Zoltan Dienes

Professor of Psychology
School of Psychology
University of Sussex
Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK

<= me in Tibet

Email: dienes@sussex.ac.uk
Phone: +44 1273 876638
Fax: +44 1273 678058

Teaching

I organize Conscious and Unconscious Mental Processes, a final year option module; Philosophy of Psychology, a final year core module. I also teach philosophy of science in the masters module Ethics, Philosophy, and Methods, and a series of lectures on hypnosis in the first year undergraduate module Contemporary Issues in Psychology.

Research publications

I am interested in the distinction between conscious and unconscious mental states, particularly knowledge, but also intentions and desires.

Unconscious knowledge: Much of the knowledge we acquire for dealing with the world appears to be unconscious. For example, we can use the rules of grammar to comprehend and produce grammatical utterances within a fraction of a second, yet we cannot describe more than a few rules of grammar. We can learn not only to use certain linguistic structures, but also to appreciate certain styles of music, to obey cultural rules, or to gain perceptual motor mastery of a domain without consciously knowing the underlying regularities. How is such knowledge acquired? By what  methods can we know whether knowledge is conscious or unconscious? What type of structures can be learnt unconsciously? How can such learning be computationally modelled? 

Unconscious intentions: I argue hypnosis is a way of acting which is intentional but the person is strategically unaware of those intentions. If you are interested in being screened for hypnotisability, and live near the University of Sussex, you can sign up online.

Unconscious desires: What is the psychological function of sexual fantasy?

I am interested in foundational differences between Bayesian data inference and orthodox statistics, and believe we psychologists should be using more Bayesian tools to get the most from our data