Thank you for having me here. Nicola, before we get started on talking about the things that you’re doing and the projects that you’re working on in the future, could you please just give us a bit of a background on who you are and what the pivot point was for you in really your passion around cyberpsychology and leading into what you really specialise in, kind of the world of online dating? Sure, of course.
So I’m a little bit similar to you in that I did not start out studying psychology at all. I did graphic design and I ended up working in web design and then advertising for quite a long time. And the recession hit, the Celtic tiger crashed and burned in Ireland.
And I decided, I got laid off, which I was quite happy with, and decided to go back to college and do a master’s degree. And originally intended to do one in digital media, which would have been kind of complementary to the skills I already had, but overheard Dr. Gráinne Ciarán talking about the master’s in cyberpsychology, which sounded far more interesting because I had an interest in psychology. And so I decided to do that.
So it was a twist of fate that kind of sent me down this path. I never intended becoming an academic. I thought that things like consumer cyberpsychology and learning how to build community online would be really useful as a designer and in advertising.
But that wasn’t the stuff that I loved. It’s interesting, but it’s not the stuff I loved. I loved the social psychology, how people interact with each other.
I love all the stuff about individual differences, all of that kind of stuff. And so when it came to doing my master’s research project, I had lived in the States for quite a few years and I was back in Ireland not all that long. And I was interested in the difference in how people approach you to ask you out for a date or flirt in person.
And I wondered what that would look like in the online dating sphere, the difference between Irish and American people. And so I ended up looking at that for my master’s. And then Dr. Chris Fullwood from the University of Wolverhampton was our external examiner on the course.
And he suggested that I could go and do a PhD with him in the University of Wolverhampton, which I did. And many more years later than I originally intended, I got the PhD right when COVID hit. And that I continued on my research in online dating and it’s just such a fascinating, interesting area.
Yeah, so that’s how I got into it. And as I was doing my PhD, I started doing some teaching in IDT, started teaching cyber psychology and gradually built up so that I became full-time as a lecturer and moved away from, at that point, I was doing some consultancy work for design, started to just cut that back. And now I am a full-time academic, which is quite fun and different.
That’s quite a change from going from the graphic design agency side of things to academics. Do you think that feeds into your insights and the way that you approach the research that you do in terms of having that real world experience? I think where it probably most plays a part in the communication of the research, maybe. So I learned how to communicate succinctly, doing pitches for advertising and like writing some copy and things like that.
And I think that’s been really helpful. And communicating to different audiences, I think, has been really helpful. It also helps that, you know, I find it easy to create kind of nice slides.
In terms of approaching the research itself, I suppose, like, I still don’t have a psychology undergrad. I did think about going back and doing a conversion course. But after spending basically 10 years in education as an adult, I kind of had enough.
Yeah. And I suppose I probably think a little bit differently than someone who came in right from the beginning. Sometimes that’s good.
Sometimes it’s not so good. Sometimes there’s things that I’m unaware of that someone with a general psychology background might be aware of. But maybe it brings a different perspective to going about research and thinking about research.
Yeah. And I think that adds a lot of value to what you do. And because even chatting with a number of academics, there is there is a very specific way that they think about things.
And you can see someone who comes in from a slightly different perspective, how they just give that nuance, which changes the questions you ask and the way that you look at things. Yeah. So you’ve done quite a bit of research in online dating.
Tell me more about that. What are the big things you found? And is there any other research that you’ve done that you’ve gone or that kind of either spun off from that or different? Yeah, I haven’t done as much as I would like. The institute I work in is a teaching institute.
And so there isn’t a huge amount of time to do research, unfortunately. But my master’s research, like I said, was looking at the difference between American and Irish men and how they present themselves in their dating profiles. And that was quite fun because American men were writing three times as much as Irish men at that point.
Now, that may have changed. So that was around 2010. And Tinder hadn’t come out yet.
So when I went on to do my PhD research, Tinder arrived kind of a year or so after I started. And again, I was looking at what people were writing about in their profiles and how they were writing about themselves and presenting themselves. And it suddenly went from people writing 500 words to very, very, very short ones.
