Mark Levine

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of Exeter

Using a detailed transcription, obtained from body-camera, CCTV, and smartphone footage of the murder of George Floyd, we examine the behavior of bystanders as events unfolded. Analysis reveals 205 direct verbal bystander interventions comprised of five forms (declaratives, assessments, interrogatives, imperatives, insults). We also describe the ke...

Improving inter‐agency working across organizations is an important goal across public and private sectors. The UK Emergency Services have spent a decade implementing organizational change to improve interoperability between the Police, Fire and Ambulance Services. JESIP—the group tasked with realising this change—have faced criticism. We evaluated...

How is the idea of ‘the bystander’ represented in popular media? And does this representation of ‘the bystander’ differ across cultures and languages? Daily bystander news stories in English and Mandarin, were collected through the Google News platform (N= 166) and its Chinese equivalent, Baidu News (N=89), over a six-month period. We analysed the...

Team training is essential for building the knowledge, skills and attitudes that are required for effective teamwork. In the UK Emergency Services, one goal of team training has been to promote greater interoperability between different response agencies, however the efficacy of this training has not been tested. The goal of this research was to ex...

Animal ethologists suggest that non-human primates console victims of aggression in a manner similar to humans. However, the empirical basis for this cross-species comparison is fragile, given that few studies have examined consolation behavior among humans. To address this gap, we revive and apply the underappreciated ethological branch of micro-s...

Autonomous systems, such as drones and rescue robots, are increasingly used during emergencies. They deliver services and provide situational awareness that facilitate emergency management and response. To do so, they need to interact and cooperate with humans in their environment. Human behaviour is uncertain and complex, so it can be difficult to...

Student employability is a key goal of a computer science undergraduate education. A soft skills gap has previously been reported between employer requirements and the skills graduates offer, suggesting that educators are inadequately preparing students for their future careers. It is important to identify the links between educators and the materi...

Security vulnerabilities are present in many software systems, putting those who entrust software with their data in harm's way. Many vulnerabilities are avoidable since they are not new and are well-described. Despite this awareness, they remain widespread. One hypothesis for their persistence is that they represent software blindspots, problems t...

Digital visual data afford psychologists with exciting research possibilities. It becomes possible to see real-life interactions in real time and to be able to analyze this behavior in a fine-grained and systematic manner. However, the fact that faces (and other personally identifying physical characteristics) are captured as part of these data set...

As autonomous systems increasingly become part of our lives, it is crucial to foster trust between humans and these systems, to ensure positive outcomes and mitigate harmful ones.

Software engineering skills are broad and varied, encompassing not only technical abilities, but cognitive and social dimensions as well. Previous research establishes soft skills as being central for software engineering, e.g., teamwork, communication, and problem solving, but the relationship between these skills and how higher education prepares...

The UK Emergency Services have spent a decade implementing organisational change to improve interoperability between the Police, Fire and Ambulance services. JESIP – the group tasked with realising this change – have faced criticism for not achieving their goal. The present study critically evaluated JESIP’s efforts by interviewing expert commander...

Autonomous systems, such as drones, are critical for emergency mitigation, management, and recovery. They provide situational awareness and deliver communication services which effectively guide emergency responders’ decision making. This combination of technology and people comprises a socio-technical system. Yet, focusing on the use of drone tech...

The growing uptake of technology in policing provides the opportunity to revisit police-citizen interactions. This paper explores police-citizen interactions from a socio-technical systems perspective, drawing on community policing in the HCI literature, as well as the experience of both citizens and the police. For the latter, we report on a quali...

This paper explores the reporting of the case 'Little Yue Yue' - an iconic (but non-WEIRD) bystander tragedy in China in 2011. Through systematic searches of Chinese databases (Baidu, Weibo, CNKI, Zhihu) spanning 2011-2021, we identified 379 distinct Chinese narratives from news, academic and social media outlets. Coding the presence of concepts fr...

