Tag Archives: psychology

A diamond in the rough? Or a universal design – one for all.

Dr Nancy Doyle (Founder and CRO of Genius Within CIC) and Professor Almuth McDowall ask where we can look for good research on neurodiversity at work and what are the most important knowledge gaps to fill. This lay summary of the research was composed by Nicola Maguire-Alcock.

We live in a time where there is an increased understanding that humans are all different, not only by our physical characteristics, but also how we think and behave. The term ‘neurodiversity’ was first termed by Judy Singer in 1999 to explain why humans naturally have a range of differences in our brains and why we behave differently.

Having an unusual neurotype can mean that there are large gaps between a person’s strengths and those things that they may struggle with, compared with a neurotypical person where the gaps are much smaller. There are a number of examples of neurodifferent conditions such as Autism, Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder, Tourette Syndrome, Dyspraxia and Dyslexia.

More recently, the term ‘neurominority’ has been used instead of neurodiverse in order to provide an understanding that those with an unusual neurotype are at a disadvantage in a range of daily life outcomes, in particular socially, in education and in employment.

Fortunately, understanding regarding neurodiversity has increased in these areas, however it is still a long way off where it needs to be. For example, in the workplace, even with initiatives and policies to support neurominorities, there is a lack of research that looks at the effectiveness of this support and there is not an approach that brings inclusivity from designing a job role through the life cycle of an employee.

Furthermore, as well as limited research in this area, there is also an unfairness in the research that currently exists on neurominorities and into the understanding into ‘what works’ to improve making working environments inclusive.

Firstly, there is an imbalance of research into this area, due to there being a large focus on Autism and mental health at the disadvantage to other neurominorities. ADHD, Dyslexia, DCD, and Tourette Syndrome are all under-researched considering how common these conditions are in society. This means that there is a large risk of ignoring other neurominorities in the work place and a lack of focus on what is needed to improve everyday lives in the working world.

Secondly, we do not have informed practice from those who are living and experiencing these issues. This would bring a huge benefit in understanding and improving the current initiatives that are already in place in this area.

Have a look at the following questions:

  • How do we design roles in a more neuro-inclusive way?
  • How do we hire to ensure all candidates can perform at their best during the process?
  • How do we contract ensuring that the terms and conditions of employment are inclusive?
  • How do we provide training which is inclusive?
  • How can we provide performance reviews which increase success, with inclusive delivery?
  • How can we change standard wellbeing services to support neurominorities’ needs?

Great opportunities as a business and for the individual can be gained as we take forward a new way of working which provides a simple, flexible, friendly model for Human Resources (HR).

In order to address this, it has been proposed that the Principles of Universal Design are applied through the employee life cycle. This provides a process for HR to follow in the workplace.

By using this, it provides the opportunity to create a workplace that works for everyone, which will really change the ‘can nots’ to the ‘can!’. Let’s not wait to miss opportunities that would limit your workforce, limit your company and increase the prevalence of staff becoming stressed or leaving. Now is the time to update your practice and apply this model.

Universal Design provides a set of principles that can guide HR to work at its best, at any point of the employment life cycle. There really is no better time but now to take action.

Please take a look at this illustration:

A flower design showing five strands: 1) Wellbeing 2) Hiring 3) Contracting 4) Training 5) Performance Review 6) Wellbeing

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Introducing the Centre for Neurodiversity at Work

Accessible Summary

The Centre researchers are Almuth McDowall and Nancy Doyle. They found that science has ignored lots of important questions about neurodifferences. The found most research looked at children not adults or work. It didn’t think about race or gender or sexuality. They wanted to help.

They are working with a board who have different backgrounds. The board are neurodiverse. The Centre wants to make sure that people who are being studied are part of decisions. The Centre wants to help employers get better at including. The Centre wants to help neurodifferent people reach their potential.

Visual Summary

Infographic showing some of the key statistics shared in this blog.

What is the Centre for?

The Centre for Neurodiversity Research at Work (C4NRAW) is spearheaded by the Department of Organizational Psychology in the School of Business, Economics and Informatics at Birkbeck, University of London and Genius Within, a social enterprise focusing on HR and inclusion services. We’d like to introduce ourselves and our research priorities.

