August 30th Personal Reflections and Links

I am entering into my sixth and final year as the head of the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at LSE. I have and continue to put a lot into this role and there has been a lot of movement in the Department over the time I have been there, including hiring, extensions of programmes, new executive options, new philanthropy lines, etc., I gave a few reflections before and at some point I might attempt a lessons-learned piece but definitely quite a bit down the line. Things that go well tend to habituate quickly in your mind. Things that have gone less well take longer to shake off. I think we have created a Department with a huge potential over the next decades and I will be giving it a good push in the last year. 

I wrote in another post about the type of things I have been working on from a research perspective. I am continuing to work on these topics. The FORGOOD initiative has also moved into a much more active phase, including rolling out our first cohort of industry participation this year. We have built a range of materials for use by cohort members and I have been enjoying engaging with a lot of people on this. 

I have been running a lot and strength training in the time I have been at LSE. I started running half-marathons in 2017 and ran my first marathon in the Connemara hills back in April and am doing my second in Dingle in Kerry this week. For any readers who have shared my early career path of health neglect and over-weighting of academic life, I have to recommend at least trying running or long walks as an antidote. Walking in Scotland when I worked there was my first very structured attempt to create a proper space away from work and that led to running and to a range of other health activities. 

For most of my life, I also had a very bizarre relationship with money and took precisely zero account of all that I learned about investment returns and human behaviour. In the last few years, that has changed as well. I don't know whether I should be annoyed or reassured as a behavioural economics devotee that I have left it all a bit too late to be a fully effective strategy. Anyone in your 20s or 30s with a reasonable research job reading this for god sake set up a low fee investment account of some type and start contributing to it, and spend a bit of time looking at your pension options. It is insane how much you can alter your financial trajectory at this stage.  A couple of years ago I also stopped drinking alcohol and I have yet really to come to a conclusion as to whether this is something I want to do permanently.  But everything combined has definitely given a stronger buffer around academic stress.

In terms of things I have been reading, watching, or listening to, I still feel a bit homeless when it comes to social media. I post the odd time on Linkedin, mostly professional updates with some attempt at authenticity. I have not changed my view that X is fatally compromised in terms of how it is run. And Bluesky just have never managed to break out of its very heavily US progressive base (though some colleagues really have used it effectively so I don't want to be too negative). I have been playing around with AI a bit and still count myself among the sceptics. One use I have found is that Gemini can increasingly do things in gmail like add things to calendars if you ask it, so that alone is worth at least some of the trillions. I do enjoy playing with GPT-5 and I think the changes in its tone etc., have been very positive. I use it to try to structure my to-do list from time to time. It is still not doing anything in my world that is transforming how I work but maybe if they stop constantly making bullshit claims and start finding low-level useful things it can do, this could be a path to converting people like me.

Cass Sunstein has posted a bit about listening to conservative talk radio. I have partly been influenced by him to listen to a few of them and partly listening to personal finance podcasts brought me into their orbit. I like listening to Dave Ramsey in particular. He is an evangelical (in every sense of the term) advocate of debt-free living. His main advice is to get rid of any high interest debt with a massive degree of intensity ("your friends should think you have joined a cult"), build up an emergency fund, invest a solid portion of your income in diversified stock funds, and pay off your mortgage as early as possible. He has a number of best-selling books on this broad theme. His radio shows mostly involve people ringing in with various debt problems and invariably involves him advising them to sell some debt-carrying assets, cut up their credit cards, try to build their income, and find some way to get to debt-zero, with an emergency fund, and the beginning of a saving and investment trajectory. I find a lot of what he says about the negatives of debt intuitively appealing and listening to his callers often brings to life many of the things I have thought about over the years on financial behaviour. He will often start talking about how financial wisdom can be found in scripture, or his love of guns, or the importance of the nuclear family above any other family structure. There are lots of things he says that should make me just turn off the channel but I grew up around many people who I thought were decent and I was able to trust and be around who often said things that I would never hear in my current environments. Truthfully I am unlikely to convert to Ramsey's type of Christian practice, or start being enthusiastic about gun ownership, or feel that my friends living together who haven't got married are doing something sinful. But, as one example, he has made me think on several occasions, whether getting in debt to gain a higher education is a sensible option for everyone, and in general listening to a conservative perspective on how to get out of poverty is a useful counter-balance to the stuff I would generally listen to. 

