Hello and welcome to Speaking of Psychology, a podcast produced by the American Psychological Association.

I'm your host, Kim Mills.

Speaking of psychology is a podcast for anyone with an interest in the science of psychology.

We talk to psychological researchers, practitioners, and educators about any and every aspect of psychology and its

application to the world around us. Dr. Emma Williams teaches psychology at the University of Bristol

in the United Kingdom. Her research interests include understanding how people perceive, consider,

and make decisions about risk in relation to emerging technologies and online activities.

In particular, she studies how these judgments may be influenced by a range of real-life factors.

She also studies how best to help people understand their risks online so they can make informed choices,

and she explores how and why people are susceptible to online scams like

fishing and other situations that put their security and privacy at risk. Thanks for joining us

today, Dr. Williams. No problem. Happy to. So let's start by talking about the reasons why people

fall for these kinds of dirty tricks. Well, I think there's a

little bit of a misconception sometimes that these things are obvious to spot. So with fishing emails,

people tend to think about what's known as the Nigerian prints kind of scams. It's,

oh, it's really obvious. Someone's clearly offering me a million

pounds to move some money into my account. And the reality is that that's not what scams actually

are anymore necessarily. So that's an aspect. But the advent of technology has meant that they can

actually create fake pages, fake emails that look very much like the real thing. So they can

use particular logos. They can have email addresses that pretty much look identical to the genuine

thing. So it's very hard for people to actually spot the difference. And obviously we have

limited kind of cognitive abilities to be able to actually do multiple things at once. So when you're checking your emails, someone's talking to you in the background, you've got to

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