Welcome Address Association of Technical Staff in Psychology

Good labs and software underpin a lot of behavioural research broadly defined. So it was great to welcome the Association of Technical Staff in Psychology (https://atsip.ac.uk/) for their 2025 annual conference at LSE. Thanks to our Scientific Officer and Head of Laboratory Innovation Sean Rooney for invitation. There has been psychology in LSE since at least 1964, including experimental research embedded into an earlier version of our undergraduate. This had largely fallen off by the mid 2000s. Over the last decade, there has been a large increase in our capacities in these areas, including the development of the Behavioural Research Lab (https://lnkd.in/dKqG56ZR), as well as a new undergraduate programme, and Masters and Executive Masters in Behavioural Science that draw heavily from lab and survey design techniques. In that context, it is good to see the conference discuss innovations across a range of capacities including SuperLab, PsychoPy, Gorilla, QuestionPro, StatsCloud, Python pipelines, eye-tracking, immersive VR set-ups, and validation hardware such as the Black Box ToolKit. I spoke in my welcome remarks about the development of behavioural research capacities across government and industry nationally and internationally in recent decades. In the UK context, the recent development of Behavioural Research UK is one example of significant investment in the future of behavioural research across a range of applications. The vast range of policy and business applications of behavioural research creates a range of ethical and regulatory issues that are at times difficult to navigate and also very interesting places to think about scale and social purpose. The UK clearly has a potential to lead on such applications and the extent to which social purpose and behavioural ethics should be factored into investments in commercial applications is a key question particularly amid the increasing policy interest in stimulating AI applications. Lab technicians and software specialists in these spaces are in a good position to input on many issues, including the feasibility of making behavioural research more dynamic, more representative, minimally invasive, as well as maintaining and building trust in data privacy, fidelity, and integrity. #BehaviouralScience #ATSiP2025 #Psychology  #Ethics #AI #LSE