So it kind of changed the data I was getting and the richness of the data I was getting. And it kind of messed it up a little bit. But that happens with cyber psychology a lot.
But what I was looking at was how people. So one of the things we know about online dating is that it can be very frustrating for a number of reasons. But one of the main reasons is that when you show up for the first date, the person often isn’t who you think they were or how you thought they would be.
And sometimes that’s because they’re lying. But often it’s not. Often it’s because we don’t really get an accurate impression of what they’re like from their profile and from the initial chats that we have.
And so I wanted to know in more depth, like, what is it that we’re missing out on? So are we able to judge personality from people’s dating profiles? Are people expressing their personality? Is it being picked up accurately by other people? And so I did a number of studies. And essentially what I found was like seven, eight years later, no, we’re very bad at this. Profiles aren’t a good place to express their personality.
And people know this. They find it frustrating as well, writing profiles, because we’re highly complex people. And then we’re trying to fit in 500 characters or less, a picture of who we are that’s positive, but also accurate and has a bit of depth and isn’t cliched and stuff.
And so it’s quite difficult. And so, yeah, I found out that people are particularly bad at judging personality from us. Now, combined with photographs, they’re probably a little bit better.
We get a little bit more of a slice of personality from photographs, but it’s still pretty poor. And so that was quite interesting. And then during COVID, I did interviews with people and I haven’t managed to publish it yet, but I did interviews with people during lockdowns, during those first lockdowns where we were very locked down and looked at their experiences.
And then I did follow up questionnaires with them to see how they were getting on later, because about half of the people I interviewed had found somebody that they thought might result in a relationship that they were talking to a lot and had been talking to for at least a good few weeks or months even. And when I followed up a few months later, when the lockdown started to lift a little bit, a lot of them had either met up in person and the person wasn’t who they thought they were, or it had just fizzled out, because it’s very hard to keep something going that feels kind of intense and romantic without the possibility of meeting or knowing when you’re going to be able to meet or anything like that. And so I think it was a good example of seeing hyper-personal communication at play, where people felt, you know, this very intimate connection, heightened emotion, really felt like they were getting to know somebody.
And it created a little bit of a fantasy in their head of who that person was. And when they met in person, often it didn’t quite match what they expected. And that was something that would cause it to just kind of fizzle out or fall apart.
And whereas other people, like I said, just, you know, found it hard to keep it going. And a lot of other people, the other kind of half of the participants were trying online dating because, you know, they were at home, they didn’t have much to do. And they were like, well, here’s an opportunity to try something and spend a bit of time doing it.
And then they’re like, you meet somebody on there that you kind of like, but you don’t invest months talking to them without the possibility of meeting. So they’re kind of parking people, which you normally wouldn’t do, but was considered maybe a little bit more acceptable then. But none of those ones really worked out all that much.
So, yeah, it was interesting. But when one of my participants who was in an African country got in touch with me months after the second survey to say that she was getting married to the person that she had met, which was really lovely update to it. So that was quite nice.
I think that was the only success story that I know of. Very cool. Do you think the general perception on this, on a cultural perspective of online dating has changed rapidly over the last decade or so, and especially since lockdown? Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I think, you know, it kind of started in the mid 90s and the initial people doing it were the early adopters. And there was still a perception that it was for people who were desperate. And around the time that I tried it, so I got interested in it because I tried it, was sort of two thousand and seven, eight, nine.
And it was more acceptable then, but it was still unusual. People were still telling their parents that they had met in a pub rather than meeting online a lot of the time. I was very open about it because I didn’t really care.
That was really interesting. And now it’s just completely mainstream, like so mainstream. There is nothing really different about the population of people who are doing online dating versus those who aren’t.
The personality traits, self-esteem, like so many different characteristics are just the same. It is just the thing that people do. And I think what changed with the rise of Tinder and the other apps is that young people didn’t engage in online dating before because they didn’t need to.
It was considered something that you did when you didn’t have access to people in the real world and young people were in college or starting jobs and there were loads of people around and lots of them were single and so they didn’t need to. Whereas people in their 30s felt more like they needed to. Tinder made it fun and gamified it and suddenly it just became a fun thing to do and people would hand their phone around their friends and swipe and it was entertaining and alleviated boredom.
