I'm James Intriligator professor
innovation and consumer psychology at
Bangor University.
I do research on perception, attention, vision, consumer issues. 
Yeah I don't know how did I end up falling into this role?
I started off interested in just
the brain, I wanted to understand how it is that
brain works and so I started off doing
computer science but that didn't quite
answer it for me so I ended up
evolving and slowly wandering from
computer science into
philosophy and mathematics and finally
ended up in psychology.
The work that I do now is primarily
in consumer psychology,
there have been some huge changes in terms of
understand how people make decisions
how people make shopping choices, things like that.
People don't actually use their rational
minds to choose products that they buy
or to choose which web sites they to go to for
instance. There are people,
myself included, who do some research on
brain imaging to try to understand
what parts the brain help us choose different
products, we're looking at how the brain
responds to different kinds of special offers, things like that. 
People make decisions based on gut instinct,
based on emotional reactions.
I'm the worst, I spend hours in
supermarkets and I get pulled in by every
kind of display that's there and I'm just intrigued
understand how
different special offers are appealing
to different kinds of people.
The way consumer psychology is studied
in different countries is actually quite
interesting. 
The way that we approach it here in the UK, within
Bangor in particular, is we try to
understand the psychological processes
that underline decision-making, emotion, motivation
things like that. So it's not just
what do people do but it's more about
why do they do what they do?
The ability to actually work with real
companies on real projects I think is
something unique to the UK in a sense. 
Class sizes are so
small that it's actually possible for us
to get our
students to work with a range of local
companies.
I suppose one thing that's quite surprising
is how tiny differences
in the way something is explained, displayed
small environmental differences can have
huge impacts
on people's behavior. Understanding how to
get people to use hospitals, use health care services.
In terms of how people spend money a lot
of that is actually dictated by government.
For them to understand how consumers behave is really vital as well. 
We've been looking at things like how the smell in a room will have people shop differently
or how a sign in the corner of the room will make
people behave differently.
All of those things can actually have huge impacts and I think that area is quite fascinating all around.
It's a great area study just because of how it can be applied in so many different fields.
We are actually just about to release a game that helps
people stop drinking 
and you play this little game and it sort of plays with your mind,
plays with your visual attention and retrains your brain in a way to make you stop paying so much attention to alcohol.
We have lab data suggesting that that will help you stop drinking.
All these kinds of gamification
techniques are really quite powerful for behavior change.
You either want to get people to buy
more of something or
consume less of something, all of that is part
of consumer psychology.
So I think for any of those areas
whether it's selling things to people or helping people to
stop drinking, smoking all that kind of stuff is
a great background for all those of those different areas
