Some discussion points for behavioural science next year

As the term comes to an end, I have had the chance to speak with students across our undergraduate, postgraduate, and executive behavioural science programmes, and those conversations have shaped a set of themes I want to explore more in the voluntary sessions in the new year. 

A recurring theme is the application of behavioural science in corporate settings. Students are thinking not only about how behavioural insights are used in organisations, but about the ethical boundaries and the kinds of innovations that are emerging in areas like product design, organisational culture, and sustainability. 

Closely linked to this is a growing interest in how behavioural interventions operate in community contexts, including NGOs, humanitarian organisations, and other life-saving or high-stakes domains. Many students want to understand how behavioural science interfaces with local knowledge, public health, and community-led action, and what it means to intervene ethically in these environments.

Another area that has come up frequently is the relationship between behavioural science and leadership and career development. Students are asking whether behavioural science is a lifelong professional identity or a foundational skill that supports work across a wide range of sectors. We have been having some interesting discussions including with alumni and external speakers on how people move between roles, how they develop wider domain expertise, and how behavioural skills contribute to leadership over the course of a career.

I have also been hearing more questions about the professionalisation of the field. There is clear interest in the role of professional associations, mentoring, accreditation, and the development of shared ethical standards. This reflects the way the field is maturing, and I plan to bring colleagues from groups such as GAABS into these discussions next term.

Students are obviously thinking about how AI systems influence judgement and decision-making, how they can be used in behavioural research, and how questions of persuasion, misinformation, and autonomy are evolving as AI becomes more integrated into daily life. We have various events in planning on in the new year. 

Finally, a strong theme this term has been the internationalisation of behavioural science. Students from India, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere have raised thoughtful questions about how behavioural science travels across cultural and institutional contexts, and how global perspectives can expand the assumptions embedded in much behavioural research. Several students have already expressed interest in regionally focused work next term, and I hope to support that.

These are some of the the threads that have stayed with me, and they will shape the sessions I run in the new year. 

Behavioural Science and the Wider World Series

Over the last five or six years I have been running the Behavioural Science and the Wider World seminar as a space where colleagues, alumni, policymakers, practitioners, and students can come together to think about how behavioural science is developing and how it is being applied in different settings. During this time the seminar has hosted a very wide range of contributors, including Cass Sunstein, David Halpern, Michael Hallsworth, Lucia Reisch, Laura Giurge, Jet Sanders, Phil Newall, Jas Virhia, Will Sandbrook, and colleagues from Busara, Nudge Lebanon, and several public bodies such as the Dutch Public Health Agency. The topics have ranged from public health, gambling policy, and ethical behavioural science, to AI, labour markets, organisational behaviour, and the practical challenges of running behavioural units around the world. 

I am now putting together and finalising the format for next year’s series, and giving some thought to how the seminar might develop in the years ahead. There are several directions that seem promising. Some sessions may remain in the familiar conversational style, but I am also considering panel discussions that bring together multiple perspectives on a theme, as well as continuing occasional online sessions to allow participation from the much broader community of alumni and collaborators around the world. I am also thinking about ways to create more direct engagement between our MSc students and senior practitioners, and about how the seminar can continue to function as a point of reunion for those who have passed through the programme. As I work on this, I would be very interested in thoughts or suggestions from anyone who has attended, spoken at, or followed the series.

Books from LSE PBS Colleagues

A snapshot from earlier in the year of books published by colleagues in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science. There has been a psychology department since 1964 and it merged with the behavioural science group in 2016 to form the current department. I have been working a bit on what came before the 1964 Department in terms of pre-cursors and I hope to give a couple of lectures on this in 2026. 

Forgoodframework

In the mid to late 2000s I was teaching economics & psychology students about behavioural economics & a particular emerging interdisciplinary strand that was going to be applied increasingly to public policy & regulation. This led to regular & interesting discussions about issues like autonomy, potential manipulation & the institutional environment. A lot of the literature emerging after the landmark publication of Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein was either focused a lot on effectiveness or on the other hand quite high level and abstract in terms of philosophical stances. We began to keep a reading list to keep track of papers across disciplines that could be useful in helping develop pragmatic ethical positions. It is a little out of date now as it is hard to keep up but still contains dozens of interesting papers on ethics of nudging and related areas,  As you might imagine, students started to wonder whether this could be parsed in some way and Leonhard Lades and I developed the FORGOOD framework as an attempt to provide a solid anchor to discuss key ethical issues in applied behavioural science projects. I have used versions of this every year in classes across Dublin, Stirling, and LSE and in many policy and executive talks. They create some of the most interesting and engaging small group seminars with many discussions and arguments about applications across a range of areas. Increasingly, I use it to help students clarify their own ethical stances and how that might shape their career aspirations, and it has been integrated into teaching across undergraduate, postgraduate, and executive courses. We also use it as a pre-mortem tool in a variety of settings and along with Bishin Ho and Annabel Gillard have developed an initiative around it to developing a range of tools for the ethical use of behavioural science in finance, tech, and related settings. The framework has been widely used in other settings including as one of the main references for the recent and very useful OECD document on how to integrate ethics in behavioural science projects. Aside from the framework, the emerging literature on ethical aspects of behavioural science is in my view incredibly interesting, and creating many new possibilities for how we develop and evaluate behaviorally-informed projects at different levels of scale. It has been great again to work with students across different classes this year and I am looking forward to working on future developments on it that we are currently writing and using in seminars.