How it started

The Centre is Co-Directed by founders Professor Almuth McDowall and Dr Nancy Doyle, both Organizational Psychologists known widely for their expertise in Neurodiversity and organizational psychology. This brings a holistic perspective for this important topic. They met when Almuth supervised Nancy’s PhD, which was an evaluation of coaching as a disability intervention for Dyslexic adults. The PhD included a review of neurodiversity research, in which we discovered that hardly any research is focused on adults. The small amount of funding and publications is not in balance with how many adults there are with different neurotypes. For example:

  • Even though there are almost as many people with Tourette Syndrome as Autistic people, there is almost 50 times as much research about Autistic people as Tourettes.
  • There is also 50 times more Autism research than Dyspraxia research, even though there are 5 times as many Dyspraxic people as Autistic people.
  • Around 63% of ADHD research is aimed at children.
  • 94% of Dyslexia research is aimed at children and literacy.
  • Adults have different concerns compared to children, like memory, organization, and time management skills.

We also noticed that there were very few studies looking at intersectional exclusion, by that we mean the added layers of bias and discrimination faced by those who are female, belong to the Global Ethnic Majority or LGBTQ+ communities. Autism research tended towards white cishet[1] males, frequently from privileged backgrounds. Most of the dyslexia research (60%) involved scanning the brains of kids to find the bits that are “broken!”

There were only a handful of papers related to ND[2] strengths, though we quickly summarized these and set about publishing them. We started evaluating what “works” so that we could inspire employers to provide the right support.

Our Mission

Our ongoing mission is to focus on addressing the missing research and linking it into employment practice. We want more employers to feel confident in operating neuroinclusive practices so that we can bust through the disability employment gap for invisible disability. Employers often have misconceptions about what neurodiversity means. For example, it is often assumed that dyslexia is difficulty with reading and writing, whereas it can manifest as difficulty with memory, time management, organisation and wellbeing.

Around 22% of the entire population are neurodivergent, but in the UK, just 53.6% of disabled people are currently in work, compared to 81.7% of those who are not disabled. Many more disabled people could succeed in the workplace if they were given access to reasonable adjustments.

Neurodiverse people bring unique qualities to the workplace, including creativity, focus, strategic thinking, innovation and problem-solving. We want neurodivergent adults to work at their best, more of the time. We want to reduce unnecessary barriers to work, and in work see more neurodiverse career progression.

We recently published a paper called “Diamond in the Rough” in which we set out all these research priorities and how we would like to tackle them. Please feel free to click through to our research page if you would like to learn more about what we’ve already achieved.

Centre Membership

Our ambition is for the Centre to be staffed and led by a neurodiverse team: that is a balance of generalists and specialists complementing each other. Nancy is an ADHDer, and we have an Advisory Board which is comprised of researchers, practitioners and those with lived experience. We are currently seeking representation from the LGBTQ+ community, do feel free to reach out, the Board meet twice a year to review research priorities and advise the Directors on ethics and sharing results.

We have several ND PhD and professional doctorate students who are part of the Centre by virtue of studying a Neurodiversity or Disability (including neurodiversity) focused PhD at Birkbeck[3]. They are Uzma Waseem, Charlie Ekton, Jessica Dark, Greg Swaysland and Ben Morris.

We’ll be using this blog to communicate our research findings in an accessible format and start conversations with our wider community. We’ll post calls for research participants and would like to work with our donor team on corporate funding for specific projects. Do feel free to reach out and to join our mailing list if you haven’t already!

We are working towards a world where neurominorities equal specialism rather than exclusion and work is neuroinclusive. We are pioneering the design, evaluation, and practical implementation of Universal Design for Human Resources. We are walking our own talk and making sure that there is “nothing about us without us” in ND research at work. And we are super excited to only just be getting started!

Further Information

[1] “Cis” meaning not transgender and “het” meaning heterosexual.

[2] We’re going to use ND as an abbreviation for neurodifferent / neurodivergent / neurodiverse as we know all three of these can be preferred. We also use Neurominorities as an umbrella term for ADHD, Autism, Dyslexia, Dyspraxia, Dyscalculia, Tourettes and more.

[3] Birkbeck was established with the sole purpose of educating working people through flexible education scheduled so that people who are in work can take part. Therefore social justice has always been at the heart of Birkbeck’s mission.

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Decision making under uncertainty: Ambiguity preferences

David Schröder, Associate Professor in Finance at Birkbeck’s Department of Economics, Mathematics and Statistics, and Elisa Cavatorta, Associate Professor in the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London, have developed a questionnaire to measure how members of the public make decisions under uncertainty. Take the survey online to find out your ambiguity preferences.

