Florence Enock

Background

About Florence Enock

I am a Senior Research Associate in online safety within the public policy programme at The Alan Turing Institute. My background is in social psychology and at the Turing I use survey methods and behavioural experiments to understand people’s experiences of online harms, such as hate speech and misinformation, and how interventions against them may be improved. For example, through a series of large-scale, nationally representative surveys, we aim to understand the UK public’s attitudes, experiences and behaviours relating to key issues in online safety, including people’s engagement with safety technology on social media, views on an array of interventions designed to protect people against online misinformation, and the psychological effects of exposure to particular harms online, in particular how people are differentially affected based on gender. I was also awarded a BA/Leverhulme small research grant to examine the extent of social bias in people’s flagging of hate speech and abuse, along with tests of novel interventions designed to improve flagging behaviours. As well as my work in online safety, I research public attitudes to AI more generally. For example, I worked on the Ada-Turing public attitudes to AI survey (launched in June 2023) which used a nationally representative survey of over people in the UK to examine people’s awareness, experiences and attitudes to a range of different uses of AI, along with general preferences for governance and explainability. My main research skills for the behavioural sciences are in survey and experimental design (including running lab-based experiments and large online studies), processing, visualisation and analysis of large datasets using a range of statistical approaches, and writing academic outputs and research reports. Before joining the Turing, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of York, where I examined the role of dehumanization in social attitudes and behaviours. I completed my DPhil in Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford in 2018. Google scholar - & hl=en