Research Group Concept

Economic Psychology and Behavioural Public Administration Group

Led by Professor Liam Delaney, the group brings together economic psychology and behavioural public administration to study how people experience complex administrative environments. The group investigates underlying mental states in administrative environments, using methods such as the day reconstruction method and experience sampling to capture experience as it unfolds. Applications span both public-sector settings, including return-to-employment systems, long-term care, and environmental behaviour, and private-sector ones such as retail investment and debt servicing, reflecting economic psychology's long tradition of engaging real world institutions and policy actors. Two dedicated initiatives bring the work to policy and industry. "Wider World" translates research into public policy through workshops, toolkits, and engagement with policy actors, while also examining, reflexively, how behavioural science ought to be applied. FORGOOD, an ethical behavioural science initiative, applies research from the group to industry. The group is staffed by affiliated researchers from within LSE and visiting colleagues from outside it, partners in policy and industry, and students at every level, from MSc dissertation students to undergraduate apprentices, to affiliated PhD students based primarily in the department.

Some illustrative papers: The papers below give some sense of the interplay of economic psychology, naturalistic methods, and ethical analysis, as well as application to administrative questions. 

Bachmann, R., Gleibs, I. H., & Delaney, L. (2026). Social identity and capital income: A social psychological approach to identity economics using UK household data. British Journal of Social Psychology, 65, e70025

Lades, L. K., Zawojska, E., Johnston, R. J., Hanley, N., Delaney, L., and Czajkowski, M. (2025). Anomalies or expected behaviors? Understanding stated preferences and welfare implications in light of contemporary behavioral economics. Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, 19(1), 48–68.

Lades, L. K., & Delaney, L. (2024). Self-control failures, as judged by themselves. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 11(1), Article 1351, 1–14.

Martin, L., Delaney, L., & Doyle, O. (2024). Everyday administrative burdens and inequality. Public Administration Review, 84(4), 660–673.

Laffan, K., Lades, L. K., & Delaney, L. (2023). Paths that lead astray: Examining the situational predictors of intention-behaviour gaps in meat consumption. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 89, Article 102045.

Arulsamy, K., & Delaney, L. (2022). The impact of automatic enrolment on the mental health gap in pension participation: Evidence from the UK. Journal of Health Economics, 86, Article 102673

Lades, L. K., & Delaney, L. (2022). Nudge FORGOOD. Behavioural Public Policy, 6(1), 75–94.

Brief Thoughts on FirstGen Student Issues

I have thought a lot about first generation students and those becoming leaders in various ways. More generally coming from a background where university education is not a norm creates different context factors. Cash and liquidity constraints shape the incentives and experience in a big way, something I have always and maybe sometimes crudely (or so I have been told) put up front when speaking to people about academic careers. I don't experience it as a moral issue primarily even though it is at some level, but it is a fact that some students and early career academics simply won't have those constraints as a dominant part of their experience whereas for others they will be foremost and it is important to understand that. Culture and the hidden curriculum also obviously matters. Personally getting older It has been good to try to fit in less to the cultural expectations of universities and I think they are loosening a bit anyway over time. But again it is obvious that the cultural aspects of universities are just an extension of school and family for some but a distinct and sometimes threatening structural break for others. It is also clearly the case that for given levels of any measurable ability students differ drastically in their earnings anchors and implicit networks. Some use the university itself to create their networks, others have access to family and wider social networks that the university basically complements. There is a lot of good work in the system on widening participation, mentoring, etc., I'm not confident I have anything to add to it but it has been interesting to speak to some others who have come through the university system and into various types of careers. It was also one of the highlights of my job in last few years to work with one of our donors to offer scholarships on our programmes. Have been thinking a lot about the second half of life and work in that space. More to follow.

On completing six years as head of LSE Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science 2020-2026

