Research Projects

How well can we understand people who differ from ourselves?

Societies are becoming more polarised, partly because people often misunderstand the beliefs and intentions of those who are different from themselves. To understand why these misconceptions occur, this research investigated how good people are at thinking about other people’s minds.

Are people just less likely to bother thinking about the minds of people they disagree with? Or are people less able to understand them, even if they try to do so?

Read the full paper here:

Payne, B., Bird, G., & Catmur, C. (2024). Poorer representation of minds underpins less accurate mental state inference for out-groups. Scientific Reports, 14, 19432. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-67311-3

Read about this research in relation to the UK 2024 riots, published in The Conversation (August 2024) and in Nautilus: Psychology (September 2024). You can also read about it in relation to our mental health on Inspire The Mind (September 2024)

This research has also been reported in Phys.Org, Mirage News, Yahoo News, KCL news centre, and Tolerance.ca (August 2024).

This research was completed at King's College London, in collaboration with Dr Caroline Catmur (King's College London) and Professor Geoffrey Bird (University of Oxford) and was funded by The John Templeton Foundation.

Anti-Brexit March in London, quite a few

What can be done to help people understand each other better?

woman in black long sleeve shirt holding

This research explored what could help people to understand others better. For example, does just knowing that you're likely less able than you think at understanding people you disagree with, help you to reconsider their point of view?

Does being told that your initial understanding was wrong, help you to come to a more accurate conclusion?

This research is currently under review, but will be available as a pre-print here shortly.

This research is being run at King's College London, in collaboration with Dr Caroline Catmur (King's College London) and Professor Geoffrey Bird (University of Oxford) and is funded by The John Templeton Foundation.

How does perceived similarity between the self and another affect our processing?

The enfacement illusion is similar to the rubber hand illusion but involves faces. In this illusion, people feel like another person's face is becoming part of their own when they see that person's face being touched in the same way their own face is being touched.

This research asked three questions:

Is the illusion stronger if people are more similar to one another?
Does the illusion result from alterations to the self-concept?
Is susceptibility to the illusion associated with interoceptive processing
i.e. one's perception of the internal state of the body?

Results indicated that the illusion is facilitated by the similarity between the self and the other and is mediated by the incorporation of the other into the self-concept. However, sensitivity to one’s own internal states did not impact upon embodiment within the enfacement illusion.

Read the full paper here:

Payne, B., & Catmur, C. (2024). Embodiment in the enfacement illusion is mediated by self–other overlap. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 379(20230146).

https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2023.0146

This research was completed at King's College London, in collaboration with
Dr Caroline Catmur (King's College London).

How does language in the media affect how we mentalise and empathise?

This project, which is still on-going, explores what influences the way we think about others. Do we inherit ways of thinking about the minds of out-group members (i.e. people we differ from) from others, via cultural learning?

Specifically, I've been looks at how reading about out-group members (i.e. immigrants) in The Daily Mail vs The Guardian changes the way we think about them and, further, whether it relates to the presence of mental and/or emotional states within the language.

This research is currently under review, but will be available as a pre-print here shortly.

What factors influence how we perceive and process a voice?

Voices are important to who we are as people - we use them to interact with others, to represent ourselves, to be recognised. This study explored how people perceive and process a new, synthesised, voice .

Sometimes it is necessary for people to take on a new voice (e.g. people living with ALS) and we wanted to know what factors were important in how far someone comes to process a new voice as being related to themselves.

We built a novel online game where participants interacted with one another using a new voice. We compared how far the new voice was processed as being one's own in two different groups of people: one that used the voice in a conversation during the online game, and another group who had only briefly heard the voice.

Read the full paper here:

Payne, B., Addlesee, A., Rieser, V., & McGettigan, C. (2024). Self-ownership, not self-production, modulates bias and agency over a synthesised voice. Cognition, 248, 105804. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105804

This research was completed at University College London, in collaboration with Professor Carolyn McGettigan (Univeristy College London), Dr Angus Addlesee (Applied Scientist at Amazon Alexa) and Professor Verena Rieser (Google Deepmind) The study was funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

How do our brains prioritize the sound of our voice?

This research examines why we tend to recognise and prioritise our own voice over others. Specifically, whether this happens because our voice sounds like us (self-similarity) or because we actually produced the sound (self-generation).

Across three studies we show that our brains are flexible in recognising and prioritising voices associated with ourselves, whether or not we actually produced the sound. This has potential implications for technologies that use voice cloning, showing that a cloned voice can still feel personal and relevant to the user.

Read the pre-print here:

Rosi, V., Payne, B., & McGettigan, C. (2024). Effects of self-similarity and self-generation on the perceptual prioritisation of voices. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/aqt4n

This research is also discussed in The Telegraph.

This research was completed at University College London, in collaboration with Dr Victor Rosi and Professor Carolyn McGettigan. The study was funded by the Leverhulme Trust and The British Academy.

What makes a voice 'mine'? Can another's voice become yours?

Voices are central to who we are and how we share ourselves with others. This research explored whether a voice that isn’t (biologically) your own could still become strongly associated with your identity.

These studies demonstrated that even a stranger's voice could become closely linked to your identity if you have sense of ownership over it, especially when you have a choice in the selection of the voice. This research informed the design and allocation of synthetic voices for communication devices, and furthered our understanding of how perceptually flexible our self-concept is.

Read the full paper here:

Payne, B., Lavan, N., Knight, S., & McGettigan, C. (2021). Perceptual prioritization of self-associated voices. British Journal of Psychology, 112(3), 585-610. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12479

This research has also been discussed here: Intro to Online Behavioural Research.

You can try out (and clone!) these studies via Gorilla Open Materials here.

This research was completed at University College London, in collaboration with Professor Carolyn McGettigan (Univeristy College London), Dr Sarah Knight, and Dr Nadine Lavan. The study was funded by the Leverhulme Trust.