It was also on your phone, so it was with you all the time. And so the 18 to 24 market went from like 10 percent of them trying online dating to now it’s like 59 percent or 64 percent, something extremely high. So that changed the market and changed the kind of perception of it and everything as well.
Do you think that’s the key pivot point was the gamification of it and the fun element rather than it being about serious, you’re desperate, so therefore you go online. It’s almost in some ways, I was actually doing some online dating about a similar time to you and got the same kind of, oh you’re desperate, giggle when I told someone I was doing online dating. But it just seems as though the whole shift has come or it seemed to me from anecdotally the shift came with when they’re talking about swap right, swap left.
There was an element of fun, there’s elements of not so desperate, it’s more it’s okay to do this now. Yeah, it became something to share with people rather than something to do by yourself quietly without telling anyone. I think the fact that it was gamified as part of it and the fact that it was on your phone was a huge part of it.
So you used to have to sit down in front of your computer and create your profile and talk to people and then when you were away from your computer you couldn’t do it. And when it became part of your phone you could do it in the bus and the train and when you’re having a break in college or whatever. And phones were something that all young people had and so it was something that was just there for them.
They didn’t have to go find it. So I think that was part of it. There was a lot of hype around Tinder as well and the fact it was the first app and gamified and all that stuff and that made it kind of trendy and cool and a lot of people who talk about why they use it is because it is trendy.
It’s because what people are doing. So yeah, there were a couple of different factors to it but the gamified part of it was certainly an aspect of it I think. And that’s interesting that it moved because I didn’t think about that.
It moved from on your own behind a computer in a room to actually in the community and you just shared it and it was you kind of moved yourself physically into a different space and in a different space changes the way you perceive it and changes the way you think about it. Yeah, absolutely. It’s less serious.
It’s less dedicated time to it I think. It’s more part of your day and integrated into it. Yeah, so it’s kind of almost less shameful because you can share it in the community.
Yeah, yeah. Oh, I keep on saying this. I just love psychology.
It’s great. And you spoke about the lecturing that you’re doing and being program chair at IADT. What does IADT stand for? Because I keep on getting it wrong every time I think about it.
So it’s the Institute of Art Design and Technology in Dunlary which is just in South County Dublin. There were a number of institutes of technology. We are the only Institute of Art Design and Technology.
So we’re the creative Institute of Technology. And we had the first master’s program in cyber psychology in the world. So Dr. Gráinne Kieron was the founding person to create that.
And it was 2007 when it started. So I was in the third intake in 2009. So it was very groundbreaking and like really new and really, really exciting to be part of it.
And now we have so we have the master’s which I’m program chair of and I teach on it and I supervise on it. We also have a certificate in cyber psychology which is one year, 20 weeks, two hours a week. And it’s basically one module and it’s an introduction to all of cyber psychology or as much of it as I can squeeze into 20 classes.
But it’s a really fun course for people who are interested in the area but don’t want to dedicate the time that a master’s would take because it’s basically a different topic every week. And we get lots of guest speakers in. I also teach the module in cyber psychology in our first year of the applied psychology undergrad which is kind of similar.
It’s an introduction to it. We go a little bit more in depth in some areas but it’s a really nice module and I think the students really enjoy it because so much of it is applicable to their lives. So yeah and then I’ve also taught things like psychology of design and user experience design and gamification and things like that.
So bringing some of the cyber psychology as well as some of my design background into other modules. So we will hopefully be having a new undergrad in like a gaming undergrad, game development undergrad potentially next year. So we’re writing some modules on psychology of gaming, gamification, things like that for that.
So there’s some really interesting stuff happening in IDT but the master’s program is fantastic. I mean I did it and now I’m running it. I’ll be handing it over to a new program chair and my colleague Dr Liam Chaloner next year.
But it’s such a fantastic program. It runs two years part-time and we run it primarily online now. So now we have students from Pakistan and Australia and America and all different countries which is really really lovely and makes it quite rich and all these different experiences coming in.
