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.