psychology essay competition 2022 uk

Essay  COMPETITION

2024 global essay prize.

The John Locke Institute encourages young people to cultivate the characteristics that turn good students into great writers: independent thought, depth of knowledge, clear reasoning, critical analysis and persuasive style. Our Essay Competition invites students to explore a wide range of challenging and interesting questions beyond the confines of the school curriculum.

Entering an essay in our competition can build knowledge, and refine skills of argumentation. It also gives students the chance to have their work assessed by experts. All of our essay prizes are judged by a panel of senior academics drawn from leading universities including Oxford and Princeton, under the leadership of the Chairman of Examiners, former Cambridge philosopher, Dr Jamie Whyte.

The judges will choose their favourite essay from each of seven subject categories - Philosophy, Politics, Economics, History, Psychology, Theology and Law - and then select the winner of the Grand Prize for the best entry in any subject. There is also a separate prize awarded for the best essay in the junior category, for under 15s.

Q1. Do we have any good reasons to trust our moral intuition?

Q2. Do girls have a (moral) right to compete in sporting contests that exclude boys?

Q3. Should I be held responsible for what I believe?

Q1. Is there such a thing as too much democracy?

Q2. Is peace in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip possible?

Q3. When is compliance complicity?

Q1. What is the optimal global population?  

Q2. Accurate news reporting is a public good. Does it follow that news agencies should be funded from taxation?

Q3. Do successful business people benefit others when making their money, when spending it, both, or neither?

Q1. Why was sustained economic growth so rare before the later 18th century and why did this change?

Q2. Has music ever significantly changed the course of history?

Q3. Why do civilisations collapse? Is our civilisation in danger?

Q1. When, if ever, should a company be permitted to refuse to do business with a person because of that person’s public statements?

Q2. In the last five years British police have arrested several thousand people for things they posted on social media. Is the UK becoming a police state?

Q3. Your parents say that 11pm is your bedtime. But they don’t punish you if you don’t go to bed by 11pm. Is 11pm really your bedtime?

Q1. According to a study by four British universities, for each 16-point increase in IQ, the likelihood of getting married increases by 35% for a man but decreases by 40% for a woman. Why? 

Q2. There is an unprecedented epidemic of depression and anxiety among young people. Can we fix this? How?

Q3. What is the difference between a psychiatric illness and a character flaw?

Q1. “I am not religious, but I am spiritual.” What could the speaker mean by “spiritual”?

Q2. Is it reasonable to thank God for protection from some natural harm if He is responsible for causing the harm?

Q3. Does God reward those who believe in him? If so, why?

JUNIOR prize

Q1. Does winning a free and fair election automatically confer a mandate for governing?

Q2. Has the anti-racism movement reduced racism?

Q3. Is there life after death?

Q4. How did it happen that governments came to own and run most high schools, while leaving food production to private enterprise? 

Q5. When will advancing technology make most of us unemployable? What should we do about this?

Q6. Should we trust fourteen-year-olds to make decisions about their own bodies? 

ENTRY REQUIREMENTS & FURTHER DETAILS

Please read the following carefully.

Entry to the John Locke Institute Essay Competition 2024 is open to students from any country.

Registration  

Only candidates who registered before the registration deadline of Friday, 31 May 2024 may enter this year's competition.

All entries must be submitted by 11.59 pm BST on  the submission deadline: Sunday, 30 June 2024 .  Candidates must be eighteen years old, or younger, on that date. (Candidates for the Junior Prize must be fourteen years old, or younger, on that date.)

Entry is free.

Each essay must address only one of the questions in your chosen subject category, and must not exceed 2000 words (not counting diagrams, tables of data, endnotes, bibliography or authorship declaration). 

The filename of your pdf must be in this format: FirstName-LastName-Category-QuestionNumber.pdf; so, for instance, Alexander Popham would submit his answer to question 2 in the Psychology category with the following file name:

Alexander-Popham-Psychology-2.pdf

Essays with filenames which are not in this format will be rejected.

The candidate's name should NOT appear within the document itself. 

Candidates should NOT add footnotes. They may, however, add endnotes and/or a Bibliography that is clearly titled as such.

Each candidate will be required to provide the email address of an academic referee who is familiar with the candidate's written academic work. This should be a school teacher, if possible, or another responsible adult who is not a relation of the candidate. The John Locke Institute will email referees to verify that the essays submitted are indeed the original work of the candidates.

Submissions may be made as soon as registration opens in April. We recommend that you submit your essay well in advance of th e deadline to avoid any last-minute complications.