I think COVID was really interesting for us because obviously like everybody else we moved everything online and initially found it very difficult I think like everybody else. But we actually found it to be very powerful for this course because you know it’s mature students, they all have jobs, they have families and it made it easier to manage for quite a lot of people. It meant that people could come in from different countries to take it and then we have a couple of hybrid days each year so anyone who can come on campus and people travel from all around the world to go on campus they come in for two days in each term in a block and we kind of help build the community a little bit more there.
But we’ve been I think quite successful in building community online as well. So taking all the principles of what we teach and bringing it into the program it’s been quite nice. So yeah the program’s quite a broad one I know there are other programs now some are more focused on things like cyber security or like mental health therapy things like that.
Ours is fairly broad and you don’t need an undergrad in psychology to take it. So we get people coming in from journalism and marketing and tech companies and like IT looking to go into cyber security and we’ve had teachers and we’ve had people from the police and army like we’ve had just every kind of person come into the course. And there’s you know there’s something for everyone but there’s a lot of modules that you can kind of make your own and then of course the research project you can make your own and that’s about whatever topic you’re interested in as well within ethical constraints of course.
But it’s a really fun course to teach because of all the different backgrounds of people like I learn as much from our students I hope as they learn from me because everybody brings a different perspective to what I’m teaching and feeds that back into the program and it’s just really exciting to teach on. That sounds amazing. You said that they don’t need an undergrad so what do you need in order to actually get accepted on the master’s program? You need a 2-1 in an honours undergraduate degree of any kind.
We also have a process if you don’t have that to recognize your prior learning through work experience etc so there’s a process to go through where you answer some questions write an essay etc to do that and we’ve had quite a lot of people. I actually went in myself through that process because I had a three-year higher national diploma in graphic design I didn’t have a degree so obviously you can be just as successful going in through that process as having the undergrad degree itself. So if you’ve done an undergrad in psychology if you get a 2-1 you’ll automatically be accepted? Yeah you’ll be accepted that’s the criteria for coming in yeah there’s no kind of subject criterias or anything like that and that’s it I mean obviously you have to provide references and things like that but yeah essentially if you have the 2-1 you’re in.
Okay and then the certificates do you have to do that at all or is that just a standalone module that you can do if you want to? It’s a standalone module so the master’s is obviously a level nine master’s the certificate’s level eight which is like honours degree level and so the only criteria for entering that is a leaving cert in Ireland it would be which is your higher one A-levels so A-levels for the UK or the equivalent so it’s it’s kind of secondary school completion degree or finishing exams yeah to get into that one but we have like again that’s a huge range of people in it we’ve had people who have their leaving cert we’ve had people come in through that RPEL process the recognition of prior learning process who didn’t have a leaving cert we’ve also had people take it who have a PhD but don’t know much about cyber psychology so just a vast range of people with hugely different experience from all different kinds of backgrounds so again that makes it really fun and again people from all around the world because that is entirely online so that’s a really it’s a really nice program I like it a lot I love teaching it really does sound like you’re the birthplace of cyber psychology yeah I know academic and teaching ish yeah that’s amazing and okay so then in terms of if someone wanted to apply for the master’s when is your next intake of master’s students and have you already filled the places or can people still apply people can still apply it usually opens sort of February March but people have applied before that we still have places at the moment there’s usually a second round if there’s places available where the deadline’s the end of August but just basically apply any time from the start of the year to August we used to I used to be able to say to people you will probably get in even if it’s full now there’ll be one or two people who maybe applied in February and by September things have changed for them but we’re actually quite full so the last year or so particularly this year we’ve been we were really subscribed so sooner rather than later is better to get the applications in for sure.
And you have done an audible book on cyber psychology. Tell us about that. What’s got you start in the process of thinking about it? Why is it audible and why not a written book? And what kind of things have you learned during that process of of constructing it? And because you deliver it yourself, you actually read it and and deliver it.
So tell me more about the book. So I kind of knew in the back of my mind that I would like to write a book at some point, but I actually got commissioned to write it, which is why it actually happened, because I’m no good at a deadline. So I was commissioned by a company called One Dream.
