Psychology in Action at Royal Holloway

On Monday, L6 psychologists Serena L, Ian W, Louise L and Shannon T took part in the National Psychology Competition at Royal Holloway University. In preparation for the competition, pupils were tasked with creating a two-minute video and A1 academic poster responding to the prompt ‘How can psychology help us build a healthier and stronger community?’

Pupils chose to focus on the boarding and international student community, conducting primary research to inform their response and drawing on psychological principles to develop evidence-based recommendations for strengthening community wellbeing in that context. On the day, teams presented their scientific poster and fielded challenging questions from the judges, competing against over sixty schools from across the UK.

Pupils also attended a talk by Dr Elitza Ambrus on cognitive biases in decision-making. Dr Ambrus explored the distinction between System 1 and System 2 thinking and examined anchoring as a cognitive bias, demonstrating how exposure to an initial value leads to insufficient adjustment in subsequent judgements, with implications for sentencing decisions, negotiations, and self-evaluation. Following this, pupils attended a Q&A session with undergraduate students at Royal Holloway to hear about studying psychology at university, maintaining work-life balance while studying, how to make friends at university, and more.

Well done to the team for their enthusiasm, intellectual curiosity, and confident engagement with university-level research.