Cartoon of a figure at a crossroads

This article was originally posted on the Research Outreach blog and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Every decision and action that we take in life is associated with a degree of uncertainty; whether we cross a road, what we invest our money in, what career we follow and the thousands of other decisions that we make on a daily basis. Over the years, economists and psychologists have studied different factors that affect how individuals make decisions under uncertainty so that they can better understand what drives the behaviours that we see in the world.

One of the underlying factors that explain individual behaviour under uncertainty is the different degree of tolerance anyone has for situations of uncertainty, in other words their individual preferences. To apply the behavioural models proposed in the scientific literature, it is important to accurately measure these preferences driving our behaviour. Elisa Cavatorta, Associate Professor at the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London, and David Schröder, Associate Professor in Finance at Birkbeck, University of London, noticed that existing approaches to measure uncertainty attitudes are overly complex and therefore rarely used to measure preferences outside economic laboratories. To improve the ability to measure uncertainty attitudes and make their measurement more accessible, they designed a new questionnaire to facilitate the assessment of the preferences guiding everyday decision making under uncertainty.

Understanding risk and ambiguity

The most common factor that people associate with decision making under uncertainty is risk, and how tolerant an individual is towards risky scenarios. In a risk-based situation, we have a sense of the likelihood of the different outcomes that our decisions could deliver. For example, if you roll a fair dice, you know that you have a one in six chance of getting a specific number. Likewise, outcomes of recurring situations may involve known likelihoods: if your parent cooks their usual signature dish, you know the chances that it tastes delicious.

In many situations however, there is an additional degree of uncertainty about the potential outcomes of our decisions and actions. For example, if you hear that the dice that you are about to use has a flaw that means it will not roll fairly, you can no longer accurately predict the likelihood of rolling the number four. If a stranger cooks for you, the probability that the dish is delicious can be vague. Thanks to the work of Knight (1921) and Ellsberg (1961), this degree of uncertainty over vague or unknown probabilities is referred to as ambiguity. Different people have a different “taste” for the lack of accurate information about the probabilities of given outcomes and will respond differently.

Our preferences towards ambiguity guide the decisions that we make under uncertainty. There isn’t an optimal decision that fits all. Optimal decisions for everyone depend on one’s own preferences. If we can accurately measure ambiguity preferences, then we have a powerful insight into human behaviour, that is, how people make choices subject to limited information.

Measuring ambiguity preferences

Traditionally, ambiguity attitudes have been measured within a controlled economic laboratory environment. Ambiguity tests have focused on specific decision tasks involving known and unknown probabilities, often complex to understand and requiring lengthy explanations. This method has produced very accurate results; however, the complexity of these tasks makes them impractical to roll out on a large enough scale to understand the decision-making behaviours that we see in the general population.

Elisa Cavatorta and David Schröder researched ambiguity preferences in great detail. They started from the results in a laboratory setting, but the researchers were motivated to find a more practical way of measuring ambiguity preferences outside of these experiments. They knew that an online survey questionnaire or a questionnaire that could be conducted by telephone would be a far more practical mechanism for collecting data from much larger groups of participants and be more practical for researchers who conduct field studies.

Survey design

Cavatorta and Schröder have designed a simple survey questionnaire, which accurately measures ambiguity preferences. Their work has been inspired by various studies that recommended using surveys to measure other economic preferences. In their 2019 paper, they develop a measurement for ambiguity preferences, adding to existing ones designed to elicit preferences for risk, trust and impatience.

The research team developed their questionnaire using a sample of 121 students from various colleges of the University of London. The idea was to find the best combination of survey questions that would most accurately predict ambiguity preferences elicited with the well-established approach in the laboratory setting. The challenge was to find the best combination of these survey questions. The research team selected around 50 possible candidate survey questions of various types. Some of these questions are short thought-experiments where participants make choices in some hypothetical games (e.g. selecting the preferred option between one unknown, i.e., ambiguous, probability and one with known probability, i.e. risky). Some questions are attitudinal questions from the psychology literature, in which participants assess how much they like or dislike a situation.

The researchers considered the predictive power of all combinations of the candidate questions. Using a selection process that evaluates all possible combinations and then selects the best predictors is a data-driven method that minimises forms of bias in the selection process. The result is a five survey-item questionnaire that provides an individual ambiguity preferences score that correlates well with the ambiguity preference score that would come out in a laboratory setting. This means the survey questionnaire is an accurate substitute when measurement in the laboratory is impractical or unavailable.