They were called the Great Courses at the time. They have their own online learning programs. Yeah, but they also make content for audible.
And they asked me to write a piece on cyber psychology. And they actually found me through Twitter. Twitter was such a great place.
It’s unfortunate that it has degenerated into the awfulness that it is now. But I had a lot of great opportunities through there when it was fantastic. So, yeah, they commissioned me to do that.
I was assigned an editor. We talked through what I would like to have in it. And my primary kind of purpose about it was to dispel some myths and kind of counteract some of the bad media reporting around cyber psychology topics.
So I picked the kind of big debates and the big things that people were interested in and the things that I thought were quite important at the time. And they very much reflect the kinds of things that I teach, particularly in the certificate, that broad overview of cyber psychology. So it’s like an introduction to cyber psychology and coming at it from kind of a critical perspective in many ways and trying to counteract some of the scaremongering.
It was quite intense to write because it was during covid when everything was quite intense. And it was really fun to do it. To work with an editor was really fantastic as well.
And it was a really nice experience. And they gave me the option of recording it myself or having someone do it. And I thought it’d be quite fun to do it myself.
And I got to record it in recording studios in Dublin called Mill Lane, which are very famous recording studios. So that was a very fun experience as well. So, yeah, the whole thing was like a little bit stressful, obviously.
I think writing a book is always a bit stressful, but I really did enjoy it. And I’m quite proud of the end product. So, yeah.
It is such a great book. And I was telling you before we started recording that the first time I listened to it, I was like, I was just in awe, just going, oh, there’s so much information. And then I listened to it again.
Oh, there’s so much more information out front. And that was so interesting. And I’m now in the third round of listening to it.
Even now, I just I’m going, wow, that is so fascinating. Wow. I didn’t hear that before.
And this is amazing. So who do you think is the best audience for this? Who do you think is the type of people that would really get a lot from your book? I think there’s a lot of people out there worried about their own technologies or their kids technologies. I think I hope that they will get a lot from us.
But also people who are curious about how and why we behave the way that we do online. So why are we more toxic online? Why does misinformation spread online? Why do we shop the way we do? Why are people drawn to gaming so much? All of those kinds of things, like that curiosity about why is it so compelling? Have they designed it to be addictive? And if that’s not true, which it’s not, then what is it about it that makes it so compelling and that makes us enjoy it or do it so much? So which is a lot of people. And I think the audience for it is quite broad in many ways.
Yeah, I think you’re right. And I think a lot of teachers and therapists and media people would find a lot or get a lot from the book because it really does explain the psychological reasons why we do things and how it impacts us both psychologically and physically and how it’s different to the online, because you often compare the online world to the offline world and how that changes, which is one of the most fascinating things about cyber psychology is how very different we sometimes act online and how we act online then changes how we act in the real world. And one of the great things you talk about, which is one of the first things I learned is there is no an online and offline self.
It’s kind of they both influence each other. Yeah, but it’s still the same person. Yeah.
Yeah. There used to be, I think, more of a divide between who we were online and those online spaces. And now it’s just fully integrated into our lives.
We just kind of seamlessly go between the two throughout our day. Yeah. And I remember someone saying to me once is that especially the younger generation, they their friends are not just online friends and offline friends.
They’re just the conversation continues from offline to online and back again. It’s just this fluid motion. And I think as older generations, we’ve adopted that same kind of online, offline communication and where being.
Yeah, absolutely. Or at least a lot of us have. I know not everyone has.
And there’s still people who find it confusing or don’t like it. But certainly a lot of us have. Yeah.
Yeah. And it just it’s it makes sense to just this is the conversation we continuously having and it just changes the way we have it changes. Yeah, absolutely.
So it’s absolutely fascinating. And you spoke about the media, because one of the things that often when I talk to cyberpsychologists, they get really frustrated about the headlines and the clickbaits in the media. Do you think it’s changing, getting better? And do you think the media needs a bit more direction in terms of understanding what cyberpsychology really is all about? So I think in some ways it’s gotten better.