Similarly, listening to some small t Trump supporting US podcasts has been interesting to at least get some sense of where Americans are going - I do find myself shouting a little bit at the "radio" at the complete refusal of nearly all of them to recognise that Trump's policies are not likely to reduce the US deficit. But you do hear more clearly what is driving a lot of the population in terms of fears of crime, and it makes it feel less alien to hear regular people ringing in and giving their views. I also hope former students reading would recognise that this is not some fanciful new direction on my behalf and I have always spent time trying to be where people are in terms of reading and listening (partly influenced by Arthur Conan Doyle's idea of having Sherlock Holmes be a voracious reader of agony columns, showbiz press etc., which somehow got under my skin reading the books as a kid). Truthfully most of my podcast listening is either football shows (Football Cliches is excellent if you are someone who enjoys the premier league and jokes about language) and various multi-presenter podcasts where middle-aged progressives try to come to terms with how disorderly everything has become. 

A more research driven podcast that I have been enjoying the last few weeks is Rational Reminder which does deep dives into a lot of behavioural personal finance. There are nearly 400 episodes and the quality is very high, including some great episodes on things like how Vanguard and Dimensional work, and a lot of episodes on investor behaviour. 

On less behavioural related matters, I enjoyed Bodkin a lot more than I thought I would from the reviews. A bit like Only Murders in the Building with a darker Irish feel.

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

IAREP Kahneman Lecture: Economic Psychology and Behavioural Public Policy

Those masterful images because complete / Grew in pure mind but out of what began? / A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, / Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, / Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut / Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone / I must lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

WB Yeats - The Circus Animals' Desertion

I gave one of the keynote lectures at the International Association for Research in Economic Psychology in Estonia in June. The talk outlined ideas on the role of economic psychology in the development of current trends in behavioural science and policy.   It offered a reassertion of the importance of eclectic sources of ideas in economic psychology both historically and for the future.  This post contains links to some of the key papers used in preparing the talk and is provided as an aide to the presentation and hopefully a jumping off point for some attendees to explore more of the area. 

Deep History 

Ashraf, Camerer and Loewenstein's "Adam Smith, Behavioral Economist" provides an account of the ideas of one of the era's main figures.

David Hume also anticipates many of the key ideas in modern behavioural economics. See below for a particularly illustrative passage (the full chapter here) from his Treatise of Human Nature, in which Hume provides an elegant account of present-bias, one of the key concepts in modern behavioural economics. Hume's work, in general, was dense in economic and psychological intuition, with many insights relevant to the types of literature we discuss on this blog.

"In reflecting on any action, which I am to perform a twelve-month hence, I always resolve to prefer the greater good, whether at that time it will be more contiguous or remote; nor does any difference in that particular make a difference in my present intentions and resolutions. My distance from the final determination makes all those minute differences vanish, nor am I affected by any thing, but the general and more discernible qualities of good and evil. But on my nearer approach, those circumstances, which I at first over-looked, begin to appear, and have an influence on my conduct and affections. A new inclination to the present good springs up, and makes it difficult for me to adhere inflexibly to my first purpose and resolution. This natural infirmity I may very much regret, and I may endeavour, by all possible means, to free my self from it. I may have recourse to study and reflection within myself; to the advice of friends; to frequent meditation, and repeated resolution: And having experienced how ineffectual all these are, I may embrace with pleasure any other expedient, by which I may impose a restraint upon myself, and guard against this weakness.".

Quite a lot of work here to be cited on Utilitarianism and the various debates about how to integrate human subjectivity during that period. JS Mill Principle of Political Economy;  An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation by Jeremy Bentham; Utilitarianism by JS Mill. 

General histories of economic psychology 

First chapter of Economic Psychology: an introduction by Erich Kirchler and Erik Hoelzl. In general, the book also provides a template for the textbook scope of modern economic psychology. 

Introduction to Economic Psychology: The Science of Economic Mental Life and Behaviour by Rob Ranyard, Vera Rita De Mello Ferreira. 