Software development is a complex process requiring aspects of social, cognitive, and technical skills. Software engineers face high levels of uncertainty and risk during functional and security decision making. This preregistered study investigates behavioural measures of cognitive reflection, risk aversion, and optimism bias among professional fr...

Emergency responding requires effective interoperability, whereby different emergency teams combine efforts and expertise to contain and reduce the impact of an emergency. Within the UK the capacity for the Emergency Services to be interoperable has been criticised by public enquiries. This systematic review had three goals to: (i) define interoper...

We apply a social and cognitive psychological approach to better understand software developers’ perceptions of secure software development. Drawing upon psychological theories of social identity and cognitive processing, we illustrate how software developers’ self-defined social identities affect their approaches to development. We also point to b...

Understanding what groups stand for is integral to a diverse array of social processes, ranging from understanding political conflicts to organisational behaviour to promoting public health behaviours. Traditionally, researchers rely on self-report methods such as interviews and surveys to assess groups’ collective self-understandings. Here, we dem...

The pressure on software developers to produce secure software has never been greater. But what does security look like in environments that don’t produce security-critical software? In answer to this question, this multi-sited ethnographic study characterises security episodes and identifies five typical behaviors in software development. Using th...

As autonomous systems are becoming part of our daily lives, ensuring their trustworthiness is crucial. There are a number of techniques for demonstrating trustworthiness. Common to all these techniques is the need to articulate specifications. In this paper, we take a broad view of specification, concentrating on top-level requirements including bu...

Background: The global population is aging, leading to shifts in health care needs. In addition to developing technology to support physical health, there is an increasing recognition of the need to consider how technology can support emotional health. This raises the question of how to design devices that older adults can interact with to log the...

Background: Recent studies show that secure coding is about not only technical requirements but also developers' behaviour. Objective: To understand the influence of socio-technical contexts on how developers attend to and engage with security in code, software engineering researchers collaborated with social psychologists on a psychologically-inf...

Psychological theories posit that we frequently switch social identities, yet little is known about the effectiveness of such switches. Our research aims to address this gap in knowledge by determining whether – and at what level of integration into the self-concept – a social identity switch impairs the activation of the currently active identity...

The COVID-19 pandemic is worsening loneliness for many older people through the challenges it poses in engaging with their social worlds. Digital technology has been offered as a potential aid, however, many popular digital tools have not been designed to address the needs of older adults during times of limited contact. We propose that the Social...

BACKGROUND The global population is aging, leading to shifts in health care needs. In addition to developing technology to support physical health, there is an increasing recognition of the need to consider how technology can support emotional health. This raises the question of how to design devices that older adults can interact with to log their...

In real-life violence, bystanders can take an active role in de-escalating conflict and helping others. Recent meta-analytical evidence of experimental studies suggests that elevated danger levels in conflicts facilitate bystander intervention. However, this finding may lack ecological validity because ethical concerns prohibit exposing participant...

Traditional work on bystander intervention in violent emergencies has found that the larger the group, the less the chance that any individual will intervene. Here, we tested the impact on helping behavior of the affiliation of the bystanders with respect to the participants. We recruited 40 male supporters of the U.K. Arsenal football club for a t...

Despite the availability of various methods and tools to facilitate secure coding, developers continue to write code that contains common vulnerabilities. It is important to understand why technological advances do not sufficiently facilitate developers in writing secure code. In order to widen our understanding of developers' behaviour, we conside...

How do people behave in the seconds after they become aware they have been caught up in a real-life transport emergency? This paper presents the first micro-behavioral, video-based analysis of the behavior of passengers during a small explosion and subsequent fire on a subway train. We analyzed the behavior of 40 passengers present in the same carr...

Between 6-13% of older people report chronic loneliness, and at the start of the declaration of COVID-19 as a pandemic, concern was expressed about the impact of socially isolating viral containment measures on this population of people who are simultaneously medically vulnerable to the virus. Despite these alarms, there is little known about how l...