So I collect terrible headlines about cyberpsychology just out of pure frustration and fascination with how bad they can be. I unsubscribed from The Guardian because the stuff about cyberpsychology was just so bad that I could not give them money anymore. They had a headline that was children are tech addicts and schools are the pushers.
Like, OK, it’s just so ridiculous. And so there’s still quite a bit of that out there, but there’s a bit less about some areas. We’ve moved on, I think, from some areas of video game violence.
I was looking for some bad headlines recently, particularly around there used to be a lot of stuff about video game violence, making kids violent, creating school shooters, things like that. And when I went looking for that, most of the recent stuff is actually refuting it and giving a compelling argument that absolutely that’s not the case. Which is much more what the research is is suggesting.
And so that was that was one of the positive things I saw. I think there are some reporters out there that are really trying to do a good job around this. Yeah, there’s still a lot of nonsense.
And then when books get published, you know, Jonathan, is this name Jonathan Haidt? Yeah. Haidt, yeah. Books like that get published.
People just buy into the idea without critically engaging with it a lot. There’s some really, really good critiques out there of his book because it’s not great and not very accurate. It cherry picks some pieces of research to support the argument that he wanted to make from the start.
And he doesn’t critically engage with the research at all, which is really disappointing for someone who’s supposed to be a psychologist. But a lot of people just buy into that idea that, of course, it must be problematic. And because there’s so much media reporting around the idea that social media in particular or screen time is problematic, we start to believe that it is and project that onto our own behaviour and think that our behaviour must be bad and therefore we start feeling bad about it.
And so it’s just the whole thing is really, really frustrating and really problematic. But there are some very good people out there and there’s some very good people doing critiques of that kind of stuff. And so it’s one of the reasons why I do the media work that I do.
I mean, I find it quite fun and I enjoy it and I like communicating the research because we do all this research and people do all this research. And if it only stays in academic journals, it’s a little bit pointless because people don’t know what’s influencing their behaviour and help them understand their own behaviour. And so I like communicating it.
But part of my mission is to try and counteract some of the scaremongering and falsehoods that are out there as well. Do you think a lot of people go searching for that information in terms of cognitive bias or not necessarily searching for it, but only really consume the media that is feeding into their cognitive bias of, say, screen time is really bad for children or gaming. Yeah.
More children are going to shoot up their friends. I think it’s so it’s there’s a lot of factors there. So the media is more likely to report on something that’s shocking or that they can make a good headline out of.
So they don’t report on the findings where technology doesn’t seem to have any negative effect on kids because that’s not a very exciting headline. They report in the ones where somebody finds that it does. And then those headlines are more dramatic.
So they catch people’s attention more. And so they’re more likely to click on them. So there’s a few factors.
It’s not just that people are looking for that information, but they also do. There is a bit of cognitive bias there of clicking on things and believing in things that support your own view. And I know when I have done some media stuff, some of the comments I’ve gotten afterwards where I’ve talked about the research and even on my audio book, there’s a couple of reviews where I talk about the research and how most people are fine.
And some of the comments will be, well, clearly that’s not the case. I’m like, I’m telling you what the research suggests, that people are actually mostly fine, but people don’t want to hear us. Some people really want to believe that it must be bad for us.
And I think there’s there are loads of problems with the online world. Like, from my perspective, I would be really happy to find out that this thing isn’t necessarily a big problem. We can focus on this other thing that is a really big problem, like children being exploited, sexually exploited online.
Huge problem. So let’s focus on that rather than kids gaming with their friends, you know, rather than kind of creating a moral panic about all of it. Let’s look at the stuff that actually is a problem and try and focus on that.
But people, some people just don’t want to know. But then I do webinars and seminars with parents or with groups like the one of the health trusts in Northern Ireland. I did some seminars with them and people are often relieved.
Parents and caregivers are often relieved to find out that it’s not everything is not terrible. There are some things to look out for. There are some problems.
Cyberbullying is a problem, but it’s not every single thing that their kid’s doing. If their kid has a phone in their hand, it doesn’t mean the end of the world. And so people are quite relieved to find that out for the most part.
