February 2020

What do you work on?

HDual process theories of reasoning and decision making.

What real-world problem do you see that your research could impact?

Understanding how we think can help improve it. It’s not easy to make good choices when surrounded by fake news and media echo chambers, difficult emotions, and the lure of short term rewards and this leads us to make decisions that are not in our best long term interests both on a personal level and a societal level.

If we had a smarter approach to thinking about our complex world then it would be a happier, fairer place and better for all.

“I was able to put together my first simple experiment very quickly – in a few hours – and ran it the next day.”

What did you do using Gorilla?

Dual process theories of reasoning and decision making look at how intuitive and analytic thought processes interact. I am interested in the intuitive processes of thinking.

Mostly experiments in this area study problems in which an intuitive response conflicts with a more deliberate, analytic response such as in the classic bat and ball problem.

“A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?” Many people answer 10 cents, when the right answer is 5 cents.

However, there is now evidence suggesting that there are initially several intuitive responses that occur in parallel. I would go a bit further and suggest that there are several distinct mechanisms of intuition that have been found, and my question is how these different intuitions operate and influence each other.

So, I am using Gorilla to develop a task with multiple intuitive responses in order to investigate how our different intuitions interact and combine during thinking.

“I found the tools for building experiments to be very easy to learn and implement.”

For you, what is the stand-out feature in Gorilla?

The flexibility. Other online platforms can handle a few different kinds of study types – e.g., questionnaires, rapid presentation of stimuli, but no platform brought them together in the way Gorilla does. In hand with this is its ease of use. At first I thought it would be difficult to use given its flexibility, but even complex experiments are simple to set up in less than an hour. ecently I have used Gorilla in cross cultural studies, with collaborators sharing Gorilla studies with populations in Africa and South America.

What did you find?

I haven’t figured out how they interact yet, but I have discovered that it doesn’t seem to work as I had originally thought!

For you, what is the stand-out feature in Gorilla?

I was able to put together my first simple experiment very quickly – in a few hours – and ran it the next day. I found the tools for building experiments to be very easy to learn and implement.

How do you think online research is going to change your field?

The speed of data collection is remarkable. New technology has always shaped the space of possible research in science and I expect that online research will influence the type of research that is conducted too.