It’s winter in Melbourne which means the Williamstown Literary Festival is coming up. Willy Lit Fest, as it’s affectionately known, offers a wonderful mix of … Read more »
My Father the Whale events
February 14 is Library Lovers Day so what better way to celebrate than by coming along to a Literary Salon at North Melbourne library? Award … Read more »
Fathers and whales
My debut novel My Father the Whale might seem like it came out of the blue. But it was years in the making. I’ve always … Read more »
A Criminal take on Milgram
This episode of the Criminal podcast focusses on the gap between Stanley Milgram’s published accounts of the obedience experiments and the behind-the-scenes reality of life … Read more »
Social psychology and reality TV
I was interviewed recently by a producer and presenter making a radio series about the link between social psychology and reality TV. No surprises that … Read more »
The Holocaust and social psychology
A new BBC radio documentary explores the effect of the Holocaust on five leading social psychologists on both sides of the Atlantic – Kurt Lewin, … Read more »
A real life ‘Lord of the Flies’?
Muzafer Sherif’s Robbers Cave study is often described as a real life ‘Lord of the Flies.’ And it’s true that in some ways Golding’s book … Read more »
Turkish threads
How did Muzafer Sherif come to be studying warring groups of boys in 1950s America? Answering that question took me on a research journey back … Read more »
Recordings of Robbers Cave
Social psychologists like Muzafer Sherif and Stanley Milgram were committed to recording as much of their experiments as possible. Not just on paper, but with … Read more »
Muzafer Sherif’s right hand man – OJ Harvey
Textbook accounts of Muzafer Sherif’s Robbers Cave experiment put Sherif front and centre of the story. But the stories of famous psychological experiments often ignore … Read more »