DoctorCarmen Weaver

People learn not only through formal instruction, but through the social, digital and organisational environments they inhabit. My research asks what they learn in those environments, how psychological processes shape that learning, and what happens when it is carried into new contexts where real decisions have to be made. I am particularly interested in situations where different learning environments provide competing messages. These might include:

• formal sexuality education versus peer and digital norms;
• formal workplace training versus informal organisational norms;
• university learning versus expectations encountered in professional practice; and
• health information versus lived social cues.

In these situations, we move beyond asking  “Did learning transfer?” and instead ask "When people receive competing messages from different learning environments, which understanding guides their judgement and behaviour in the real-world context?"

This opens questions about the psychological processes that make some learning more influential than others—for example, perceived norms, trust, identity, self-efficacy, risk appraisal, social expectations and the cues present in the immediate context.