The work of George Katona at the Survey Research Centre at Michigan and the work of Herbert Simon at Carnegie-Mellon is described in this 2003 Journal of Socio-economics article by Hamid Hosseini. The article also provides information and links to a range of other interesting papers and contributions from the first half of the 20th century.

Histories of Behavioural Economics 

Camerer, C. F., and Loewenstein, G. (2003) “Behavioral economics: Past, present, future,” in Camerer, C. F., Loewenstein, G., and Rabin, M. (eds.) Advances in Behavioral Economics. Roundtable Series in Behavioral Economics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 3–51

Behavioral Economics: Policy Impact and Future Directions. Chapter on Development of Behavioural Economics. 

Laibson, D., and Zeckhauser, R. (1998) “Amos Tversky and the ascent of behavioral economics.” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 16 (1): 7–47.

Rabin (2002), "A perspective on psychology and economics," European Economic Review.

Richard Thaler's MisBehaving is a gripping account of the development of behavioural economics in top US universities in the 70s, 80s, and 90s.

Niels Geiger The Rise of Behavioral Economics: A Quantitative Assessment

Abstract

This article is devoted to the issue of operationalizing and empirically measuring the development of behavioral economics, focusing on trends in the academic literature. The main research goal is to provide a quantitative, bibliometric assessment to answer the question of whether the relative importance of behavioral economics has increased over the past decades. After an introduction and a short summary of the history of behavioral economics, several studies are laid out and evaluated. The results generally provide a quantitative confirmation of the story of a rise of behavioral economics that can be found in the literature, and add some notable additional insights.

Hands, D. W. (2010) “Economics, psychology and the history of consumer choice theory.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 34: 633–48.

This paper examines elements of the complex place/role/influence of psychology in the history of consumer choice theory. The paper reviews, and then challenges, the standard narrative that psychology was 'in' consumer choice theory early in the neoclassical revolution, then strictly 'out' during the ordinal and revealed preference revolutions, now (possibly) back in with recent developments in experimental, behavioural and neuroeconomics. The paper uses the work of three particular economic theorists to challenge this standard narrative and then provides an alternative interpretation of the history of the relationship between psychology and consumer choice theory.

Esther-Mirjam Sent "Behavioral Economics: How Psychology Made Its (Limited) Way Back Into Economics"

Contemporary Overviews of Economic Psychology 

George Katona 1954 Scientific American Article on Economic Psychology

Webley, Burgoyne, Lea, and Young 2001 - The Economic Psychology of Everyday Life 

Handbook of Economic Psychology (1988) W. Fred Raaij, Gery M. Veldhoven, Karl-Erik Wärneryd.

Earl, P. E. (1990) 'Economics and Psychology: A Survey', Economic Journal, 100: 718-55.

Illustrative Canonical Works 

Edgeworth's Mathematical Psychics is a classic work and is eerily relevant to modern debates about decision-making despite being published in 1881. David Colander's excellent JEP article on Edgeworth and Fisher is well worth reading.

Keynes' General Theory set out many of the themes that would be pursued by scholars such as George Katona in developing the field of psychological economics. 

Frank H, Knight's classic "Risk, Uncertainty and Profit" provides ideas on the role of uncertainty in economics that continue to be highly relevant.

Karl Polanyi's "The Great Transformation" is a key work across several interdisciplinary disciplines in Economics. It contains a vast range of insights into the development of market societies and the psychological, cultural, and other aspects of market behaviour.

The work of Maurice Allais was written exclusively in French and not widely translated making it all the more remarkable he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1988. A study of Allais would require a lot of time, patience and linguistic ability but he is clearly an important figure in the history of economic thought relevant to behavioural economics. Paul Samuelson famously stated that “Had Allais's earliest writings been in English, a generation of economic theory would have taken a different course.”

As much a warning about excess as anything else, Watson (1913) "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views it" is the classic statement of the behaviourist view of psychology.

Simmel's Philosophy of Money is often cited as a historical reference in modern papers on economic psychology. It deals with a staggering array of questions on the philosophy and implications of using money as the medium of exchange.

How the Divorce Happened 

Lewin "Economics and Psychology: Lessons for Our Own Day From the Early Twentieth Century" documents the interaction between the development of neo-classical marginalist economics and the development of psychology as a separate discipline.

