I am a research psychologist who studies human motivation, health, and well-being in the digital age. I am curious about how our minds navigate the shifting boundaries between analogue and digital environments. Since 2011 – the beginning of the replication crisis in psychology – I have been interested in how different attempts to improve the behavioral sciences might sharpen or obscure how we understand life in an increasingly connected world.

 

More recently, some amazing charities and the UK government have supported my involvement in research probing this. These projects are all about looking at how different scientific approaches using data from surveys, health data, brain scans, online platforms, and video games could teach us something valuable about how humans play, socialise, and thrive.

 

As an undergraduate at the University of Rochester in New York, I enjoyed studying psychology, religion and classics. Later, I was honored to continue my education at Rochester with Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci. Together with clinical psychologist C. Scott Rigby we studied motivation, learning, immersion, and engagement in video games