Do you think parents and educators need to be slightly educated a bit more about the impacts of technology? Do you think or do you think they have bought into the media hype around the bad or the negative effects of technology and they actually need to be almost re-educated in a way in terms of giving them the cyber story and giving them a proper balance? Yeah, and I think it’s not their fault. You know, we say bought into it’s what they’re doing. But what they see, they often aren’t getting a contrasting view.
And so they’re and they’re being presented it by someone like Haidt, who is a psychologist. They think that should be reliable information and it’s unfortunately not. And so it’s hard for people who aren’t in the field to pull it apart and understand that that person isn’t really constructively looking at the research and presenting something unbiased.
He’s telling a good story and it’s a compelling story. And so you can understand why people do buy into it. I think a lot of parents are relieved to get education about it and understand that it’s not such a problem.
Getting that education out to parents is quite difficult. And again, it’s one of the reasons I do media stuff. It’s one of the reasons why I did the book.
But even trying to get that to people can be quite difficult and to spread the word about it. It’s kind of a bit of a problem because we don’t have the same reach as the newspapers and the media and television programs and so on. Exactly.
We will continue to fight the fight. Exactly. And spread the word.
So you do a lot of talks and a lot of media interviews. What are the things that you focus on and what are you wanting to do going forward or hoping to do going forward? So I talk about a lot of different areas, which is unusual. I would typically have tried to stay in my own lane, my own research area, which, of course, is a lot of online dating, online communication, relationships and technology, things like that.
But because I teach across a broad area and oftentimes the media will come to me about stuff that I teach about, but isn’t my research area, the segments tend to be quite short. So it’s kind of surface level. And so if it’s a much bigger, deeper thing, I tend not to do it if it’s not in my area.
But I talk about a lot of different things. So I do talks for companies. I do media stuff and I’ll talk about general cyber psychology topics like, you know, who we are online, why we behave the way we do online, things like disinhibition, toxic behavior, harassment, trolling.
I’ll talk about how we present ourselves, how we communicate. I’ll also do quite quite a few of my talks are about well-being and social media, well-being and screen time, sometimes in the context of kids, sometimes both adults and kids. I also talk a bit about cybersecurity.
So things like the psychological reasons behind why we fall for phishing and scams and stuff like that, because that’s another one that I think the public can only benefit from having education around why that happens. And I think it’s quite important. So, yeah, I also talk a bit about the psychology of UX and how cyber psychology relates to UX.
So quite a few different areas. And I love doing those things. I love all of them, the media, the public talks, the company talks, everything like that.
I just find it really, really fun to do because it is, again, getting another audience to hear about all the exciting stuff in cyber psychology. And I love to talk about cyber psychology. So if somebody wants me to, I’m always open to that.
But, yeah, I think just a lot of different areas. But I specifically love talking about online dating and technology and relationships, which I sometimes get to do, but not as much for company talks. I have done one or two, which were quite fun, but that’s more media stuff.
Generally. So if a company wants to bring you in to do a talk for them, how do they get in touch with you? Is it through LinkedIn the best way to get in touch with you or through Twitter or? LinkedIn or my website. So my website has a lot of kind of what I do, what I’m able to do.
So a lot of TV clips, radio clips, all that kind of stuff. So things that I have done in the past. LinkedIn, I’m not a massive fan of LinkedIn, but I do check it because I have to.
And Twitter, I used to be on there a lot and I’m not so much anymore. But you can find me through any of them. I will always check them.
But any of those means are a way to get me. But my website has a lot of kind of information about how to get in touch and what kind of things I do. OK, and are you able to specialise or customise your presentations and talks for companies if they say we’d really love you to talk about this? Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah. Within the realms of what I’m experienced at. Yeah.
But yeah, absolutely. I’ve done that quite a lot. And you are planning on starting a podcast.
Tell us about that. So it very much comes from the same place as the motivation for the book, which is counteracting those narratives that are out there and communicating the fascinating research that’s being done in cyber psychology. So we don’t have a title for it yet.
We’ve been brainstorming, have come up with a couple of really nice ideas that I’m brainstorming about at the moment. The I think it’ll probably launch in the summer. We’re kind of in the planning discussion stages at the moment.
