RHUL Cyber CDT Blog

First year student Elle Pearson participated in an online poster competition during the Royal Holloway Annual Doctoral Conference on 10 and 11 June. Elle was placed fourth and received an honourable mention for her poster. You can view the poster and the accompanying short essay below. “I’m fine” is likely the most common lie you hear as people tend to lie the most about how they feel (DePaulo & Kashy, 1998). Lying and deception is too nuanced to claim that it is simply ‘bad’ and shouldn’t be done, it is a complex human trait and behaviour, with children beginning to lie from the age of two (Talwar & Lee, 2008). Of course people lie for nefarious reasons, but people also lie for good-hearted reasons or to protect themselves, either psychologically or from a situational danger (DePaulo, 2004). Some research also points to deception and lying being an evolutionary trait that allows humans to work together cooperatively (McNally & Jackson, 2013). Humans have alwa...

We made it! The COVID-19 crisis has undoubtedly created a rather challenging environment for my cohort, as we did not have the opportunity to start our PhD journey in a traditional way. I must say that initially I was rather perplexed, as I thought that the lack of face-to-face interaction with lecturers and fellow students would have a negative impact on our learning experience. What happened over the last six months proves that I was certainly too pessimistic, and the spirit of co-operation of the 2020 cohort was the real winner. The taught element of the CDT was a pleasant surprise for me. We all knew that our training would be interdisciplinary, but I suspect that very few of us, including me, had imagined that it would be so engaging, despite the circumstances created by the global pandemic. If I were asked to choose the highlights of the first term, I would mention the geopolitics course, where interaction is to my mind the key to success. I have always read about politics and in...