New horizons in human behaviour research

At the University of Birmingham there are hundreds of ongoing interdisciplinary projects within the realm of ‘human behaviour’. Here, we delve into three particularly cutting edge strands of research.

Protecting the protectors

"Studying human behaviour is complex because behaviour doesn’t occur in a vacuum, the individual resides within systems that influence behaviour.” Professor Jessica Woodhams, a forensic psychologist explains that “behaviour results from an interaction between the individual and the environment, or more accurately the environments, they are in.”

She points to the University of Birmingham as a stellar setting for such complex research and cites the scale of human behaviour activity already underway to meet major societal challenges including climate action, the cost of living crisis, and promoting physical and mental health for all. The University backs up the academic know-how with an environment to support research, from the catalysing units for interdisciplinary research, such as the Institute for Global Innovation and Institute of Advanced Studies, the laboratory settings at the Centre for Human Brain Health, and The Exchange, a space in the heart of Birmingham city centre that helps researchers to directly engage with the public.

“You really do need that wide variety of support and access to expertise because studying human behaviour requires a whole systems approach spanning different disciplines,” says Professor Woodhams.

The field covers all types of offences from acquisitive crimes such as shoplifting and fraud, to serious forms of interpersonal crime such as murder and rape. It demands a blending of methodologies – qualitative research and data science – and greatly benefits from combining psychological knowledge and methods with those from allied disciplines (e.g., criminology, linguistics, economics).

Professor Woodhams believes the field has undergone significant change in the last decade with new modes of thinking and technological advances adding additional layers of complexity to the work, but also presenting more opportunities to benefit law enforcement and criminal justice.

She says that there is a broad recognition to move towards a more challenge-led approach to research in partnership with key stakeholders and law enforcement practitioners. It is something the University, through systems and networks such as the Centre for Crime, Justice and Policing (CCJP), has been doing for some time.

“I think that’s where a lot of the really exciting, impactful work happens for sure. But it’s important that we continue with blue sky discovery science too as, quite simply, we don’t always know the answer to those challenges when they’re presented to us and it’s through widening our evidence base that we’ll be better prepared. Both approaches are needed.”

Perhaps the biggest shift though has been in technology and its evolving relationship with criminal offending and pathways to justice.

“Technology is clearly a major consideration for us – in both the behaviours we see in offenders and the methods we can now use to understand them. In my particular area of focus – sexual offenders – there has been a marked change. For example, it has altered the way in which people meet and first engage. Whether its social media or dating apps, these new technologies present new routes through which an offender might meet, harass, or abuse a victim – but they also open up potential pathways through which perpetrators might be apprehended. It has shifted how law enforcement operates, and throughout that is a common thread of behavioural change.”

Advances in data science are also changing how practitioners, particularly those in analyst roles, go about their work.

The key, she says, is to marry the technological tools with the human element, and to work with practitioners and interdisciplinary experts to foreground their experiences as much as the technology itself. That’s precisely what the Protecting the Protectors research project is setting out to do.

Alongside her colleague Dr Fazeelat Duran, Professor Woodhams is working to understand the impact on employees who are exposed to distressing materials as part of their work including analysts for serious crime cases, social media moderators, front-line emergency services personnel. Exposure to this material can have a negative impact on cognitions, emotions, and of course, behaviour too.

“These people are working to either stop, apprehend, or prevent some of the most extreme crimes and that often means they are exposed to highly distressing images, videos or reports on a daily basis. We want to explore how they cope with that kind of work, the behaviours they undertake in order to protect themselves, and how their organisations are best able to support them. Understanding human behaviour is paramount to that.”

The research found that these practitioners would often engage in detrimental behaviours, sometimes inhibiting their own lives in order to feel safer because of their elevated perception of risk. Some of that, they reported, was due to the attritional effect of seeing such a large volume of material.

That’s where another strand of Professor Woodhams’ research comes in. In an interdisciplinary project, alongside computer scientists, criminologists and practitioners, they are exploring the use of responsible AI (artificial intelligence) and behavioural science to support crime linkage analysis – a method for analysing crime scene behaviour to identify crime series. Currently, this is an entirely manual process. Professor Woodhams explains “Our idea is to build an AI-enabled software system to help prioritise cases, and in doing so reduce the amount of distressing material analysts are required to look at. Again, it doesn’t remove the human element from the process – but it can be a great help to practitioners, and it can help us achieve justice in more cases too.”

Shaping physical activity interventions

Dr Jet Veldhuijzen van Zanten explores the links between behaviour and physiological and psychological health.

At its core, she says, her work is overtly interdisciplinary, sitting at the intersection of physiology, psychology, healthcare, sociology and more. That interdisciplinary mindset is somewhat natural to an academic in the School of Sport, Exercise and Rehabilitation Sciences and is clear from their established close links with colleagues in Psychology, the Medical School, and Social Sciences - but straddling so many fields of study can make the research design process challenging.

“My research demands a breadth of foundational knowledge across subject matters, and nowhere is that more pronounced than in human behaviour, explains Dr. Veldhuijzen van Zanten. “I perhaps have a slight advantage because my background in both physiology and psychology makes it a little easier to speak the different languages, if you will.”

“In my work it’s not just about getting those diverse viewpoints from an academic perspective but also speaking to our various stakeholders to understand what is possible within a clinical setting or within a specific community. So we have to be interdisciplinary beyond the walls of the University.”

A key strand of Dr. Veldhuijzen van Zanten’s work is on the relationship between physical activity, stress and health (both physical and psychological) – with recent studies conducted with people diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis.