Possible uses of the new measurement

The professors recommend their measurement whenever incentivised experiments in a laboratory are not feasible, for example, when researchers need to gather ambiguity preferences of a large number of participants, field-studies, or in scenarios where time or money is limited.

This questionnaire provides the opportunity to conduct large-scale studies into the impact of ambiguity preferences on economic and social behaviour. Given the uncertainty surrounding many decisions in every-day life, applications of the measurement can be wide-ranging. The current pandemic demonstrates people have different preferences for ambiguity and this guides different reactions and health behaviour. Another application concerns the financial services industry: the industry has traditionally focused on risk preferences when recommending the most suitable investment options to its clients. Risk preference assessments help us to understand one element of what makes an investment a good match for an individual. However, investments often involve unknown risks (i.e. ambiguity), so the measurement can assist financial services professionals to better tailor their product recommendations to the client’s tastes and needs.

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Managing the ‘always on’ culture – a myth buster and agenda for better practice

Professor Almuth McDowall (Department of Organizational Psychology) shares her research into worklife balance and calls on employers to take responsibility for their organisation’s culture.

Break, Business, Business People, Businesswoman, Cafe

There is much being written and said about the ‘always on culture’ and how we are increasingly glued to our digital devices – whether at work or at home. Some of my own research has also concerned itself with this topic. My colleague and friend Gail Kinman and I had the results from a practice survey published in 2018 as we wanted to know what organisations are doing about the changing world of work, and the use of information and computer technology.

Well, precious little is the answer. Over half of our respondents said that their organisations don’t have a relevant policy in place and don’t offer any guidance or training. Somewhat worryingly over 40% thought that it should be up to individuals to manage the issue, rather than their line managers or human resources.

Why would people choose to be ‘always on’ outside formal working hours?

Working unpaid during leisure time does not make logical sense! We gift the UK economy billions in unpaid overtime year on year, as research by the Trade Unions Congress has revealed. Our systematic review with colleagues Svenja Schlachter, Ilke Inceoglu and Mark Cropley pointed to a complex picture.

People have different motivations, influenced by issues such as what everyone else does (social norms), what the expectations in the job are, how committed people feel to their job, how they value ‘switching off’ and recovery and whether this is supported in their environment. One key issue which came out of this review is the ‘empowerment enslavement paradox’. Our digital devices are both an enabler, as they afford flexibility, but also ‘digital leash’ as it’s difficult to say ‘enough is enough’ and switch off. As we all know, screen-time can be very seductive.

Is there any evidence that being ‘always on’ is bad for our health?

A recent econometric analysis shows that ICT infrastructure has a positive impact on population health (the authors measured general health outcomes such as infant mortality etc.). Regarding the impact of social media use, there is evidence that high use is linked to poor sleep quality, anxiety depression and low self-esteem. Of course, such studies cannot tell us whether teenagers who are highly anxious to start off with are more likely to be prolific users.

There is far less robust evidence on the exact effects from the world of work – what happens to you if you are on your phone, tablet or laptop near 24/7? We lack good research to tell us what the exact effects are.

What we do know though is that we need recovery and respite, our systems are simply not programmed to be on continuous overdrive. We also know that leisure activities which are quite different from our work tasks are better for our recovery than doing more of the same. I take this to heart. For instance, I find that reading at night doesn’t help me switch off as academics read rather a lot at work, so I take ballet classes online (and am known to teach the odd one myself!), knit and crochet.

What can organisations do?

Employers have a duty of care and should ensure that people are not overworked and can switch off. Worklife balance research tells us that those who live ‘enriched’ lives have better mental and physical health, important for them, and important for their employer. We should actively support employees by ensuring that:

  • A worklife balance policy is in place as a point of reference; then check processes and structures against this policy
  • Employers review job design and ensure that digital tasks (checking and responding to emails, synchronising devices, remote calls and conferences) are actually captured in people’s workload and tasks – these often fall off the radar
  • There is consultation to ask employees what they need – mutually negotiated boundaries and solutions work much better. Think creatively about flexible solutions!
  • Everyone, including senior leaders and managers, role models good behaviours. People need time to switch off, so don’t expect your staff to be available outside normal working hours
  • Staff are offered training and development. Managing in an increasingly digital workspace requires up-to-date management and leadership skills
  • Employees look out for implicit expectations and ‘rumours’. “I check my emails on holiday because this is what is expected of me”. Really? Question such assumptions as they can often take on a life of their own

Finally, if in doubt, ask a psychologist. The Department of Organizational Psychology is keen to work with organisations to establish, consolidate and evaluate best practice.

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