The Behavioural Research Lab is a resource for the faculty, research fellows and PhD students at the UCL School of Management to collect data for their academic research. Studies can run in the lab space, online and in the field, with the lab team facilitating the organisation and delivery of this service through participant recruitment, the setup of various studies and coordination of data collection. 

Participants are not permitted to create more than one account on the research participation website or to use the account of another participant. Phones must be switched off and be kept off tables for the duration of study participation. Participants who interact with their phones at any stage during lab study participation may be asked to leave without payment. Consumption of food or beverages (except water) is prohibited unless as part of a study.

The lab is situated within an office working environment, and so conversation should be kept to a minimum outside of study room spaces. Participants are expected to know their unique participant ID code, which is in the ‘my profile’ section of your research account and at the end of any study sign up confirmation emails, as you will need to enter this during study participation at the lab. You will be identified by this number to mark your attendance.

Keep in mind the lab is based on the 38th floor, so once a member of the lab team has taken all participants up to begin the study, it is unlikely they will be able to return to collect any participants arriving late. If you arrive after the start time of your scheduled time slot, we may not be able to run you on the study and you will not be paid. We understand transport problems can/ do arise unexpectedly and, where possible, we will offer latecomers the option of any available later time slots. Please be mindful that we must begin studies on time to ensure time slots do not run beyond their scheduled duration. Contact the lab team if you think you will not make it in time for the start of your study time slot.

Participants should take tasks seriously and follow instructions carefully; ask the experimenter for clarification if you are unsure about anything. A brief description of each study will be displayed on SONA to let you know what is expected during your study participation. Do not discuss study procedures or content with other participants who are yet to take part in the same study.

You will also be asked to show a form of photographic ID. If you work or study in One Canada Square, your building or work pass will suffice. The ID should clearly display your photo and the name associated with your research participation account. Photocopies are acceptable, but must clearly display your photo and the name associated with your research account. All participants must be 18 years or over to participate in studies.

The lab is based in Canary Wharf at One Canada Square, London, E14 5AA. Participants attending for studies will be collected at the ground floor level foyer by a member of the lab team before the start of a study time slot. Canary Wharf is served by the Jubilee line.

To find the lab on Google Maps, click here.

Please do not create a new account! You can click on the “forgot password?” button, which can be found at the bottom right of the research participation home page (https://uclsom.sona-systems.com) and follow the instructions. When you receive the email with your new login information, be careful to remove any spaces that should not be there if you have copied and pasted the user ID and password.

If you no longer have access to the email account associated with your research participation account and cannot login, e-mail the Lab team at mgmt-lab@ucl.ac.uk to let us know the email address associated with your account so we can update the information for you and help you to login again.

Contact the lab team at mgmt-lab@ucl.ac.uk at your soonest convenience. Study time slots are usually scheduled with time slots before and after, meaning it may not always be possible to accommodate participants who arrive late. Studies often rely on participants attending on time and so it is important that participants contact the lab team as soon as possible if they believe they may be late.

Please note that the lab is not on the ground floor level and so once it is time to start the study participants who have arrived will be taken to the lab; there may not be a member of the team available to return to the foyer to collect participants who arrive late.

If you are unable to come to the lab to participate in a study you have signed up for, please login to your research account and go to “My Schedule and Credits”, click on the cancel button for the study you would like to cancel. If you need to cancel with less than 24 hours before your scheduled time slot, please e-mail the Lab team at mgmt-lab@ucl.ac.uk.

While studies may not last the full duration of the stated time slot, participants who have signed up for a lab study should be prepared to be available for the full duration of their time slot from start to finish.

Research study payments are made in the form of Amazon voucher codes, which can then be redeemed to an Amazon account. The payment amount will be stated in the SONA study description. All payments will be sent to the email address associated with the research participation account. Please ensure the security settings on your email account will allow for emails sent by mgmt-lab@ucl.ac.uk. At present, the lab is able to offer payment in the form of UK vouchers only. Some specific researchers may be able to offer participants payment in Amazon US vouchers.

For lab-based studies, the lab team will issue payments by email at the end of each study running week. For online studies, payment will typically be sent once ALL participant data for that study has been collected and the researcher has confirmed the list of eligible participant IDs to be paid. If online study data collection continues for a period longer than expected, the lab team may process payments in batches to reduce the wait between study participation and payment.