Daniel Read's "Experienced Utility from Jeremy Bentham to Daniel Kahneman" provides a detailed account of the attempt to measure utility directly over the centuries. Ulrich Witt also reviews the history of utility distinguishing between sensory utilitarianism that seeks to measure utility directly and the more axiomatic form that dominated in the 20th century.

Bruni, L., and Sugden, R. (2007) “The road not taken: How psychology was removed from economics, and how it might be brought back.” The Economic Journal 117 (516): 146–73

This article explores parallels between the debate prompted by Pareto's reformulation of choice theory at the beginning of the twentieth century and current controversies about the status of behavioural economics. Before Pareto's reformulation, neoclassical economics was based on theoretical and experimental psychology, as behavioural economics now is. Current ‘discovered preference’ defences of rational-choice theory echo arguments made by Pareto. Both treat economics as a separate science of rational choice, independent of psychology. Both confront two fundamental problems: to find a defensible definition of the domain of economics, and to justify the assumption that preferences are consistent and stable.

Jevons: The Theory of Political Economy. Containing the immortal paragraph below. 

"The reader will find, again, that there is never, in any single instance, an attempt made to compare the amount of feeling in one mind with that in another. I see no means by which such comparison can be accomplished. The susceptibility of one mind may, for what we know, be a thousand times greater than that of another. But, provided that the susceptibility was different in a like ratio in all directions, we should never be able to discover the difference. Every mind is thus inscrutable to every other mind, and no common denominator of feeling seems to be possible".

Mid to Late 20th Century Reunification Programmes 

There are obviously dozens of papers that can be included here and many of the main ones are discussed in the references above. Any account of economic psychology and behavioural economics in the 20th century needs to recognise that the separation of the two disciplines was never universally accepted. Several streams of thought including American institutionalism, several streams of UK and European organisational and management psychology, all pre-dated the dominant wave of US behavioural economics that led to at least two Nobel prizes. A lot has been written on these interactions and one purpose of my lecture will be to rethink a little bit how current streams of behavioural public policy are related to the type of economic psychology being promoted through the IAREP conference and similar psychological outlets. 

The Case of Time Preferences and Delayed Gratification 

George Ainslie "Specious reward: a behavioral theory of impulsiveness and impulse control"

George Ainslie "Freud and Picoeconomics"

Walter Mischel: "Processes in Delay of Gratification". 

David Laibson: "Golden Eggs and Hyperbolic Discounting"

Till Grune-Yanoff  "Models of Temporal Discounting 1937–2000: An Interdisciplinary Exchange between Economics and Psychology"

Strange Intersections 

George Ainslie "Freud and Picoeconomics" 

Hofmann and Van Dillen "Desire: the new hotspot in self-control research". 

Derek Parfit: Reasons and Persons

Behavioural Public Policy: 

Faisal Naru: Behavioral public policy bodies: New developments & lessons (Source of the cool map in the slides). 

Behavioural Public Policy Journal: Edited by Adam Oliver, Cass Sunstein, and George Akerlof a key emerging journal for the development of this field. 

Some projects and talks for 2025

My main day job at the moment is still as head of the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at LSE. I am five years into a two three-year term of six years. When I started I was struck by how many Department heads in UK universities could tell you how many days they had left in the role and it is still noticeable how quickly some colleagues deteriorate in general sense of calm and cheer when they take on the role at first. I found the first year very tough (newish multi-group Department, learning the ropes at a new place, changing city, covid etc.,) and it has been ok since with some genuine highs in being part of building a very interesting Department in a very vibrant university. I also teach across our undergraduate, postgraduate, and executive education programmes, including co-directing and delivering the foundations course with Chris Krekel on our MSc in Behavioural Science. One aspect of the role I have enjoyed is really deep diving into how to develop different aspects of behavioural science education and we have done quite a few things as a group including developing new student journals, policy simulations, advanced policy seminar formats etc., Certainly won't attempt a lessons learned piece at this stage but for the most part once you deeply realise you could drop dead in the morning and people will just get on with things, you can relax a bit and do your best in most roles.  It has changed my orientation to research and I have not tried to maintain a formal research group alongside the role for the first time in my career (watch this space soon!). Instead I have tried to focus on some "death-bed" projects that I am fairly sure I will do in one form or another for as long as I am healthy enough to do so. Broadly speaking, these are the projects that I would be open to talk about if I am being considered to speak at a seminar or if you happen to meet me in the street. I am afraid I am unlikely to be able to supervise new PhD students in the next 18 months until the Department head role finishes and current students graduate. 

