How can you tell who will – or won’t – keep corporate secrets? And how does a religion’s physical environment affect its adherents’ beliefs, and feelings about those beliefs?

Our August 4 Catalyst Kōrero features two University of Otago psychology PhD students about to finish their doctoral research on these two topics. Be the first outside their University colleagues to hear what they have discovered.

Victor Okoro is researching corporate secrets and espionage. More than 80% of breach attempts are from external sources, which are the primary target of cybersecurity measures. But despite comprising less than one-fifth of breach attempts, insider breaches compromise more than 10 times the amount of information.

It is these insider threats that Victor’s research focuses on – understanding how people form and act on intentions, especially in high-stake or sensitive environments. And he’s developing a new tool for assessing such insider risk.

Navdeep Kaur has been investigating how the physical environment affects the rituals, beliefs and feelings engendered by religion in different places.  Is part of religious belief an accident of history and geography, of what materials are available to symbolise the entity being worshipped?

Are statues and temples simply tools of our religious expression, or do they shape what we believe and how we practice religion?

A chance to ask researchers first-hand about two very different topics.