Continuing the Economics, Psychology, and Policy Blog

This blog has existed in various forms since 2007. For approximately 4 years, it served as a message board for a number of people working at the Geary Institute. From 2011 to 2016, it mostly served as a way of introducing new projects and workshops at the Stirling behavioural science centre and then slowly faded. I will shortly begin as Professor and Head of the LSE Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science and the thought struck me that reintroducing the blog would be a good way to develop a reflective space to talk about some emerging issues in our fields.

I have spent the last four years developing behavioural economics and behavioural science capacity at UCD. The website of the UCD Behavioural Science and Policy group is here. It was great to work in my second stint at UCD. The development of an experimental lab and the first MSc in Behavioural Economics in Ireland, now moving into the fourth group, were two highlights. I am also glad to have kept weekly meetings and seminars in the area. We also brought over 300 people together in September 2019 for the IAREP-SABE conference, which we hosted in Croke Park. The research work revolved around examining relationships between lab and field behaviour, ongoing work on mental health and economic outcomes, and a range of projects on the ethics and development of behavioural science as a field of practice. I maintained a basically constant set of engagements with Irish public policy agencies throughout the four years. There is now genuine interest and capacity in this area across a range of regulators and policy agencies in Ireland, and the ESRI, in particular, have developed a coherent long-run stream of behavioural public policy work that is having a strong influence on Irish public policy. I will continue to organise seminars and workshops as part of the Irish Behavioural Science and Policy Network and we will meet monthly from September.

I will post here purely in a personal capacity. My main interest is to have somewhere online to talk about interesting ideas emerging at the intersection of economics, psychology, and policy. At present, I am particularly interested in how different types of behavioural science are emerging as forms of professional practice, and how we think about evidence and ethics in this context. Below and linked here is a recent paper I published with Leonhard Lades trying to summarise a large literature on the ethical issues. That paper partly drew from a lot of discussions I had through this blog e.g. see the following post which gathered readings on the topic for a number of years.  As many people likely to read something like this know, I have been trying for several years to finish a book on the history of economics, psychology, and policy and I will also talk about some themes from that on here from time to time.

Insights from the behavioural sciences are increasingly used by governments and other organizations worldwide to ‘nudge’ people to make better decisions. Furthermore, a large philosophical literature has emerged on the ethical considerations on nudging human behaviour that has presented key challenges for the area, but is regularly omitted from discussion of policy design and administration. We present and discuss FORGOOD, an ethics framework that synthesizes the debate on the ethics of nudging in a memorable mnemonic. It suggests that nudgers should consider seven core ethical dimensions: Fairness, Openness, Respect, Goals, Opinions, Options and Delegation. The framework is designed to capture the key considerations in the philosophical debate about nudging human behaviour, while also being accessible for use in a range of public policy settings, as well as training.

I have spent a lot of the last three months working on the behavioural change sub-group of the Irish National Public Health Emergency Response Team (NPHET). This was an interesting and intense experience and made me think constantly about the role of behavioural science in interdisciplinary teams, what behavioural science can contribute to emergency response, the optimal composition of behavioural science groups, ethical issues, and how we can develop the capacity of behavioural science to address major global issues through training and collaborative structures. I am currently part of a large H2020 initiative being led by Professor Maria Baghramian called PERITIA, which examines trust in expert knowledge in the context of climate change. Many of the contributors have written about these issues in the context of covid (see here). The extent to which behavioural science generates trustworthy evidence is something that I have been discussing in various forums and I think there will be a lot written on the covid context in the next year. I was on a panel recently with Ulrike Hahn, Paul Dolan, Nic Chater, Julia Black, and Grace Lordan that discussed some of these issues. I have also been working with several colleagues on how to ensure that the pandemic response draws from evidence on social and economic impacts. Along with Stephen Kinsella, Orla Doyle, and Philip Connell, I organised 17 panel sessions looking at a wide range of issues in the Irish covid policy response. I am continuing to speak to colleagues about themes from these sessions, including how to bring experts and citizen perspectives together in the policy process and how to synthesise different areas of knowledge, in particular how to bridge what can be seem like chasms between knowledge emerging from STEM and knowledge of administrative context and socio-economic and psycho-social contexts.

As has been the case from the beginning, I continue to work on the intersection of mental health and economic policy. The covid recession is starting to look very similar from an employment and mental health perspective to previous recessions, with a large number of young people at risk for long-term unemployment and underemployment, with consequent mental health and scarring effects. How we embed knowledge about mental health into the design of policy structures will be a constant feature of my own work over the next few years, and I hope to organise a number of events around this topic and continue to work and publish on the area.

I am not sure who will read this blog. My imagined audience has tended to be people with an intrinsic interest in the connection between economics, psychology, and policy throughout the world, and the blog has helped me start a lot of interesting discussions over the years.