1. History of Behavioural Science: I have also been working on a history of behavioural science for a very long time at this stage. At the very least it will lead to one paper this year as I have been asked to give the keynote lecture at the international economic psychology conference. At the moment, I have a version where I go through the development of concepts like hyperbolic discounting and outline the interplay between psychological ideas and later formalisation in behavioural economics. It is being developed for a broad social science audience. I am keeping track of readings and links on this post. This is also informing some ideas for new teaching particularly the potential for a new course in economic psychology. 

2. Valuation of the Past: I talked about this in a post when I was at Stirling in 2016 and I have thought it about regularly since. I will be giving some talks on this topic in 2025 including in Galway on March 7th and hope to finish at least one paper. I am using this post to keep track of some links on this topic.

3. Ethics and Institutionalisation of Behavioural Science: We are continuing to develop the FORGOOD ethics framework along different lines. One has been the development of a formal initiative to develop models of good practice for behavioural science in corporate settings with Annabel Gillard and Bishin Ho (provisional webpage here). Along with Leo Lades, we are continuing to develop the theoretical aspects of the ethics of behavioural science in policy (video of a recent seminar on this here). In particular, we are building the case more explicitly for the advantages of contextual, multi-dimensional, pragmatic ethical appraisals in the policy context. I am continuing to develop the LSE Behavioural Science and the Wider World seminar series and am hoping to embed new ideas about how to have interesting conversations in these areas across countries and sectors. 

4. Psychology of Unemployment: I am continuing to work on the links between unemployment and mental health and the psychology of unemployment more generally, including work with Lucia Macchia and Michael Daly on pain, employment conditions, and well-being more generally and with Sharon Raj and Chris Krekel on time perception. time structure, well-being and unemployment (e.g. working paper here in the new ISER innovation panel document). 

5. Day Reconstruction Methods for Behavioural Public Policy: The Ulysses project continues. I have continued to work with a number of colleagues and students including Kate Laffan, Leo Lades, Michael Daly, and Lucie Martin on developing day reconstruction methods for public policy. My paper with Leo "Self-control failures as judged by themselves" is one of the most interesting papers we have done in this area and a testimony to allowing something to gestate a little bit (about 8 years from start to finish). My paper with Lucie Martin and Orla Doyle in Public Administration Review is also something I have very happy to have seen fully in print and it brings these methods into the study of administrative burdens in public and private settings, an area with a lot more to be done. I was very happy with the paper with Leo and Kate using these methods to examine the contextual predictors of meat consumption. One medium term aim is to develop a solid research group in this area for September 2026 and I am doing some background work on this. 

Recent paper: Improving the management of hospital waiting lists by using nudges in letters: A Randomised controlled trial

Below is the abstract of a recently published with a team of colleagues in Social Science & Medicine. This project has been ongoing since at least 2018 and seeks to improve communication with patients across the Irish Health Service. It is driven by officials in the Irish Department of Health with involvement from academics and researchers in NUIG and ESRI, and input across the hospital and health system more generally. The trial below is a pragmatic trial. The nature of the administrative system did not at the time permit multiple trial arms of a type that would enable isolation of precise mechanisms so the main aim was to combine several elements demonstrating promising effects in the literature into a new letter that could be tested against the status quo. See this page for a detailed description of the policy implications of the trial and results. It is one of several trials and projects ongoing to improve administrative aspects relating to patient interactions in the system (see paper here for a wider summary). The group involved in the project also composed the nucleus of the development of the behavioural change component of the Irish covid response. In general, behavioural science has emerged as a strong capacity for the Irish health system. 

Abstract

Objective

A commonly adopted intervention to help to reduce wait times for hospital treatment is administrative validation, where administrators write to patients to check if a procedure is still required. The did not return (DNR) rate to validation letters is substantial. We tested whether the DNR rate was reduced by introducing nudges to validation letters.

Methods

Participants from eight public hospitals (N = 2855; in 2017) in Ireland were randomized to receive an existing (control group) or a redesigned validation letter including nudges (intervention group).

