Find out more here about the first round of our new small grant scheme for 2024-25, which is now live.
The Behaviour Spotlight is dedicated to supporting Warwick's research community, providing support and resources to those working in and with research. We are delighted to highlight the work and feedback of those who successfully received funding from our 2023-24 Small Grant Scheme.
Research themes: Behavioural Change, Computational Behavioural Science, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Behavioural Science
Matthew Cashman - Warwick Business School, Behavioural Science Group
"Behaviour Spotlight funding allowed me to accelerate my research programme shortly after arriving. With this support, I have been able to double the empirical data I have shortly after arriving at Warwick."
Research themes: Computational Behavioural Science
Lucas Castillo Martí - Psychology
"A large body of research has studied how people sample information before making a choice between uncertain outcomes. While previous work has typically assumed that people only learn about the available options when in this exploration step, it is possible that instead they also learn about the environment more generally: what the typical risk is, whether catastrophic outcomes are possible, etc. In addition, people might be trying to exploit spurious patterns as the experiment progresses, such as being in a lucky streak.
Thanks to the Small Grant Scheme, we were able to carry out research on how these factors influence people's search for information. We are currently analysing some data and are looking forward to running a follow-up experiment."
Research themes: Judgement and Decision Making, Policing
Kieran Drury - Statistics
“The Behaviour Spotlight Small Grants Scheme funded my trip to Finland in July 2024 to attend the INFORMS Advances in Decision Analysis Conference. The 3-day event supported my learning and appreciation of interdisciplinary approaches to, and applications of, decision analysis - a core theme of my PhD research. As a student within the Applied Statistics & Risk Unit of the Department of Statistics, interdisciplinary knowledge and connections is a highly valuable asset for my research in developing and applying graph-based decision support systems. It was therefore incredibly interesting to hear so many great talks from other academics and students whose research heavily links to decision analysis but who are from different backgrounds and departments – including psychologists, sociologists and economists. Attending this conference has opened up many possible research directions for me, and this would not have been possible without the awarding of this grant.”
Research themes: Behavioural Change, Judgement and Decision Making
Fenqi Guo - Warwick Business School
"The Behaviour Spotlight grant partially funded my MRes dissertation research project. This research aims to answer how do consumers react to the marketing instrument when they are informed that their behavioral biases are used to design this instrument to increase profit. It examines how consumer awareness changes the effectiveness of this design and consumers’ perception of the brand and product. It employed online survey experiments with hypothetical choices through several vignette studies, distributed through Prolific. This grant provided £700 research budget, in addition to the BSCI student research fund granted by WBS Doctoral Program Office, with the latter one alone being insufficient to conduct a well-powered survey experiment aiming at detecting an interaction effect. This grant allowed me to recruit 800 more participants to achieve the power of 0.8, which made this research more scientifically rigorous. This project has been presented at my PhD upgrade panel, the BSCI Group 2nd WBS-LSE PhD Networking Event, and BSCI Group Brown Bag Seminar."
Research themes: Behavioural Humanities, Computational Behavioural Science, Judgement and Decision Making
Xiaomu Guo - Psychology
"Thanks to the generous support from the Warwick Behaviour Spotlight Small Grant Scheme, I have been able to develop a novel behavioural paradigm for studying the interplay between forgetting and risky decisions from experience. The financial support has allowed me to recruit a sufficient number of 240 participants for my study across three groups, ensuring the statistical power and validity of my findings on the role of forgetting in shaping risk-taking behaviours."