The COVID-19 pandemic is increasing older people's existing challenges in engaging with their physical and social worlds, and is thereby likely to worsen their loneliness. Digital technology has been offered as a potential aid for social connectedness during social distancing/isolation. However, many popular digital communication tools have not bee...

Objectives Belonging to groups can significantly affect people’s health and well‐being for the better (‘the social cure’) or worse (‘the social curse’). Encouraging people to join groups is a central component of the Social Prescribing movement; however, not everyone who might benefit from Social Prescribing aspires to participating in groups. This...

Eyewitnesses to crimes sometimes search for a culprit on social media before viewing a police lineup, but it is not known whether this affects subsequent lineup identification accuracy. The present online study was conducted to address this. Two hundred and eighty-five participants viewed a mock crime video, and after a 15–20 min delay either (i) v...

The COVID-19 pandemic is increasing older people's existing challenges in engaging with their physical and social worlds, and is thereby likely to worsen their loneliness. Digital technology has been offered as a potential aid for social connectedness during social distancing/isolation. However, many popular digital communication tools have not bee...

The various group and category memberships that we hold are at the heart of who we are. They have been shown to affect our thoughts, emotions, behavior, and social relations in a variety of social contexts, and have more recently been linked to our mental and physical well-being. Questions remain, however, over the dynamics between different group...

Perceptions of police trustworthiness are linked to citizens’ willingness to cooperate with police. Trust can be fostered by introducing accountability mechanisms, or by increasing a shared police/citizen identity, both which can be achieved digitally. Digital mechanisms can also be designed to safeguard, engage, reassure, inform, and empower diver...

Objectives: The social connectedness of older people is of increasing concern. Technology has been suggested for enhancing social inclusion. This study aimed to explore the nature and quality of connections via technology. Methods: Qualitative exploration of experiences, stories, and needs was undertaken through semi-structured interviews with olde...

Social media is used for political influence, but do digital advertisements have the power to shape how users interpret the sociopolitical messages that are shared through social media? In 2 experiments (ns = 86 and 225), we tested whether digital advertisements have the capacity to act as identity signals, affecting the degree to which the source...

The social identity approach suggests that group prototypical individuals have greater influence over fellow group members. This effect has been well-studied offline. Here, we use a novel method of assessing prototypicality in naturally occurring data to test whether this effect can be replicated in online communities. In Study 1a (N = 53,049 Reddi...

Community policing faces a combination of new challenges and opportunities due to both citizens and police adopting new digital technologies. However, there is limited scholarly work providing evidence for how technologies assist citizens' interactions with the police. This paper reports preliminary findings from interviews with 13 participants, bo...

Violence prevention programs aim to raise awareness, change attitudes, normative beliefs, motivation, and behavioral responses. Many programs have been developed and evaluated, and optimistic claims about effectiveness made. Yet comprehensive guidance on program design, implementation, and evaluation is limited. The aim of this study was to provide...

Reconciliation is an aspect of natural conflict resolution with similar behaviour patterns documented in non-human primates, human children, and human adults in hunter gather societies. However, actual or potential post-conflict reconciliation behaviour amongst adults living in industrialized societies has rarely been studied systematically. In thi...

Perceptions of police trustworthiness are linked to citizens' willingness to cooperate with police. Trust can be fostered by introducing accountability mechanisms, or by increasing a shared police/citizen identity, both which can be achieved digitally. Digital mechanisms can also be designed to safeguard, engage, reassure, inform, and empower diver...

Given concerns about mental health during periods of Covid-19 lockdown, it important to understand how engagement with online Covid-19 related material can affect mood. In the UK and Ireland, online community support initiatives (OCSIs) have emerged to help people manage their lives. Yet, little is known about how people engaged with these or wheth...

