Dr Richard Mills

Richard was a Research Associate in the Psychometrics Centre working on the Wikirate project, a European Commission 7FP project (2007-2013). He obtained a BSc in Psychology from the University of Abertay in 2006 and an Msc in Psychological Research methods from Dundee University in 2007, before working as a research assistant for one year in Dundee University. As a researcher in cognitive psychology Richard designed and ran experiments concerning face recognition and spatial-numerical associations (the SNARC effect).

Richard then moved to Lancaster University to study on-line interaction, completing an Mres in Applied Social Statistics in 2009 and a PhD in Applied Social Statistics in 2014 with a thesis titled “Distributed Moderation Systems – An exploration of their utility and the social implications of their widespread adoption”. His PhD research involved the collection and analysis of data from websites of interest to build an understanding of how their voting systems function in practice, how users participate, and how the implementation of Distributed Moderation affected the resources which the sites produce.

During his PhD research he also worked on Science and Technology Studies projects in Lancaster’s Sociology department. These projects involved subjects like Next Generation Genomic Sequencing data and Open Source software development on platforms like github. Richard is also working with BuzzMath on a project about the motivational effects of digital badges, funded by the MacArthur Foundation.