Results

Participants in the intervention group were less likely not to return it than those in the control group, OR = .756, SE = .069, p = .002. Control and intervention group DNR rates were 23.97% and 19.24%. This is equivalent to 1 in 5 non-responders changing their behaviour because of the redesigned letter.

Conclusions

The redesigned letter increased patient compliance with the validation process. The redesign has subsequently been adopted by public hospitals in Ireland.

Ending Six Years at Irish Central Bank Consumer Advisory Group

I recently completed two three-year terms as a member of the Irish Central Bank Consumer Advisory group. The group was established under legislation from the Irish parliament in 2011 (brief description below) to advise the Central Bank on consumer issues. Below are brief personal reflections.

The role of the Consumer Advisory Group ('CAG') is to advise the Central Bank on the performance of its functions and the exercise of its powers in relation to consumers of financial services including:The effects of the Central Bank's Strategic Plans on consumers of financial services; Initiatives aimed at further enhancing the protection of consumers of financial services; and If the Central Bank so requests, documents, consultation papers or other materials prepared by the Central Bank.

I was appointed while a UCD academic in 2018 and extended to a second term in 2021 and completed my term in December 2024. I attended quarterly meetings and commented on a quite large array of documents received in the intervening periods. As fitting for a body of this nature, the proceedings are transparent and the minutes can be seen on the website.

Many items recurred regularly including the development of the consumer protection code in Ireland, inertia in the health insurance market, vulnerable consumers, central bank strategy, digitalisation, and various impacts of Brexit on financial services. Some interesting event-type issues including the withdrawal of Ulster Bank from the Republic of Ireland, meaning that their customers had to switch their banking in a set time-frame with the ensuing communication and technical issues. Over the period I was there, obviously covid was one event that impacted the agenda and organisation, as did cost-of-living issues arising after the invasion of Ukraine. The development of initiatives like MICAR regulations to deal with the increasing use of cry*t0-currencies and new strategies on firms covered under the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive were interesting to witness. Globally, many of these issues will define a lot of our financial lives in the 21st century. 

Some general themes that animated how I worked on this include:

Respect for the secretariat and officials. It will probably be obvious to most people but being respectful and recognising you are working with people who have packed agendas and assuming good faith is something I have always tried to do in policy contexts.

Having said the above, your job as an independent member of an advisory board is not just to nod along and be a passive recipient of information. One input that I made consistently throughout the six-year term was the need for two-way conversation, in particular for the independent committee members to bring agenda items rather than just receive them. This is not as obvious as it sounds. In something like the Central Bank, the officials themselves have far more information and day-to-day understanding of the rhythms of policy and regulation than the independent advisors. Raising issues not part of the standing agenda can sometimes make you feel like you are just chipping in and I am sure there were occasions where I raised issues around questions like emerging digital risks, emerging thinking on consumer behaviour etc., that must have felt like academic flights of fancy to people dealing with established issues with set action points and deadlines. One of my formative experiences was the Irish financial crisis and there are a lot of accounts that put a culture of not breaking consensus in discussions around financial services as being a contributing factor and I was always conscious of that when weighing up whether to raise questions and objections. There were many times led by a strong chair when independent members were able to add agenda items, have separate meetings to the officials, request follow-ups etc., The OECD reviewed consumer protection in Ireland recently including the advisory group and made some more recommendations in that regard, including adding consumer groups.

The third thing that animated my thinking was the belief that behavioural science broadly defined is a useful input. That is maybe not surprising for people who know me and in fairness why else would I be in such a room if not to provide thinking from these areas? But again, there is a line to be walked between relevance to the issues at hand, the capacity of the different groups to absorb evidence, and the quality of the evidence base. As well as the international literature in the area, there is also a strong community of researchers and scholars working on behavioural aspects of regulation and policy in Ireland (e.g. recent annual conference here). Throughout the six years I tried to point where possible to relevant and cogent behavioural work across areas of consumer decision making including pensions, mortgages, insurance, credit cards, novel emerging digital projects etc., and made a number of recommendations and provided some support on Central Bank research in these areas. Behavioural consumer research is a valid input into consumer protection and financial regulation and I was glad to have the opportunity to be part of the policy process in this regard.