Our main research focuses on how people make financial decisions, and how various factors, from mood to social pressure, affect the decisions people make. The main method of research uses traditional lab-based controlled experiments, but we've been branching out into market-research style survey-based techniques and online testing.

The group applies basic psychological principles developed in perception in order to understand how people deal with risk and utility. By developing a methodology to study 'financial personality' will help determine the key dimensions of consumer financial behavior and how stable they are over an individual's life.

Investigations are performed to explore the way in which financial decision making is affected by context, be it the range of options available or whether a computer or a person is asking the questions. Part of the aim of this research is to work out how to minimise these context effects when trying to determine peoples' true preferences, helping them make decisions that really are in their own best interests.

You can take part in one of our current online experiments here. By using this multi-pronged approach, we're able to check that phenomena we measure in the lab also affect peoples' decisions in the real world.