Objective: Accumulating evidence shows that bystanders witnessing public disputes frequently intervene to help. However, little is known regarding the risks entailed for those bystanders who enter the fray to stop conflicts. This study systematically examined the prevalence of bystander victimizations and the associated risk factors. Method: Data w...

Objective: Accumulating evidence shows that bystanders witnessing public disputes frequently intervene to help. However, little is known regarding the risks entailed for those bystanders who enter the fray to stop conflicts. This study systematically examined the prevalence of bystander victimizations and associated risk factors. Method: Data were...

Peer-to-peer energy-trading platforms (P2P) have the potential to transform the current energy system. However, research is presently scarce on how people would like to participate in, and what would they expect to gain from, such platforms. We address this gap by exploring these questions in the context of the UK energy market. Using a qualitative...

The global population is ageing, leading to shifts in health- care needs. Home healthcare monitoring systems currently focus on physical health, but there is an increasing recogni- tion that psychological wellbeing also needs support. This raises the question of how to design devices that older adults can interact with to log their feelings. We des...

Accumulating evidence shows that bystanders witnessing public disputes frequently intervene to help. However, little is known regarding the risks entailed for those bystanders who enter the fray to stop conflicts. This study systematically examined the prevalence of bystander victimizations and associated risk factors. Data were a cross-national sa...

Pervasive digital technologies are increasingly used to record different aspects of citizens' lives, from activity and location tracking, to social interactions and video recordings of life experiences. However, effective use of these technologies to strengthen collaborations between citizens and police requires a fresh examination of the creation...

Many violence prevention programs include a focus on the role of bystanders and third parties in violence prevention training. Central to this work has been the classic social psychological research on the “bystander effect”. However, recent research on bystander behavior shows that the bystander effect does not hold in violent or dangerous emergen...

Privacy is a psychological topic suffering from historical neglect—a neglect that is increasingly consequential in an era of social media connectedness, mass surveillance, and the permanence of our electronic footprint. Despite fundamental changes in the privacy landscape, social and personality psychology journals remain largely unrepresented in d...

As software-intensive digital systems become an integral part of modern life, ensuring that these systems are developed to satisfy security and privacy requirements is an increasingly important societal concern. Integrating security into software development involves more than learning security principles or applying techniques. Security in practic...

Night-time economy (NTE) leisure zones, while providing local economic growth and positive social experiences, are hotspots for urban public violence. Research aimed at better understanding and thus reducing this violence has employed a range of empirical methods: official records, self-reports, experiments, and observational techniques. In this pa...

The population of older adults is increasing across the globe; this growth is predicted to continue into the future. Most older adults prefer to live in their own home, but many live alone without immediate support. Living longer is often coupled with health and social problems and difficulty managing daily activities. Therefore, some level of care...

Half a century of research on bystander behavior concludes that individuals are less likely to intervene during an emergency when in the presence of others than when alone. By contrast, little is known regarding the aggregated likelihood that at least someone present at an emergency will do something to help. The importance of establishing this agg...

In this paper we argue that recent developments in peer-to-peer platforms, including those underpinned by distributed-ledger technology (or blockchains), represent a new model for organizing collective action, which we term the “marketized-commons” model. Drawing on social psychological and economic theory, we compare this concept to established mo...

As software-intensive digital systems become an integral part of modern life, ensuring that these systems are developed to satisfy security and privacy requirements is an increasingly important societal concern. This paper examines how secure coding practice is supported on Stack Overflow. Although there are indications that on-line environments ar...

This paper describes materials developed to engage professional developers in discussions about security. First, the work is framed in the context of ethnographic studies of software development, highlighting how the method is used to explore and investigate research aims for the Motivating Jenny research project. A description is given of a series...

Security of software systems is of general concern, yet breaches caused by common vulnerabilities still occur. Soft- ware developers are routinely called upon to ”do more” to address this situation. However there has been little focus on the developers’ point of view, and understanding how security features in their day-to-day activities. This pape...

