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.
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.
I am coming towards the end of my role as Head of Department at LSE. It has been my primary professional identity for six years at this stage. I will be handing over in August. I was head during covid, industrial unrest, the development of scaled LLM use etc,. But also at a time when psychology and behavioural science was growing quite a lot within LSE. We have hired a lot of new staff and built new programmes including a lot of new executive education. I have also been teaching and co-directing the MSc in Behavioural Science. Heads of Department come and go in UK universities without much fanfare (other than huge joyous expressions of relief to be handing over) but I feel something different in this case, it has been the main role in my career so far and I learned a lot about people doing it and formed very strong professional connections with a range of people. I have been working on an interesting project reviewing psychology and behavioural science over the 130 years in LSE and also situating the current decade within that, including organising some photographs and documents to deposit in the LSE archive, including this one below of our current Department staff.
Over the next year, I am trying to build a new research group broadly at the intersection of ethical aspects of behavioural public policy and economic psychology. My research has generally looked at subjective aspects of policy, including how people are affected by economic circumstances, how we deal with administrative burdens, and how we conceptualise ethical aspects of the interaction between institutions and citizens with the psychological aspects in mind. I am going to do a lot more soul-searching into how exactly the research group will be built. It will partly nest aspects of the Wider World Initiative that I have built with students and colleagues over the last five years, as well as the FORGOOD initiative we have been working on, and my contribution to the behavioural aspects of the Building Sustainable Societies Theme of the Global School of Sustainability. It will also include a number of existing PhD students and research fellows who have been working with me on economic psychology related topics, as well as collaborators. I don't want it to be solely focused on academic research papers and it will include people who are working in public policy and industry in various capacities. I want to create new ways of using behavioural science concepts in ethical and interesting ways.
As part of work on the Climate Change Advisory Council Ireland, I worked with council secretariat recently to organise a one-day workshop on the behavioural and psychological dimensions of climate change in Ireland. There were over 100 attendees from across many different organisations in Ireland with a focus on how to connect evidence from these literatures to public policy. The event saw talks from researchers from the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI), Department of Transport, Teagasc and University College Cork (UCC). Topics included public perceptions of climate change, climate literacy and misinformation, behavioural barriers to the adoption of low-carbon transport and energy technologies, and the role of fairness and policy design in securing public acceptability. Presentations also addressed demand flexibility in energy use, sustainable mobility, farmer engagement on mitigation and adaptation, biodiversity awareness, and the practical embedding of behavioural frameworks into policy development and implementation. A recurring theme was how to move from isolated pilots and surveys towards more systematic integration of behavioural evidence across Government and local authority decision-making. A highlight was a comprehensive keynote presentation from Lorraine Whitmarsh which set out the central role of behavioural change in delivering effective climate policy, drawing on evidence from the UK and international research. She emphasised that technological innovation alone will not be sufficient to meet emissions targets, highlighting the need to address demand-side behaviours in areas such as transport, diet and home energy use. The presentation explored systematic reviews of the effectiveness of behavioural interventions, the importance of fairness and policy acceptability, and the value of targeting “moments of change” such as moving home or generational farm transfer as strategic opportunities for intervention. A panel discussion emphasised the emergence of a strong behavioural science ecosystem in Ireland across agencies, departments and academia, and explored how this capacity can be better coordinated and embedded earlier in policy design.The document linked here summarises the event and talks, and details of the panel discussion that proposed various ways in which the many streams of very strong work in this area in Ireland could be brought together and integrated into emerging challenges in policy in this area. A follow up event is being developed for later in the year aimed at specific areas identified.
Thank you toSabrina TeyssierandPaolo Crosettofor organising the 4th Winter Workshop in Behavioural and Experimental Economics of Food Consumption.https://lnkd.in/eAZQGB38It was good to hear a range of talks from colleagues across disciplines and career stages, to see the lovely town of Villard-de-Lans, and learn more about the fantastic research environment surrounding the Grenoble Applied Economics Lab (GAEL). Opening Keynote lecture byJutta Roosenon social media analytics and the study of food choices. Dedicated sessions on randomised controlled trials, sustainability and change, methods, nudges and labels, natural labels, rating and ranking scales, and my closing talk on institutional aspects of behavioural change in climate settings. There are so many interesting areas evolving across measurement, causal inference, welfare evaluations, and broad ethical and institutional design in these areas and the workshop covered all this in a very stimulating and engaging way.
Great to continue our series of LSE/Warwick PhD Behavioural Science events this week. Twice-annual event bringing together PhD students and faculty in behavioural science working in Warwick and LSE. Having rich spaces between internal presentations and full international conferences is important for research development. Looking forward to continuing to developing this with PhD researchers and staff over the next few years. Thanks in particular to our PhD manager at LSE Karine Gay for organising this one and all presenters and faculty attendees.