Acceptance of your essay depends on your granting us permission to use your data for the purposes of receiving and processing your entry as well as communicating with you about the Awards Ceremony Dinner, the academic conference for essay competition finalists, and other events and programmes of the John Locke Institute and its associated entities.  

Late entries

If for any reason you miss the 30 June deadline you will have an opportunity to make a late entry, under two conditions:

a) A late entry fee of 20.00 USD must be paid by credit card within twenty-four hours of the original deadline; and

b) Your essay must be submitted  before 11.59 pm BST on Wednesday, 10 July 2024.

To pay for late entry, a registrant need only log into his or her account, select the relevant option and provide the requested payment information.

Our grading system is proprietary. Essayists may be asked to discuss their entry with a member of the John Locke Institute’s faculty. We use various means to identify plagiarism, contract cheating, the use of AI and other forms of fraud . Our determinations in all such matters are final.

Essays will be judged on knowledge and understanding of the relevant material, the competent use of evidence, quality of argumentation, originality, structure, writing style and persuasive force. The very best essays are likely to be those which would be capable of changing somebody's mind. Essays which ignore or fail to address the strongest objections and counter-arguments are unlikely to be successful .

Candidates are advised to answer the question as precisely and directly as possible.

The writers of the best essays will receive a commendation and be shortlisted for a prize. Writers of shortlisted essays will be notified by 11.59 pm BST on Wednesday, 31 July. They will also be invited to London for an invitation-only academic conference and awards dinner in September, where the prize-winners will be announced. Unlike the competition itself, the academic conference and awards dinner are not free. Please be aware that n obody is required to attend either the academic conference or the prize ceremony. You can win a prize without travelling to London.

All short-listed candidates, including prize-winners, will be able to download eCertificates that acknowledge their achievement. If you win First, Second or Third Prize, and you travel to London for the ceremony, you will receive a signed certificate. 

There is a prize for the best essay in each category. The prize for each winner of a subject category, and the winner of the Junior category, is a scholarship worth US$2000 towards the cost of attending any John Locke Institute programme, and the essays will be published on the Institute's website. Prize-giving ceremonies will take place in London, at which winners and runners-up will be able to meet some of the judges and other faculty members of the John Locke Institute. Family, friends, and teachers are also welcome.

The candidate who submits the best essay overall will be awarded an honorary John Locke Institute Junior Fellowship, which comes with a US$10,000 scholarship to attend one or more of our summer schools and/or visiting scholars programmes. 

The judges' decisions are final, and no correspondence will be entered into.

R egistration opens: 1 April, 2024.

Registration deadline: 31 May, 2024. (Registration is required by this date for subsequent submission.)

Submission deadline: 30 June, 2024.

Late entry deadline: 10 July, 2024. (Late entries are subject to a 20.00 USD charge, payable by 1 July.)

Notification of short-listed essayists: 31 July, 2024.

Academic conference: 20 - 22 September, 2024.

Awards dinner: 21 September, 2024.

Any queries regarding the essay competition should be sent to [email protected] . Please be aware that, due to the large volume of correspondence we receive, we cannot guarantee to answer every query. In particular, regrettably, we are unable to respond to questions whose answers can be found on our website.

If you would like to receive helpful tips  from our examiners about what makes for a winning essay or reminders of upcoming key dates for the 2024  essay competition, please provide your email here to be added to our contact list. .

Thanks for subscribing!

The John Locke Institute's Global Essay Prize is acknowledged as the world's most prestigious essay competition. 

We welcome tens of thousands of submissions from ambitious students in more than 150 countries, and our examiners - including distinguished philosophers, political scientists, economists, historians, psychologists, theologians, and legal scholars - read and carefully assess every entry. 

I encourage you to register for this competition, not only for the hope of winning a prize or commendation, and not only for the chance to join the very best contestants at our academic conference and gala ceremony in London, but equally for the opportunity to engage in the serious scholarly enterprise of researching, reflecting on, writing about, and editing an answer to one of the important and provocative questions in this year's Global Essay Prize. 

We believe that the skills you will acquire in the process will make you a better thinker and a more effective advocate for the ideas that matter most to you.

I hope to see you in September!

Best wishes,

Jamie Whyte, Ph.D. (C ANTAB ) 

Chairman of Examiners

• 2023 Contest Results
• 2023 Psychology Essay Contest
• 2022 Contest Results
• 2022 Psychology Essay Contest
• Submission Guidelines

SoT Psychology Essay Contest

Topic   the al-psychology connection: exploring the lmpact of artificial lntelligence on mental health, therapy, and well-being.  , students are asked to write an essay (up to 1,500 words) to address the following five points:.

Discuss the Al-Psychology Connection: Exploring the lmpact of Artificial lntelligence on Mental Health, Therapy, and Well-being.

