Writing

Psychology

How people decide, what motivates them, and why behaviour is rarely as rational as we pretend.

The Salt Path Jason Arday and the Contract We Never Signed

The Salt Path Jason Arday and the Contract We Never Signed

7 August 2026
1 min read

Stress-Testing the STAR: What 600 Synthetic Personas and 10 Out-of-Character Answers Reveal About the Future of Psychometric Assessment

There is a difference between a tool that works and a tool that works under pressure.

24 July 2026
12 min read

The Confidence Trap

You know the feeling.

24 July 2026
10 min read

Join The DOTS: The Art of Storytelling

You've read something that changed your mind. Not a statistic that made you update a spreadsheet. Not an argument that made you nod. Something that actually...

17 July 2026
8 min read

The 115 We Dont Count

Every day in the United States, roughly 115 people die in car crashes caused by human drivers. That number doesn't make the news. It barely makes the statist...

15 July 2026
7 min read

The World Cup's Identity Engine: Why Football Makes Us Feel Like We Belong

The FIFA World Cup 2026 is in its semi-final stage, with France facing Spain in Dallas. Beyond the spectacle, the tournament is a live demonstration of Socia...

13 July 2026
8 min read

The Psychology of the Final Four: Why the World Cup's Last Week Is a Behavioural Experiment

Four matches remain in the 2026 World Cup. Two semi-finals, a play-off nobody wants, and a final everybody wants. Most previews will treat them as separate p...

12 July 2026
9 min read

Housing costs doing your head in?

Subject: Housing costs doing your head in? This might help. Preview: We've partnered with Blackbullion to help you save £100s. Free. No catch.

8 July 2026
2 min read

Student Accommodation as the Physical Manifestation of Conditional Tribalism

PBSA is literally designed for conditional tribalism: intense community for a defined period, with guaranteed exit. The common room is the Discord server mad...

8 July 2026
11 min read

The Mental Health Metric: Student Wellbeing as an Investment Thesis

51.9.

8 July 2026
7 min read

Three Million Beds: Europe's PBSA Gap Is the Real Story

The UK has a student accommodation problem. Everyone knows this. The 665,000-bed shortfall gets the headlines, the conference panels, and the investor decks....

8 July 2026
5 min read

UK Armed Forces Day 2026: What the Lancaster Taught Me About Changing Defence

The Lancaster shakes in a way that modern aircraft do not. Not turbulence. Not mechanical vibration. Something older, something that comes from eighty years...

8 July 2026
4 min read

What 20 Years of Student Data Reveals About Everyone

A few weeks ago, HEPI and Advance HE published the 20th edition of the Student Academic Experience Survey. Two decades of data. Hundreds of thousands of resp...

8 July 2026
8 min read

Why STAR Uses the Big Five and Not MBTI

The most popular personality test in the world is not the most accurate. Here's why that matters — and what we built instead.

8 July 2026
9 min read

The Students Who Don't Feel at Home

Our data from 14,000 residents across 191 properties shows a belonging gap that the student accommodation sector has barely begun to address. Transgender stu...

1 July 2026
9 min read

Per Ardua ad Astra: The Motto That Became a Framework

How thirty years of navigating other people's skies led to building my own constellation.

28 June 2026
11 min read

The Last Frequency: The BBC Just Switched Off 101 Years of Shared Memory

There is a particular quality to silence that arrives after a century of sound. Not the silence of an empty room or a paused conversation, but the silence of...

27 June 2026
11 min read

Action Bias: Why Your Type Decides Whether You Jump or Stay

The penalty kick study everyone quotes misses the most important question.

18 June 2026
9 min read

The Penalty Psychology of Player Types

What happens at twelve yards isn't random. It's architectural.

18 June 2026
11 min read

How You Do You

There is a particular kind of frustration that comes from taking a personality test and arriving at a result that feels simultaneously obvious and useless. Y...

13 June 2026
7 min read

Liverpool Didn't Hire a Manager. They Hired a System.

The STAR Index breaks down Andoni Iraola's psychological profile, and why a Thinker/Adventurer Director might be exactly what Anfield needs.

4 June 2026
9 min read

The 15-Point Gap: What STAR Reveals About Student Satisfaction

If I told you that one variable predicts whether a student will recommend their accommodation more reliably than their gender, nationality, year of study, or...

4 June 2026
7 min read

WHY MONEYPENNY'S BEST PLACES TO WORK AWARD SAYS MORE ABOUT BELONGING THAN BENEFITS.

The Communications Service Just Won A Sunday Times Workplace Award. The Psychology Behind It Is More Interesting Than The Trophy.

28 May 2026
8 min read

The STAR Operating System: A Psychometric Framework for Cognitive-Motivational Profiling Through Integrated Behavioural Science

Author: David Chadderton, BSc (Hons), PgDip Affiliation: STAR Dynamics Consulting Ltd, United Kingdom ORCID: [To be assigned] Correspondence: david@stardynam...

22 May 2026
23 min read

The Biological Case for Doing Things That Don't Optimise You

Arts, culture, and "wasted" time are linked to slower biological ageing. The productivity bros won't like this one.

12 May 2026
5 min read

The Four-Day Week Isn't Lazy. It's a Self-Determination Play.

The obesity data is in. The productivity data was already in. The psychology was never in question.

12 May 2026
5 min read

When the Team Stops Believing: What Leadership Collapse Looks Like Through a Behavioural Lens

Over 70 MPs want Starmer out. The policy analysis is noise. The psychology is everything.

12 May 2026
5 min read

The Invisible Vote: Why Reform's Local Election Surge Is a Masterclass in Social Identity Theory

Everyone is analysing Reform UK's gains through policy. None of them are looking at the right thing.

11 May 2026
7 min read

The Party That Lost Its Tribe: Labour, Social Identity, and the Fracture of Belonging

In 1974, a miner from South Wales stood outside a polling station and told a BBC reporter why he'd voted Labour his entire life. "It's not about policies," h...

11 May 2026
16 min read

The 3.6% Difference: What Iceland's EU Referendum Reveals About How Nations Decide

On 29 August 2026, 380,000 Icelanders voted on whether to resume EU membership negotiations. The result was agonisingly close: 51.81% No, 48.19% Yes. But the...

1 January 2026
7 min read

The £61,000 Question: What Happens When Students Cannot Afford to Be Students

There is a number that should keep anyone working in student accommodation awake at night. Not occupancy rates, not NPS scores, not development pipelines. Th...

1 January 2026
5 min read

What Students Actually Want in 2026: Beyond En-Suite Bathrooms

The PBSA product has converged. En-suites, communal kitchens, and study spaces are table stakes. So what is actually driving student choice now? Two datasets...

1 January 2026
13 min read