Mandeep K. Dhami, PhD Reader in Forensic Psychology Director, Postgraduate Programme in Forensic Psychology School of Psychology University of Surrey
School of Psychology Over 50 academics and postdoctoral researchers. Rated 16/102 Psychology departments in UK in 2010 Sunday Times rankings. Since 2007 has hosted over 40 research grants (over 4 million) funded by ESRC, BBSRC, MRC, EPSRC, EU, government departments and others. Long history of integrating applied psychology theories and ideas in to real world applications. Offer undergraduate BSc and range of postgraduate MSc courses, as well as PhD programme and clinical psychology and psychotherapeutic & counselling practitioner doctorates.
Forensic Psychology @ Surrey Well established and popular postgraduate programme Accredited by British Psychological Society Taught in collaboration with Broadmoor Hospital Evolving to include defence and security contexts Training students in the researcher practitioner model Exposed to practitioners from various forensic and investigative settings Opportunity to visit secure forensic mental health setting Taught qualitative and quantitative skills Opportunity to conduct research 8 core modules (incl. criminal behaviour, treatment, investigation, violent and sexual offending)
Theme led research Encourages cross fertilization of theories and methods Draws together different sub disciplines of psychology, and input from other disciplines. Themes Enhancing Thinking Brain & Behavior Health & Wellbeing etc Research Groups Staff
Enhancing Thinking Includes on going work in cognition, development, psychological neuroscience, forensic, health and social psychology, and history of psychology. Involves thinking processes such as reasoning, problem solving, decision making, and creative thinking. Aims to understand fundamental mechanisms underlying these skills, their interaction with emotion processing, and how these skills can be enhanced and used at levels of brain, individual, organisation and society. Applied to numerous real world domains including health, criminal justice, defence and security, business and organisations, science policy, and education.
Examples of staff included in Enhancing Thinking theme led research: Adrian Banks Modelling and EEG studies to explore reasoning processes and using models to understand and enhance reasoning and decision making in experts. Mandeep Dhami Human judgment and decision making (esp. heuristics, risk, linguistic probabilities); applied to criminal justice system (e.g., judicial, jury, offender, police). Peter Hegarty Subtle influences of thinking about social groups on scientific thinking; critical uses of bibliometrics; history of psychological theories of the intellect; ideological relevance of scientific thinking about the origins of stigmatized traits. Paul Sowden Influences of mood and environment on creative thinking, problem solving and improvisation and how they can be harnessed to improve creative task performance.
Mandeep K. Dhami Research on decision making and social cognition. Testing rational choice models. Multi methods. Applied to criminal justice, defence and security. Offending Law enforcement Forensic science Courts Restorative justice Imprisonment Intelligence analysis
Found that neither legal actors nor offenders are normatively rational. Their decisions best described and predicted by simple heuristic strategies. Ignore much of the available relevant information than by models that weight and integrate information. Their performance marred by errors and biases. E.g. including over reliance on irrelevant or extra legal information, unwanted influences of emotion and hedonic adaptation, intra and inter individual inconsistency, over confidence, lack of self insight, framing effects, and over optimism and self preservation bias. Their performance not necessarily improved by experience (and training) or existing schemes aiding their decisions. But, some of these behaviors are adaptive to internal and external conditions. Offer prescriptive solutions focusing on task and human.
Looking forward to collaborating! Any Questions?