• Discuss how this problem impacts a specific group of people. Personal or more general examples are encouraged.
• Describe one way that the study of psychology can help you and others understand an aspect of individual cognition, behavior or development related to this problem. You must state, describe, and provide an example relating to at least one specific concept in psychology.
• Discuss one way in which the study of psychology can help you understand an aspect of social relations or influences related to this problem. You must state, describe, and provide an example relating to at least one specific concept in psychology.
• Discuss one way in which a concept in psychology can help inform a solution to this systemic problem. You must state, describe, and provide an example relating to at least one specific concept in psychology.

Submissions must:

• Address the essay prompts provided above
• The work must be written in English
• The work must be completed individually, not in teams or groups
• Include citations from credible, peer-reviewed sources
• Plagiarism is prohibited. The top essays will be submitted to Turnitin.com before awards are decided and essays with evidence of plagiarism will be eliminated from the competition

Submission format requirements:

• Times New Roman, 12-point type, double-spaced
• Include the title, author information on the cover page, and an abstract of no more than 250 words.
• In-text citation in APA format and a references list. For more information, please consult the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.).
• MS Word Format Only

Eligibility and Rules

oEntry Requirements

Entry is open to students from any country and any school. Candidates must be 18 years old, or younger, on the date of the submission deadline.

Key Dates​ ​

Submission deadline - 15th, August, 2023

Award Announcement - 1st, October, 2023

200 RMB. All income will be used for project operations and other non-profit activities.

Awards First Prize 500 RMB

Second Prize 300 RMB

Third Prize 200RMB

Honorable Mention

Scoring Rubric

Formatting and Language

An essay of no more than 1,500 words (Cover page, abstract, and reference page do not count toward word limit)

• A cover page specifying the title and author information.
• An abstract of 120-250 words.
• In-text citations in correct APA format.
• A reference page in correct APA format.
• Free of grammar mistakes

Accurately identify and describe the origin and current situation of a problem of public mental health

Provide Coherent and consistent line of reasoning

Use at least one specific concept in Psychology to support your point

Accurately and clearly discuss one way to inform a solution to this problem.

Academic Committee

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National psychology competition, site search.

The competition

We run a national Psychology competition for schools, enabling Year 12 students to pit their psychology skills against pupils from across the UK.

To enter the competition, students answer the competition question with a two-minute video (submitted before the event) and a corresponding poster (to be presented at the on-campus event).

Students may want to look at findings from psychological studies, think about the implications of a psychological theory, or approach it completely differently. It’s an opportunity for you to showcase your understanding of Psychology.

The competition question

How can psychology be used to understand the misinformation epidemic? 

Rules and regulations

Teachers: You can register one team of 2 to 5 students from your school or college

Submission deadlines, rules, and regulations for the competition.

Registration

To register your team(s) for the competition, please complete the registration form by Friday 9th May 2023.

Team places will be allocated may fill up faster than the registration deadline (30 places are available in total).

If you are an A-level teacher and would like receive updates about future event registration dates, please join our mailing list .

Winning team members/school will receive a share of £150 in gift vouchers, courtesy of the Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway University of London.

Previous winners

Our 2022 competition theme was “How can psychology help solve societal and global problems?” Watch the video from the winning team from Peter Symonds College. https://vimeo.com/719007066

Our 2021 competition theme was “How can psychology help us to create a better future?”  Watch the video  from the winning team from Hazelwick School. Our 2020 competition theme was “How can psychology help us to understand current events?”. Watch the video from the winning team from Lady Eleanor Holles School.

Our 2019 competition theme was: “How can psychology be used to promote equality and greater acceptance of diversity?”  Watch the video from the winning team from Dame Alice Owens School.

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Article Contents

Brain 2023 essay competition.

• Article contents
• Figures & tables
• Supplementary Data

Masud Husain, Brain 2023 essay competition, Brain , Volume 146, Issue 7, July 2023, Page 2657, https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awad160

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The response to our inaugural essay competition last year was remarkable. The impressive quality of submissions and diversity of subjects considered by the authors—who included researchers, clinicians, patients, carers, as well as people who have no immediate link to neurology—was extraordinary. The thoughtful and sometimes moving nature of those essays have encouraged us to launch a new competition this year.

We seek writing that stimulates, provokes and makes our readers reflect. We emphasize that essays for Brain are NOT scientific articles. Nor are they academic pieces, but rather writing that provides a broader perspective on life for the general reader. Essays do NOT have to focus on neurological topics or the brain but they should make our readers reflect. They can be opinionated, entertaining or amusing, but most importantly, they should be enlightening, illuminating some aspect of the human condition, and written well.