“There is a real duality to how we consider human behaviour within communities,” says Dr. Veldhuijzen van Zanten. “Behaviour can be the root cause of health risks, but also the foundation of our solution to them. That duality is particularly stark in people with rheumatoid arthritis where fatigue is a significant problem, it becomes a major obstacle to doing physical activity, and yet regular physical activity can be the very thing that reduces that fatigue”.

“That’s why we focus our efforts on designing interventions that can work in practice and with an appreciation for how humans behave. I think greater interdisciplinary thinking is helping us to improve our interventions as a research community and within healthcare – but we do have space to improve.”

She points to the example of the oft-cited mantra that adults should take 10,000 steps per day to stay healthy and fit. Indeed, wearable fitness devices can often promote that number as a specific target and it remains persistent in health magazines and newspapers. But, she says, it speaks to a common problem with health interventions that can feel prescriptive or inconsiderate of an individual’s circumstances.

There are seeds of change. The revised physical activity guidelines issued by the UK Chief Medical Officers (Dr Veldhuijzen van Zanten was a member of the working group for adults) are now specifically mention the idea that ‘every minute counts’ – an appreciation that some exercise is better than none. There is room though, she says, for that message to be clearer and better communicated to the general public.

“We were already starting to see a shift away from that thinking, but the Covid-19 pandemic brought a lot more urgency to it. Within my own work, we were assessing stress in people who were suddenly placed into a new environment with additional stress-causing factors. The rheumatoid arthritis community were particularly vulnerable and placed in shielding measures, bringing heightened anxieties and additional things to consider. You have to then assess whether your interventions are feasible, and if you need more flexible frameworks that encourage positive physical activity behaviours.”

Not only did the pandemic place additional emphasis on the need to understand an individual’s stresses in terms of their levels of physical activity, particularly for the rheumatoid arthritis community, but it also necessitated a shift away from some of the lab-based experiments on stress towards remotely-held observational studies.

“In a sense, it moved our methodological approach towards what might be considered closer to social science research. If we’re to design more helpful interventions for physical activity then this interdisciplinary approach needs to be the norm rather than the exception. I’d like to think we are at the forefront of doing that in our work.”

Young people, social media and mental health

Barely a week passes without seeing a negative headline about social media and its role in the lives of young people. There are regular calls from media, and governments, for the major service providers to do more to moderate content in order to protect younger users. But, argues Dr. Victoria Goodyear, the relationship between young people and social media is far more complicated.

“Social media isn’t something that young people fear. They’ve grown up with it, and have gotten used to a smartphone full of apps, to the point at which their phone is almost an extension of their self. They don’t see a conversation they have on Snapchat or TikTok as being inherently separate from their face-to-face interactions, it’s a continuation of their ongoing conversations.”

“Because it’s so prevalent – many young people we research spend between five and ten hours a day on their smartphones – there are going to be examples of online activity interacting with negative actors or influences. But not all young people experience risk in these settings, most do not, and that belies the commonly reported idea that it is a causal relationship. In reality, those people who are already vulnerable are going to be vulnerable in these online settings.”

She asserts that there will always be a space for the negative or dangerous content that we see on social media. If Facebook were to ban users under a certain age or place a blanket ban on conversations about mental health, for example, people would find other online or offline spaces in which to have that conversation. What is often overlooked, she explains, is the supportive elements that can also be found on these platforms whereby people interact with positive discussions about mental and physical health, or discover spaces to have conversations with people experiencing similar challenges to them.

Social media is an inevitable part of our future lives. As each generation grows and novel technologies emerge, a new platform comes to the fore and sees astonishing growth (TikTok was established in 2016 and already has over 1 billion monthly users). The interface and branding might change but, says Dr. Goodyear, the underlying behaviours remain broadly similar – likes are more sought-after than comments, influencers hold significant sway, and misinformation is a concern.

It is certainly not a fad that will pass. For teachers and education policymakers, this necessitates a move away from the hard-nosed instinct to simply ban phones and block access to social media during school hours. That is something of a reflex response that is partly down to the difficulty that many parents and teachers have in navigating these online spaces, relative to their children.

Dr Goodyear says that better guidance is needed. “There’s a lot more we can learn about the experiences of young people with social media and technology, and a lot more to unpack about how it might prove helpful in certain settings. There’s limited support available for teachers and so it makes sense they have the reaction they do – but there is no real evidence base for what the best approach might be.”

To that end, Dr Goodyear and colleagues (from the Institute of Applied Health Research, Institute for Mental Health, and School of Sport, Exercise and Rehabilitation Sciences) are working on an NIHR-funded SMART Schools project.

The primary research question is to investigate the relationship between time spent by young people on their smartphones with mental wellbeing outcomes. However, their diverse research design is based on a systems-thinking approach that acknowledges the different factors that influence behaviour.

“At the heart of it we’re looking at schools that have a phone ban in place and comparing them to those that don’t. We’re exploring the impact on mental health, reporting motives for them using their phones, educational attainment, sleep quality, physical activity and more. We’ll be combining those large-scale quantitative data with qualitative research involving teachers, families and the students themselves. Added to that is our economic analysis – to determine the potential long-term cost-savings to the NHS for example. You can see how deeply interdisciplinary and complex the study is.”

It is an example of what Dr. Goodyear says is the most significant change in behavioural study in the past decade. “I think, in the academic sense, we’ve shifted our focus away from the behaviour of the individual and towards an appreciation of system-thinking and society-wide behaviour.”

“That’s exciting though and why I enjoy the work. Human behaviour is so complex, you cannot expect to find simple answers.”