Shortly completing 6-years as head of LSE Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science. The current Department was formed in 2016 through bringing together staff in social and organisational psychology with colleagues in behavioural science. Throughout the history of LSE, there has been a strong presence for social and organisational psychology, not least in the work of one of the founders Graham Wallas. Psychology was taught alongside anthropology and sociology in general social science courses through the first half of 20th century. The great Hilde Himmelweit was the key founding figure for social psychology here, as founding chair and main energy behind the creation of a Department of Social Psychology and ensuing traditions such as social representations have created a strong intellectual legacy that remains. Through Beveridge and many others there has also been a long tradition of integrating ideas about human welfare and well-being into public policy. The creation of the Executive MSc in Behavioural Science in 2014, the MSc in Behavioural Science in 2019 and the development of the behavioural science lab cemented a strong presence for behavioural science in LSE. Bringing social, organisational psychology and behavioural science into one Department has led to a decade of new programmes, new research and policy collaborations, and interesting ideas, including the creation of a new undergraduate programme in psychological and behavioural science. It has been a pleasure to be a part of developing this further in the last six years, including bringing on a new generation of faculty and staff, and working with a great team and collaborators across the Department, School, & beyond to develop many aspects of the effort. We are fortunate that Professor Alex Gillespie has agreed to take on the role. Looking forward to continuing to work here as a faculty member in the Department, some roles in the School, and as co-lead of the behavioural science postgraduate programme. I will also co-ordinate a new general course reviving the format of faculty-led debates on key issues in contemporary psychology and behavioural science. Will continue to update here on a new research group at the intersection of economic psychology and behavioural public administration. For the many people here who interacted with me and the Department throughout the six years including through some pretty intense times in a challenging environment for social science in the UK, thanks and look forward to keeping in touch, and strong assurance that the energy that has led to such an interesting space for these areas is alive and well.

Research Group Conversation

Following from the previous post, working on topics for an evolving research group at intersection of economic psychology & ethical aspects of behavioural policy. Over my career, have been most interested in subjective aspects of economic and policy systems, how regular humans navigate and experience complex administrative environments, and how our knowledge of this shapes how we think about the ethics of different types of policy actions broadly defined. The history of behavioural economics and behavioural public policy more generally is grounded to some degree in eclectic economic psychological methods and theory and engagements with industry and policy. And there has been an increasing professionalisation of behavioural science in policy and industry, increasing the need for reflection on the legitimacy and ethics of this work. The group will create space for capacity building in these areas, including engagement with a wide set of existing groups and institutional developments including IBBPA, BR-UK, IAREP, GAABS, and others. The key literatures I want to both draw from and advance in specific ways through research i) the ethics of behavioural applications ii) literature on subjective aspects of administrative processes iii) the subjective experience of consequential economic decisions and outcomes iv) the development of naturalistic everyday measurement techniques such as day reconstruction for use in economic psychology applications v) the experience and valuation of time. I hope to work with students at all levels, and a network of academic collaborations, policy partnerships and industry engagement to develop a research environment with a focus on academic rigour but with a strong applied and institutional sensibility, with the latter being one key driver of theoretical and empirical development. AI will feature to some extent in the group with a focus on ethics of application and some element of transparent collaborative experimentation in its use. But it will have a clear philosophy of fostering dynamic human engagements as fundamental to theory building and application development. I have no idea whether it is true but I have always felt that some element of controlled human chaos is helpful for the emergence of important research in economic psychology (e.g. see Katona, Ainslie, Thaler, all very eclectic routes to their ideas). I hope as well as strong research papers, we create some interesting points of contact between the evolving economic psychological literature and the wider environment, that it creates a supportive space not just for research papers written with me but for people to pursue some big thoughts in these spaces. I am currently still Department chair and fighting with a big part of my brain tied behind my back but will unfold these ideas over the next year. Posting for conversation. Formal proposals, calls for collaboration later.

Proposal for a Chair of Economic Psychology at LSE 1925

The current Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science was formally started in LSE in 2016 and a lot of our current students are on programmes that have been created during the last decade. But clearly there is a far longer history of psychology and behavioural science, dating back to the foundation of the university. The Institute of Social Psychology and incarnations dating back to 1964 were initiated primarily by Professor Hilde Himmelweit. Prior to that, psychology existed in a range of forms spread between various departments including economics, anthropology, and sociology. It is also well represented among the founders of LSE in particular Graham Wallas who wrote a number of works on industrial and political psychology. I have been doing some archival digging as part of a project to create some materials to represent this history in the wider context of the history of LSE. I posted a bit more context on that in this post recently. 

One document so far that has been particularly interesting to read is the 1925 proposal put to William Beveridge to create a new Chair in Economic Psychology (to my knowledge this did not happen in the form envisioned but clear economic psychology has survived in various forms here). There is also another document put to Beveridge to form a Department of Industrial Psychology at LSE. It is dated May 19th 1925. It is interesting in the archives at this stage to see how many threads from this period still exist in various ways here. I am even tempted to just give a lecture from the perspective of the person they hired for the role. 

Evolving Research Group Idea: Behavioural Science and the Wider World Research Group

Below is evolving and shared here to help me have discussions with various people interested in working on this evolving research group. 