Some great people to read

On his Substack (and before anyone starts, I am not getting a Substack, I’m quite happy here on Blogger with my two confirmed readers), Cass Sunstein lists scholars who have influenced him the most, restricting his list to people he knew. Posner, Rawls, Elster, Ullmann-Margalit, Thaler, and Kahneman is quite a list. I have met two of these brilliant scholars (Kahneman and Thaler) but I will give a list of people below that are awe-inspiring even if I haven't met them. I spent a lot of my formative years reading Freud, Hume, Keynes, Schumpeter, Mill, Rawls and a lot of moral philosophers. I have spoke before about how reading Kahneman and Tversky's work gave me some focus and I have largely worked within that broad tradition since. Cass himself is someone I have interacted with a lot and the most influential scholar for me in terms of thinking through connections between psychology, behavioural economics, regulation, and policy. I am assuming most people who read here will know where to find work by him and by Richard Thaler and Daniel Kahneman.

Elster's works been a constant companion over the years. Ulysses and the Sirens and Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences are both marvellous and bring together many concepts in behavioural science with political and institutional thinking.

Parfit's Reasons and Persons is another one that I hope any philosophically-minded behavioural student gets a chance to read at some point. You can search "Parfit" in the blog search bar to find many posts her on the great moral philosopher, including a post here on an ongoing project on his past valuation arguments.

Nancy Folbre's work on economics and the family has constantly recurred when I am talking with students about issues such as gender, care, and the general sense that traditional economic accounts overlook the role of these factors in societal allocation. If you want to connect feminist economics with critical discussion of traditional utility theory, among many other things, her work is outstanding, clear, and very pragmatic in its orientation.

Nancy Cartwright is another person who I regularly return to and who constantly provides stimulating ideas on method and on causality in particular. Among many well-known works, her highly-cited book "Hunting Causes and Using Them: Approaches in Philosophy and Economics" is a fascinating discussion of the many different ideas of causality that are at play when we talk about relationships between social and economic quantities. More recently, many readers will recall her paper on understanding and misunderstanding of randomised trials with Angus Deaton which has been widely cited in the discussions around the use of RCTs in evidence-based public policy (See reply from Guido Imbens for a sense of the parameters of the discussion). Cartwright is obviously working within technical literature but is far from an obscurantist and I believe any social science researcher would benefit from engaging with her work. A recent paper below "Rigour versus the need for evidential diversity" is particularly relevant to many current debates about how behavioural and social science is being embedded into public policy organisations. It gives always a strong sense of points made across her work on the limits of randomised trials, the nature of causality, and the tensions between the development of generalised theories and context-specific usable knowledge.

This is not an exhaustive list and you can look around the blog for many others.

Early November 2025 Behavioural Science and Policy Links

Former Colombian president and Nobel peace prize winner Juan Manuel Santos spoke at LSE this week as part of the new Global School of Sustainability event series. It was an interesting and wide ranging discussion on the Colombian peace process and the future of armed conflicts and democracy. It is available here. 

Dilip Soman on why behavioural scientists should be more like cartographers. 

I enjoyed listening to Emma Pinchbeck, head of the UK Climate Change Committee on the rest is politics podcast. She is an effective communicator and spoke clearly about several issues facing UK energy policy in the next few years. Towards the end, she touches on the role behavioural science work plays in a world that is quite dominated by engineers and economists, and speaks favourably in particular about the role of citizen assemblies. I have been part of the Irish climate change advisory council for the last 18 months or, and it has been fascinating to work through the behavioural dimensions of a wide range of issues relating to climate adaptation and mitigation. 

Excellent blogpost by Leonhard Lades, Malte Dold, Kate Laffan, Paul Lohmann, Andriy Ivchenko, and Manu Savani summarising the recent International Behavioural Public Policy conference. 

Michael Inzlicht on whether a small amount of drinking is a good thing in academia. I am glad he wrote the article even at risk of annoying people. Whether you agree with him or not, people talk about this type of stuff offline and we should start to reclaim this type of discussion online as well. Floating this with various people, the reactions ranged from very high disagreement and a sense that moving far away from academic drinking cultures was a good thing to people who felt very strongly that he was voicing something important, and that we are losing a lot in the decline in social drinking in academia.I am anti-social bordering on hermetic at the moment due to the (hopefully temporary) mis-anthropism that comes with running a Department. I have also not drank alcohol for a few years largely due to a desire to reset default options that were prevalent in the environment when I was entering adulthood. But that wasn't always the case and I have had some fun beers with a variety of people from around the world over the years. So if I had a vote, it would be to keep it somewhere in the mix but not as the norm and not pushed too much. Walking tours I have always found to be a good way of bringing people together and if some of them want to find a pub after so be it.