Half a century of research on bystander behavior concludes that individuals are less likely to intervene during an emergency when in the presence of others than when alone. By contrast, little is known regarding the aggregated likelihood that at least someone present at an emergency will do something to help. The importance of establishing this agg...

Research on collective action frequently characterizes social media as a tool for mobilization. However, social media activity can fulfil a variety of different functions for social change. In particular, the rhetorical functions of social media use by social movements are not well understood. We address this shortfall by analysing the rhetorical f...

Night-time economy (NTE) leisure zones, while providing local economic growth and positive social experiences, are hotspots for urban public violence. Research aimed at better understanding and thus reducing this violence has employed a range of empirical methods: official records, self-reports, experiments, and observational techniques. In this pa...

The world is facing an ageing population phenomenon, coupled with health and social problems, which affect older people’s ability to live independently. This situation challenges the viability of health and social services. Smart home technology can play a significant role in easing the pressure on caregivers, as well as reduce the financial costs...

Social media is increasingly used for social protest, but does internet-enabled action lead to ‘slacktivism’ or promote increased activism? We show that the answer to this question depends on prior level of activism, and on beliefs about the effectiveness of individual contribution to the collective campaign. Internet-enabled action was varied quas...

Developers turn to Stack Overflow and other on-line sources to find solutions to security problems, but little is known about how they engage with and guide one another in these environments or the perceptions of software security this may encourage. This study joins recent calls to understand more about how developers use Internet sources to solve...

Social media is increasingly used for social protest, but does internet-enabled action lead to ‘slacktivism’ or promote increased activism? We show that the answer to this question depends on prior level of activism, and on beliefs about the effectiveness of individual contribution to the collective campaign. Internet-enabled action was varied quas...

Some online social networks (OSNs) allow users to define friendship-groups as reusable shortcuts for sharing information with multiple contacts. Posting exclusively to a friendship-group gives some privacy control, while supporting communication with (and within) this group. However, recipients of such posts may want to reuse content for their own...

Low cost digital cameras in smartphones and wearable devices make it easy for people to automatically capture and share images as a visual lifelog. Having been inspired by a US campus based study that explored individual privacy behaviours of visual lifeloggers, we conducted a similar study on a UK campus, however we also focussed on the privacy be...

Post-aggression consolation is assumed to occur in humans as well as in chimpanzees. While consolation following peer aggression has been observed in children, systematic evidence of consolation in human adults is rare. We used surveillance camera footage of the immediate aftermath of nonfatal robberies to observe the behaviors and characteristics...

Codesheet of dynamic variables during robbery. Partial ethogram of offender behavior. (DOCX)

Logit analysis of consolation among 3650 dyads. Quadratic assignment procedure. (DOCX)

Logit analysis of consolation among 3680 dyads. Quadratic assignment procedure. (DOCX)

Logit analysis of consolation among 3390 dyads. Quadratic assignment procedure. (DOCX)

Codesheet for dynamic variables during aftermath of robbery (ethogram). (DOCX)

Logit analysis of consolation among 3680 dyads. Quadratic assignment procedure. (DOCX)

ConsolationRobbery.csv (datafile). (CSV)

Codesheet for static variables during aftermath of robbery. (DOCX)

ConsolationRobberyStataCode.do (Stata script analysis). (DO)

Privacy is psychologically important, vital for democracy, and in the era of ubiquitous and mobile surveillance technology, facing increasingly complex threats and challenges. Yet surveillance is often justified under a trope that one has “nothing to hide”. We conducted focus groups (N=42) on topics of surveillance and privacy, and using discursive...

Study 1: Qualitative 3-day diary/interview study. Results indicated high levels of diversity and disparity in how and what is perceived as ’being’ contact. Study 2: Exploratory factor analysis of 67 contact situations. The outcome revealed four types of perceived contact (Fig 1.). Additionally, a correlation analysis found small but significant pos...