Power-Posing Politicians, Human Pheromones, and Other Psychological Myths

Multi-coloured smoke

Free and open to all. The talk is designed for researchers from all disciplines and the general public.

Newspapers often feature studies that sound too good to be true: it turns out they’re myths. Tristram has been looking into one of them – human pheromones. Some myths may be harmless but the phenomenon affects most kinds of research including medicine. It’s been called a ‘reproducibility crisis’. The good news is that there’s a new movement, led in large part by psychologists, which is tackling unreliable research and trying to give us results we can trust.

Tristram Wyatt is an emeritus fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford and formerly Director of Studies in Biology at OUDCE. He is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford. He’s interested in how animals of all kinds use pheromones to communicate by smell. His Cambridge University Press book on pheromones and animal behaviour won the Royal Society of Biology’s prize for the Best Postgraduate Textbook in 2014.  His TED talk on human pheromones has been viewed over a million times. His book Animal behaviour: A Very Short Introduction was published by Oxford University Press in 2017.

See more and book tickets on the Department for Continuing Education event.

 

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