So it’s going to be myself and my co-host, Dr. Liam Chaloner, who is a lecturer in IADT as well, who’s going to be taking over for me as the programme chair of the Masters next year. He’s a fantastic researcher, fantastic lecturer. So it’s going to be great having the two of us doing it.
And we are going to delve into a lot of those topics that people are interested in, worried about. And I’m hoping that we can also integrate people, people’s voices into it as well. So get people to share their experiences, ask questions, etc.
and as part of it as well. So it won’t be a kind of a guest based podcast. We may occasionally have guests if somebody really interesting is around, but it’ll be more of a sharing the research.
So I have some favourite podcasts that I absolutely love, which aren’t on cyber psychology topics at all because there’s very little out there. But there’s one called Maintenance Phase and another one called If Books Could Kill. And I love the format of having two presenters and one researches something and presents it to the other presenter and they have a conversation around it.
I find it really engaging and they really get into the nitty gritty of the research. And I find that really fun. So the audience is me and people like me.
The audience is people who are interested in cyber psychology. Again, that idea of people who are curious about why we behave the way we do, what the research tells us about how technology’s impacted on us, all of those kinds of things. That sounds fascinating because it’s all those little questions and especially talking with another cyber psychologist, you can ask those very specific questions that really bring up the nuances of what that means for the general public.
That’s very exciting. I’ll definitely link to that as soon as it’s out. Well done on doing that.
Well, we haven’t we haven’t done it yet. But yeah, it takes time. I found it took ages for me to build up enough courage to actually get to the point of doing it.
And it’s just putting yourself out there is the first step. And even think about it’s the first step. I’m doing a really interesting course at the moment in IDT.
It’s a certificate in radio and podcast production. And that’s given me so many ideas about how to go about it and what kind of things to integrate and how to do the production and everything. So that’s been really great as well.
Is there anything else that you want to chat about that you find really fascinating and haven’t we haven’t covered yet? There’s so much about cyber psychology that I find fascinating, but we don’t have time to cover all of it. I think they’re the main things like my research, what we teach, the kind of reasons why I get into communicating all of this. And I think they’re all the core things.
I think if I get into talking about another subject that I’m interested in, we could be here for another hour. Which would be great for me. We’ve got things to do.
And that’s outside of you, the audible book you’ve done, what is the one book that you would recommend to other people to listen to or read right now? Can I recommend two? Yes, you can. I can’t choose between the two. OK, so there are two very different kinds of books.
The first one is a textbook and it’s an introductory text to cyber psychology called an introduction to cyber psychology. And the second edition just came out a few weeks ago, just before Easter. And it’s all written by lecturers in IDT or lecturers who were lecturers in IDT.
But it is kind of the core textbook. It’s a BPS core textbook. It’s really, really, really excellent.
So I highly recommend that for someone who wants to read more about the academic side and the research side of it. For people who don’t read an academic textbook. Pete Etchell just released a new book just before Easter called Unlocked.
And it is fantastic. And I cannot recommend it highly enough. I have the printed book behind me, but I also listened to it on Audible because that’s how I absorb most of my information at the moment.
And it is so, so good. It is the book that I would have liked to have written. It’s fantastic.
So it gets into the idea of screen time, the problems of conceptualizing screen time the way that it is in research and in conversation. Looking at the idea of addiction and whether or not we’re addicted to things. Looking at gaming, looking at so many different aspects, distraction, the idea that our attention span is reducing and looking at the good quality research on those and pulling those concepts apart.
And it’s very reassuring, you know, because the research isn’t terrible about most of these things. Most stuff is actually fine. So it’s really excellent.
Cannot recommend it enough. That’s definitely my next Audible purchase. Next month, ironing.
You’ll really enjoy it, I think. Nicola, thank you so much for all your time and all the insights and you just doing the most fascinating things in cyber psychology. And thank you so much for everything you’ve shared.
And we’ll be linking to all your podcasts and any books, all the books you’ve written and all the talks that you’ve done in the past on our YouTube channel and all social media posts. But thank you very much for joining us on Confessions of a Cyber Psychologist. Thank you very much for having me here.