For online studies that can be done remotely, researcher discretion will determine payment for participants who have attempted to take the survey more than once, displayed suspicious behaviour in their data (e.g. unusually fast survey completions), or have failed to correctly answer specific attention-monitoring questions. Online study participants may also be asked to provide a form of photographic ID before payment is administered if their account information matches that of another participant. 

Do not attempt to take a survey again. If you are at the lab and experience issues taking a survey, please contact the experimenter as soon as possible.

If you experience any technical difficulties when completing surveys outside of the lab, please take a screenshot of what you see on-screen (e.g. an error message) and send this in an e-mail with your unique participant ID number and the date and approximate time at which you were taking the survey.

Please do not attempt to take a survey more than once if you have clicked beyond the consent page information, unless instructed to do so by the lab team, as subsequent attempts may invalidate your data and you may not be eligible for payment.

When completing online surveys outside of the Behavioural Research Lab, please remember to click all the way to the end of the survey to submit your data and wait for the webpage to redirect you to the SONA login page. This signifies that your data has been recorded and your status within SONA for said study will not be automatically marked as ‘participated’.

If you do not wait for this page to load, your survey data may not be recorded, and you will not be granted with participation in the study you have just completed. This will in turn cause you to continue to receive notification emails to complete the study. If you believe you have already completed an online survey and you are still receiving email notifications to complete it, please contact the lab team at mgmt-lab@ucl.ac.uk.

Please do not cancel your study sign up, as the lab team will need to sign you up retrospectively to credit you either with participation or withdrawal/ partial completion of the study. 

To complete the survey for an online study you have signed up for, you can locate the study confirmation email sent to you after you signed up, which will have the survey link to click on and complete before the study deadline. Or, alternatively, you can login to the research participation website, select the name of the study concerned and you will be able to view a page that allows you to take the survey, providing you are completing before the study deadline.

Please check the SONA study description to see if the online study is mobile-device compatible. If not, you will need to have access to a PC or a laptop to complete the survey. This may be because a tablet or mobile phone screen size inhibits you from viewing the survey as the researcher intended it to be viewed. You will also not be able to use a mobile device to join a remote Zoom study. 

To check participants are reading and understanding all instructions in a study before selecting and submitting a response, researchers may include questions that request a specific response is selected. Attention-monitoring questions are either instructional (e.g. requesting you respond to a survey question in a specific way to indicate you have read the full text instructions carefully), comprehension-based (e.g. requesting recall of information you have read on a previous survey page) or ‘nonsense’ questions (e.g. “Have you ever seen a live horse at the lab?”), which aim to identify random clicking.

Sometimes, participants who do not respond appropriately to these types of questions will be automatically redirected out of an online survey without being able to view and respond to the main survey content. It is at the researcher’s discretion whether payments will be made to participants who fail to correctly respond to attention-monitoring questions.

An online study can be shut down before the originally specified deadline if the quota of participants has been reached early. The deadline provided is an estimate of how long it may take to reach the data quota. 

Of course! As long as they are aged 18 years or over, all they need to do is to go to our research participation website to create their own personal research participation account. 

All data collected during studies via the lab is used for academic purposes only. The researchers/ principal investigators are UCL staff or PhD students analyse the study data with the goal of publishing their research papers in academic journals, books and possibly for presentation at academic conferences. Data will be stored as required by journal and professional standards. Your privacy will be maintained in all published and written data resulting from your participation in our studies.

Your personal information will never be shared with any third party. The researchers who analyse study survey data do not have access to your personally identifying information on the SONA Systems database. Your unique participant ID number is the only reference point attached to your data. All study data is stored securely in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998, and UCL’s data storage policies.

Any data in your SONA research participation account is accessible to the lab team to facilitate the scheduling of studies, inviting you to participate and contacting you about your study participation.

There may be a number of reasons for this. Some studies may take several weeks for all data to be collected. If you have already taken part, it may mean we are still busy collecting data for that study. A study may have specific restrictions or requirements that you may not meet; you may have completed a similar study in the past, which disqualifies you from participating in a particular subsequent study. You may not have completed your pre-screen, which is mandatory before you can view or sign up for a study. If you have not done so, you will be prompted to do so each time you login.