The best submissions will be published in our Essay section, highlighted on Brain’s website and social media, and made freely available to all readers. Last year’s winning essay was published in the January 2023 issue of Brain, while the two runners-up had their submissions published in February and March of the journal.

What are we looking for in an essay? Aldous Huxley famously began the Preface to his Collected Essays (1960) with: ‘What is true of the novel is only a little less true for the essay. For, like the novel, the essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything’. According to Huxley, essays often focus either on the personal or autobiographical; or the objective or factual; or the abstract and universal. ‘Most essayists are at home and at their best in the neighbourhood of only one.’ However, he concluded: ‘The most richly satisfying essays are those which make the best not of one, not of two, but of all the three worlds in which it is possible for the essay to exist. Freely, effortlessly, thought and feeling move … from the personal to the universal, from the abstract back to the concrete, from the objective datum to the inner experience’.

We want an essay to be a coherent, carefully crafted piece of writing that aspires to achieve all these elements, providing an absorbing experience that stays with our readers long after they have enjoyed the text.

If you’re interested to submit an essay, or know someone who does, please read the following carefully :

This competition is open to anyone who would like to write an essay.

Essays have a limit of 2000 words. Please provide a word count at the end of the text.

Essays do not have an abstract but must have an introductory paragraph (∼100 words) to set the scene or summarize the contents for the reader.

Ideally, they don’t have subheadings but could have breaks within the text to divide up sections.

To reiterate, Essays are NOT scientific articles or academic texts. They do not have to cover neurological topics. They are supposed to stimulate, provoke and make our readers reflect.

If necessary, you can add up to 10 references, but Essays don’t have to have any references.

Please consider adding up to two images, ideally without copyright, to accompany your text.

Submit your text to the Brain pre-submission email address: [email protected]

Please DO NOT put your name, affiliation or any other information that can identify you anywhere on the text. Submissions will be judged by a panel that is blind to who you are or where you come from.

Only one submission per author is allowed.

All the information you need is provided here—if you read the text carefully. Please don’t send in further questions about the competition.

Deadline for submission: 15 October 2023.

We’re very much looking forward to reading your essays.

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2022 Brain essay competition results

Original publication

10.1093/brain/awac457

Journal article

Brain : a journal of neurology

Publication Date

Click here to start your application. Apply now

The Essay Competition is now closed.

Northeastern University London is inviting competition entries from students who are currently in their penultimate year of secondary education (equivalent to Year 12 in the English education system, or Grade 11 in India).

Our selection of essay titles engage across a broad range of technology, social science and humanities topics and we look forward to receiving entries from talented and intellectually curious students who show passion in their subject area. We welcome entries from students located anywhere in the world.

If you have any further questions please see our  FAQ page before contacting us.

Choose your essay question

Applied Digital & Technology Solutions: Discuss the societal risks and rewards associated with generative AI (such as ChatGPT). 

Business: Is it possible to reconcile the cost-of-living crisis consumers are experiencing with the need for sustainable consumption?

Computer & Data Science: Describe a modern application of data science based on machine learning, generative AI or data analytics. Discuss its context in terms of topic, domain, and societal implications. 

Economics: Does the expanding gig economy contribute positively to sustainable economic growth? 

English: Is it fair to say that literature is another name for language which has no practical use? 

History: How have empires throughout history shaped the societies we live in today? 

Law: Ed Sheeran said “Defending copyright infringement lawsuits has become as much a part of the job description for top musicians as the performance of hits”. Discuss whether UK copyright laws are out of date and should be reviewed by Parliament. 

Philosophy: To what extent, and in what ways, can the past be a good guide to the future? 

Politics & IR: Is environmental degradation a greater threat to the international community than war? 

Psychology: Discuss to what extent mental factors impact ageing.

The following prizes will be awarded:

Overall winner across all essay subjects- £1000

Winner in a subject category- £500

Runner up in a subject category- £250

How to enter

1. Register for the competition – After registering you will be emailed detailed instructions on how to enter.

2. Choose one of the titles

3. Write your 1,500-word essay

4. Submit your essay via our online form (URL will be emailed to you after you register) by 1pm GMT Sunday 31st December 2023 .

If you have any further questions please see our FAQ page before contacting us.

Who can enter?

The Northeastern University London Essay Competition is open to students who are currently in their penultimate (second to last) year of secondary education (Year 12 in England or Grade 11 in India). This is a global competition, so we encourage entries from those studying anywhere in the world. Find full competition rules here .

Register here

We are no longer accepting registrations for the essay competition. If you have any questions please refer to our FAQ .

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