What inspired you to become a psychologist?
My mum is a clinical psychologist, and my dad moved from clinical psychology into brain research. When I was a kid, I always wanted to be a clinical psychologist, but when I got into my teens I thought maybe it wasn’t cool to do what your parents do and I chose to study history at college.
I loved it, but I noticed that I was always really interested in the people in history, the effects that events had on them and why they made particular decisions. So I went on to study psychology at the University of Sussex.
How did you get involved in research?
I did a PhD in Trinity, looking at how people’s perceptions of ageing influence their cognitive and physical health. I worked with Prof Rose Anne Kenny, who leads the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing or Tilda, and we could see that if people feel they are old, that is reflected in their cognitive and physical abilities.
How this happens is not clear, but it may be that people withdraw from society more if they feel subjectively old, and they take on fewer challenges. After my PhD I went to Columbia University to research how perceptions of ageing affect people physically. We could see that even being told you are old could affect things like blood pressure.
Why did you move to the ESRI?
I really liked the applied nature of the research I was doing on ageing, and I had that spark of wanting to do more research that had an impact. So I joined the Economic and Social Research Institute in 2017.
In finance we have just done a study looking at why people don’t switch mortgage providers, and thereby miss out on savings,
Tell us about the work you do there
In the behavioural research unit, we are interested in why people make decisions and why they behave in the way they do. We use what we know from psychology and behavioural economics to design research that we apply to lots of different areas.
And what kinds of projects have you worked on?
Lots of different kinds. For example, in health we have looked at what people believe about obesity, and what affects doctors’ decisions about prescribing antibiotics. And during the Covid-19 pandemic, we looked in real time at how people understood the risk of the virus, and attitudes towards vaccination.
In finance we have just done a study looking at why people don’t switch mortgage providers, and thereby miss out on savings, and we trialled an app to support people to look at switching. For the environment, we are tracking what people think about climate change and active forms of transport, and we are looking at systems to encourage people to retrofit homes.
What’s the biggest challenge of being in research?
We work with experts from lots of different disciplines, so you need to be open to listening and learning, getting up to speed with different fields. It’s a challenge, but that also makes it interesting.
So I am not working only in psychology and behavioural science, but I am learning more about economics, sociology, political science and ethics. I also love the analysis of the data, when you get to dive into the numbers and find out the answers to the research questions.
And can you switch off from work completely?
We have three young kids, so family life is busy. I have also started back at Gaelic football; our local club has a team for mothers. It’s brilliant; there is nothing like being out on the pitch to burn off your energy and make you forget any work stresses.
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