Line up - Øredev 2019

Alison Attrill-Smith

Having completed her undergraduate degree at Birkbeck College, University of London, Dr Alison Attrill completed a PhD in Social Cognition at St Andrews University, prior to taking up a position as an ESRC Research Fellow at St Andrews. Subsequently Alison spent 7 years at De Montfort University where she became particularly interested in understanding the social behaviour of people online. Seeing this as an extension of offline social cognitive behaviour, Dr Alison Attrill is now predominantly interested in how people construct their self online. This includes all aspects of online behaviour, but particularly platonic and romantic relationships as well as functional relationships online. Her other interests lie in the area of online crime, in particular understanding perpetrator behaviour online. Editor of the core text Cyberpsychology and author of the Palgrave Pivot Series Title The Manipulation of Online Self-Presentation: Create, Edit, Re-edit and Present, Alison is currently involved in a number of research projects including work exploring the understanding of Catfishing, trust and privacy concerns online, the perceived realness and consequences of online behaviour for individuals’ offline worlds, cyberbullying in the workplace and many more exciting areas of research.

Friday

Debunking the Myth: Extending Cyberpsychology Beyond Freud

Key takeaways

You will learn what we do in cyberpsychology
What types of psychology we look at in online behaviour
Learn not to reduce online psychology to a single theory

Cyberpsychology has become one of the fastest growing areas of psychology in the last 10 – 15 years. It draws on traditional areas of psychology to help understand online and connected behaviour. It has evolved from a psychology around human computer interactions, which was very much focused on how people use technology, the benefits and costs, advantages and disadvantages of interacting with certain types of technology. Cyberpsychology has extended this to incorporate how we perceive, interpret, think and feel about our online interactions. It also considers both the online and offline impacts of our interconnected acts on our psyche, wellbeing and behaviours. Interactions that cyberpsychologists explore can range from helping people to date better online, to avoid falling victim to the worst of online dating scams, and from using online tools to enhance one’s social existence to becoming overly reliant on online interactions to the detriment of an offline social circle. Cyberpsychologists focus on the Internet and any technology or applications used for any type of interconnected behaviour as a tool. It serves as something to use to achieve a goal, usually a goal motivated by underlying psychological motives. When non-psychologists think of psychology, they usually think of Freud and outdated theoretical applications to human behaviour. In this talk, I will outline how our work as cybersociologists could not be further from this perception. I will consider the role of different areas of psychology in helping us understand the array of online behaviours we experience in our everyday lives. In doing so, I will focus on a number of different behaviours, including criminal activities, online socialising and online shopping to illustrate a need to look beyond Freudian theory to a more inclusive psychological approach to thinking of the end user when designing technology.