership slipping down into the general public… this idea that if you find a wallet in the street, it's OK to take the money away, because your political leader would do it? How do we change that? While we're congressing, that's a sort of topic I'd like to be able to talk about.

I still regularly get emails saying, 'stick to the science, leave politics out of it'… but what you're saying is that the politics filters down to the most basic of levels.

Of course it is the science, because we're interested in things like belief revision – how do you stop people holding racially prejudiced beliefs? And how do you get people to make sensible financial decisions about their future, and to invest in pensions? When you look at the destabilisation that happens to basic fundamental values and integrity, it's very hard for the science to work. When the science is telling you one thing and your political masters are telling another… so I don't think they're really that separate.

So what impact has Brexit had on your work? Are there ways you're still managing to unite communities?

It's made people like me try harder to stay united with overseas and particularly European colleagues. For example, I have a visitor coming from Italy to work with me for three months… I probably wouldn't have arranged that prior to Brexit. To me, it's part of the fight back, to make the links much more tangible, more physical and visceral. That's part of the excitement about having the European Congress in Brighton, which is about as close to the continent as you can get.

That's fascinating. But then presumably, there are ways in which the 'fight back' has become impractical?

Well, everything's a little bit harder… travel's harder, finances harder. The rules around European funding, there's still a sense of uncertainty about whether we can have access to the replacement for the Horizon programme. But on the other hand, it's actually made people think about it. I did a radio interview, just before the Brexit vote, with the psychologist Nick Chater, on the opportunity for creativity that Brexit provides. My answer was, if it limits resources, you'll find people being more creative. But if it limits time, if you have to rush, people will be much less creative. So in a sense, as academics and as researchers, we've been quite creative to overcome some of the problems because it's been a slow process. But I don't know that we've got to the end of that journey.

What makes a good European Congress?

We need to work really hard to integrate the different nationalities that visit – an event that really allows people to intermingle. When we were deciding the themes, the war in Ukraine had just started, and it seemed that as European psychologists we ought to be attending to that issue of conflict. Bringing different researchers from lots of different countries together to talk about a topic that affects all of us… we are really 'congressing' when we do that.

It's good if the word Congress actually stands for something, perhaps particularly with this return to physical events.

Yes, what is it to be a congregation? We're not just coming to present what we've done, we're coming to contribute to a whole, a movement if you like, to make European psychology address key European and global challenges.

Do you have advice for people submitting to the Congress?

Think about it from the audience's perspective. You will have a very mixed audience… a mixture of languages, of cultures, of experiences. There'll be everyone from undergraduates through to emeritus professors in the audience. Remembering that it's them that need to understand it not you is important. Go slower than you normally would. Try and let your data and your results talk through pictures wherever you can.

Obviously, we're keen to encourage people to situate their work where possible underneath the themes. But on the other hand, the themes cannot cover everything, and you won't be excluded if you don't fit under them. Finally, plan to have fun!