1. Overall Idea

A group of researchers, students, and practitioners working to rigorously develop the insights of economic psychology and behavioural science and translate them into policies and institutions that improve human welfare.

2. Mission

The Behavioural Science and the Wider World Research Group advances the scientific foundations of behavioural public policy. We develop and test theory at the intersection of economic psychology and policy-relevant behaviour, train the next generation of behavioural scientists through embedded research apprenticeships, and build frameworks, including the FORGOOD framework and the Building Sustainable Societies agenda of the Global School of Sustainability, that connect rigorous evidence to real-world decisions across government, industry, and civil society.

3. Research Group Features

 
Three things define the group's identity: 

1. Economic psychology as a scientific foundation. The group is rooted in economic psychology, the study of decision-making, preferences, welfare, and financial and social cognition, and brings this theoretical depth to bear on questions of behavioural public policy.

2. The policy translation problem as a central intellectual challenge. The group treats the gap between behavioural evidence and policy application as a genuine research question, not just a communications challenge. This includes questions of scaling, cross-cultural validity, ethical frameworks, and welfare evaluation methodology.

3. A teaching-research continuum. The group is structurally connected to undergraduate and postgraduate education through the Wider World Initiative, the undergraduate advances in behavioural science module, and the research apprenticeship scheme. This creates a genuine pipeline and makes the group a training environment as well as a research one.

4. Core research themes 

Economic psychology and decision-making: foundational work on preferences, cognition, financial behaviour, and welfare

Behavioural public policy: designing, evaluating, and scaling policy interventions

Ethics and governance of behavioural science: FORGOOD framework and its development across sectors

Sustainability and behaviour: connecting to the Global School of Sustainability's Building Sustainable Societies theme

Measurement and methods: novel welfare evaluation, cross-cultural comparability, evaluation methodology

5. Engagement

The Behavioural Science and the Wider World Research Group welcomes engagement from researchers, students, and practitioners at all career stages.

PhD study We supervise doctoral research across the group's core themes. Prospective PhD students interested in economic psychology, behavioural public policy, welfare measurement, ethics of behavioural science, or sustainability and behaviour are encouraged to get in touch to discuss potential projects and supervision arrangements ahead of making a formal application.

External fellowship funding Researchers at postdoctoral or more senior levels who are considering applying for external fellowship funding, including ESRC, ERC, or similar schemes, and who would like to be based within the group are welcome to reach out to discuss hosting arrangements and collaborative fit.

MSc supervision We supervise MSc dissertations for students across relevant programmes at LSE. If you are an LSE MSc student interested in working on a project connected to the group's research themes, please get in touch to discuss potential topics and supervisors.

Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship The group participates in LSE's undergraduate research apprenticeship scheme, offering students the opportunity to contribute to live research projects. These are made available through the PB312 code in LSE. 

Wider World Seminar Series Our weekly seminar series brings together researchers, policymakers, industry practitioners, students, and alumni to discuss emerging themes in behavioural science and its applications. 

See below my keynote lecture from the 2025 International Association for Economic Psychology for an account of the role of economic psychology in behavioural pubic policy: 

6. Some illustrative papers: The papers below give some sense of the interplay of economic psychology, naturalistic methods, and ethical analysis, as well as application to administrative questions. 

Bachmann, R., Gleibs, I. H., & Delaney, L. (2026). Social identity and capital income: A social psychological approach to identity economics using UK household data. British Journal of Social Psychology, 65, e70025

Lades, L. K., Zawojska, E., Johnston, R. J., Hanley, N., Delaney, L., and Czajkowski, M. (2025). Anomalies or expected behaviors? Understanding stated preferences and welfare implications in light of contemporary behavioral economics. Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, 19(1), 48–68.

Lades, L. K., & Delaney, L. (2024). Self-control failures, as judged by themselves. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 11(1), Article 1351, 1–14.

Martin, L., Delaney, L., & Doyle, O. (2024). Everyday administrative burdens and inequality. Public Administration Review, 84(4), 660–673.

Laffan, K., Lades, L. K., & Delaney, L. (2023). Paths that lead astray: Examining the situational predictors of intention-behaviour gaps in meat consumption. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 89, Article 102045.

Arulsamy, K., & Delaney, L. (2022). The impact of automatic enrolment on the mental health gap in pension participation: Evidence from the UK. Journal of Health Economics, 86, Article 102673

Lades, L. K., & Delaney, L. (2022). Nudge FORGOOD. Behavioural Public Policy, 6(1), 75–94.