Click on the ‘my profile’ tab to check your study invitation emails are going to the correct email address. You can participate in as many or as few studies as you wish, providing you are eligible to do so.

On creation of a research participation account, people who are NOT members of UCL are asked to email photo ID to mgmt-lab@ucl.ac.uk so that the lab team can approve your research account. Your research account will not be approved for study viewing and sign up if this is not done.

For lab-based studies, for security reasons, all participants for lab-based studies at One Canada Square are asked to show a form of photo ID before being granted access to the designated floor within the building. For the sake of research integrity, the lab team must also be able to verify that the person who has shown up to participate in the study is the same individual who signed up to take part. For online studies completed remotely, you may be asked to email a copy of your photo ID before payment can be administered.

Your photographic ID or any personal information will never be linked with any of your study data. Participants will be required to present a form of ID that clearly displays their photograph, full name (that matches the one in their research participation account). The following types of ID can be presented: • 18+ photo Oyster cards • military ID • passport • NUS extra card • provisional or full driver’s license • student ID cards with photo. If ID is sent by email and we can verify it matches the information in your research account, it will be deleted and our system updated to show that you have provided suitable ID.

If your account information matches that of another participant and ID is requested, your research participation account will remain deactivated until photographic ID is provided.

No. Your friend (as long as they are 18 years or over) will need to create their own research participation account with us. Even if they do have a research account with us, they would need to sign up for the study under their own research account and may not automatically be eligible to participate in the same studies as you. It is against the lab’s policy for more than one person to use a single research participation account.

If you can no longer attend your study time slot, please either cancel your slot before the study cancellation deadline or contact the lab team to notify of your cancellation or discuss the possibility of rescheduling.

Please adhere to information in the email invitation and SONA study description on the research participation site. Sometimes study time slots will be scheduled to overlap if time slots are occurring simultaneously in multiple locations or with multiple experimenters.

Approximate study durations are based on the lab team testing the surveys and taking into account potential waiting times, instructions, etc.

If the study you take part in will involve video recording, you will always be informed in the study description before you sign up to participate. Recordings will not be made without participant consent. Recordings are only analysed by members of the research team and will never be shared with anyone who is not involved in the research. 

When attending lab-based studies, you will be asked to show a form of photographic ID before taking part and the name on your ID must match the name in your research account.

For security reasons, access to the lab at One Canada Square can only be granted to individuals who identify themselves. To uphold data integrity, the lab team must verify that the individual attending for a lab-based study is the same person who has signed up for the time slot.

You may be asked at a later time to provide photo ID and if it does not match the details in your research account, this could result in non-payment for a study and/ or account deactivation.

The PI/ researchers will only see your unique participant ID number; they do not have access to view your personal information on the research participation database and would only receive your email contact information if you chose to contact them directly. If you need to update your details (i.e. name), please send an e-mail to the lab team at mgmt-lab@ucl.ac.uk.

While coronavirus restrictions are being lifted across England, we recognise it is an individual’s choice to wear a face covering. We encourage participants to continue to wear a face covering, unless exempt, and to be considerate of others nearby, especially if wearing a ‘please give me space’ sunflower lanyard or badge. Lab devices will be cleaned between participant use. If you have any questions, please contact mgmt-lab@ucl.ac.uk.

Please do not attend an in-person study if you are feeling unwell. Please let the lab team know beforehand and this will not incur any penalty on your research account. If you are unwell and visibly appear to be unwell on arrival, you may not be permitted to take part in the study and will not be paid.

Send an e-mail to the lab team at mgmt-lab@ucl.ac.uk, providing the email address associated with your account, or your user ID, or your name to request deactivation. If you have never participated in a study, your account will be deleted on request. If you have a study participation record, your account will be deactivated, and your pre-screen data deleted along with any contact information you provided.

Your record of study participations will be retained for auditing purposes to show a unique individual took part in said study/ studies. A deactivated account can be reactivated on request by the participant; you would need to contact the lab team to have your contact information reinstated and you would need to complete the pre-screen again.