Andy Wills

Hi, I'm Andy J. Wills, Ph.D. (he/him) and a Professor of Psychology at the School of Psychology , University of Plymouth, United Kingdom. I have researched cognitive processes in biological intelligences (mostly humans), and taught psychology to undergraduates, for 30 years.

You can access my academic publications, teaching materials, software, and other resources using the menu icon at the top right of this page.

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Almost anything can be above average, depending on what you value

ChatGPT-assisted analysis of quality of life and university rankings

Posted on September 10, 2026

This morning, I was having breakfast in London when I came across this Visual Capitalist post on quality of life in cities. Three of the cities I consider to be among the greatest in the world (Paris, New York, and - of course - London) came below the median on... [Read More]

Tags: misc

Don't think too much ... it might make you irrational

Psychonomic Society blog covers our research

Posted on August 14, 2025

In addition to the excellent g-distance paper, recently published in Psychological Review, the other main output from Lenard Dome’s Ph.D. was a paper on the effect of concurrent load on the inverse base-rate effect (IBRE). In the IBRE, one pair of cues (AB) predict a common outcome, while an overlapping... [Read More]

Tags: misc

The decline of physical communities

What research culture in UK universities has lost, and what will replace it.

Posted on March 31, 2023

I’ve been based at the University of Exeter this week, a place I worked for 12 years and where I’ve maintained good relationships with several people ever since. In the 12 years I worked here, it was a good, bad, and indifferent experience for me, at various points. But there... [Read More]

Tags: misc

Why I'm currently declining some unpaid peer-review requests

Industrial Action in UK Higher Education

Posted on November 30, 2022

TL;DR: Due to Industrial Action, I am currently limiting the number of new, external, unpaid peer-review jobs I take on. I will still take on some unpaid reviews, proportionate to my own use of the peer review system. Beyond that, I’ll decline requests for unpaid reviews. If you’d like to... [Read More]

Tags: misc

GPT-3 does math

You have done something you consider to be impossible, what do you conclude from this?

Posted on September 27, 2022

Having mainly focussed on object classification in my career, I thought I’d have a peek at what AI language models have been up to in the last few years. I started by asking it some questions related to immigration, which I won’t post here because one of the answers was... [Read More]

Tags: compcat