Claire Heard

Dr Claire Heard is an LSE Fellow in Management (Decision Science) in the Department of Management. She holds a PHD in Psychology (2018; King’s College London). She is also an elected Associate of King’s College (AKC), an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a Chartered Member of the British Psychological Society.

Her main research interests focus on investigating risk communication, risk perception and decision making primarily within the public health and emergency response domains. Her emergency response work, conducted at King’s College London as a Research Associate (War Studies) as part of the multi-institution National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Health Protection Research Unit in Emergency Preparedness and Response has investigated how to communicate information about first aid to the public. Through its use of focus groups and interview methodologies, it has examined issues of first-aid uptake and confidence, as well as examining how the public makes decisions in emergency situation, ranging from the traditional cardiac arrest emergency to mass-casualty and acid attacks emergencies.

In the public health domain, her work (including her doctoral thesis) assesses the impact of information design and presentation in the health domain. It examines how changing the presentation of risk-related information impacts people’s perceptions, comprehension and choices (or behaviours). Topics of investigation include: 1) investigating speed-of-ageing metaphors formats (versus traditional hazard ratio formats); 2) investigating the role that language, particular emotive language has on information processing and risk perceptions; 3) the effect of presentation order and orientation on information search (measured via eye-tracking methodology) and subsequent option evaluations and choices.

Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Medical Decision Making and she has regularly presented her work at national and international conferences (SPUDM 2015, CogSci 2017; Public Health England, 2018) and as a guest lecturer or speaker.