Research Group Concept

Economic Psychology and Behavioural Public Administration Group

Led by Professor Liam Delaney, the group brings together economic psychology and behavioural public administration to study how people experience complex administrative environments. The group investigates underlying mental states in administrative environments, using methods such as the day reconstruction method and experience sampling to capture experience as it unfolds. Applications span both public-sector settings, including return-to-employment systems, long-term care, and environmental behaviour, and private-sector ones such as retail investment and debt servicing, reflecting economic psychology's long tradition of engaging real world institutions and policy actors. Two dedicated initiatives bring the work to policy and industry. "Wider World" translates research into public policy through workshops, toolkits, and engagement with policy actors, while also examining, reflexively, how behavioural science ought to be applied. FORGOOD, an ethical behavioural science initiative, applies research from the group to industry. The group is staffed by affiliated researchers from within LSE and visiting colleagues from outside it, partners in policy and industry, and students at every level, from MSc dissertation students to undergraduate apprentices, to affiliated PhD students based primarily in the department.

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. 

Bachmann, R., Gleibs, I. H., & Delaney, L. (2026). Social identity and capital income: A social psychological approach to identity economics using UK household data. British Journal of Social Psychology, 65, e70025

Lades, L. K., Zawojska, E., Johnston, R. J., Hanley, N., Delaney, L., and Czajkowski, M. (2025). Anomalies or expected behaviors? Understanding stated preferences and welfare implications in light of contemporary behavioral economics. Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, 19(1), 48–68.

Lades, L. K., & Delaney, L. (2024). Self-control failures, as judged by themselves. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 11(1), Article 1351, 1–14.

Martin, L., Delaney, L., & Doyle, O. (2024). Everyday administrative burdens and inequality. Public Administration Review, 84(4), 660–673.

Laffan, K., Lades, L. K., & Delaney, L. (2023). Paths that lead astray: Examining the situational predictors of intention-behaviour gaps in meat consumption. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 89, Article 102045.

Arulsamy, K., & Delaney, L. (2022). The impact of automatic enrolment on the mental health gap in pension participation: Evidence from the UK. Journal of Health Economics, 86, Article 102673

Lades, L. K., & Delaney, L. (2022). Nudge FORGOOD. Behavioural Public Policy, 6(1), 75–94.

Brief Thoughts on FirstGen Student Issues

I have thought a lot about first generation students and those becoming leaders in various ways. More generally coming from a background where university education is not a norm creates different context factors. Cash and liquidity constraints shape the incentives and experience in a big way, something I have always and maybe sometimes crudely (or so I have been told) put up front when speaking to people about academic careers. I don't experience it as a moral issue primarily even though it is at some level, but it is a fact that some students and early career academics simply won't have those constraints as a dominant part of their experience whereas for others they will be foremost and it is important to understand that. Culture and the hidden curriculum also obviously matters. Personally getting older It has been good to try to fit in less to the cultural expectations of universities and I think they are loosening a bit anyway over time. But again it is obvious that the cultural aspects of universities are just an extension of school and family for some but a distinct and sometimes threatening structural break for others. It is also clearly the case that for given levels of any measurable ability students differ drastically in their earnings anchors and implicit networks. Some use the university itself to create their networks, others have access to family and wider social networks that the university basically complements. There is a lot of good work in the system on widening participation, mentoring, etc., I'm not confident I have anything to add to it but it has been interesting to speak to some others who have come through the university system and into various types of careers. It was also one of the highlights of my job in last few years to work with one of our donors to offer scholarships on our programmes. Have been thinking a lot about the second half of life and work in that space. More to follow.

On completing six years as head of LSE Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science 2020-2026

Shortly completing 6-years as head of LSE Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science. The current Department was formed in 2016 through bringing together staff in social and organisational psychology with colleagues in behavioural science. Throughout the history of LSE, there has been a strong presence for social and organisational psychology, not least in the work of one of the founders Graham Wallas. Psychology was taught alongside anthropology and sociology in general social science courses through the first half of 20th century. The great Hilde Himmelweit was the key founding figure for social psychology here, as founding chair and main energy behind the creation of a Department of Social Psychology and ensuing traditions such as social representations have created a strong intellectual legacy that remains. Through Beveridge and many others there has also been a long tradition of integrating ideas about human welfare and well-being into public policy. The creation of the Executive MSc in Behavioural Science in 2014, the MSc in Behavioural Science in 2019 and the development of the behavioural science lab cemented a strong presence for behavioural science in LSE. Bringing social, organisational psychology and behavioural science into one Department has led to a decade of new programmes, new research and policy collaborations, and interesting ideas, including the creation of a new undergraduate programme in psychological and behavioural science. It has been a pleasure to be a part of developing this further in the last six years, including bringing on a new generation of faculty and staff, and working with a great team and collaborators across the Department, School, & beyond to develop many aspects of the effort. We are fortunate that Professor Alex Gillespie has agreed to take on the role. Looking forward to continuing to work here as a faculty member in the Department, some roles in the School, and as co-lead of the behavioural science postgraduate programme. I will also co-ordinate a new general course reviving the format of faculty-led debates on key issues in contemporary psychology and behavioural science. Will continue to update here on a new research group at the intersection of economic psychology and behavioural public administration. For the many people here who interacted with me and the Department throughout the six years including through some pretty intense times in a challenging environment for social science in the UK, thanks and look forward to keeping in touch, and strong assurance that the energy that has led to such an interesting space for these areas is alive and well.

Research Group Conversation

Following from the previous post, working on topics for an evolving research group at intersection of economic psychology & ethical aspects of behavioural policy. Over my career, have been most interested in subjective aspects of economic and policy systems, how regular humans navigate and experience complex administrative environments, and how our knowledge of this shapes how we think about the ethics of different types of policy actions broadly defined. The history of behavioural economics and behavioural public policy more generally is grounded to some degree in eclectic economic psychological methods and theory and engagements with industry and policy. And there has been an increasing professionalisation of behavioural science in policy and industry, increasing the need for reflection on the legitimacy and ethics of this work. The group will create space for capacity building in these areas, including engagement with a wide set of existing groups and institutional developments including IBBPA, BR-UK, IAREP, GAABS, and others. The key literatures I want to both draw from and advance in specific ways through research i) the ethics of behavioural applications ii) literature on subjective aspects of administrative processes iii) the subjective experience of consequential economic decisions and outcomes iv) the development of naturalistic everyday measurement techniques such as day reconstruction for use in economic psychology applications v) the experience and valuation of time. I hope to work with students at all levels, and a network of academic collaborations, policy partnerships and industry engagement to develop a research environment with a focus on academic rigour but with a strong applied and institutional sensibility, with the latter being one key driver of theoretical and empirical development. AI will feature to some extent in the group with a focus on ethics of application and some element of transparent collaborative experimentation in its use. But it will have a clear philosophy of fostering dynamic human engagements as fundamental to theory building and application development. I have no idea whether it is true but I have always felt that some element of controlled human chaos is helpful for the emergence of important research in economic psychology (e.g. see Katona, Ainslie, Thaler, all very eclectic routes to their ideas). I hope as well as strong research papers, we create some interesting points of contact between the evolving economic psychological literature and the wider environment, that it creates a supportive space not just for research papers written with me but for people to pursue some big thoughts in these spaces. I am currently still Department chair and fighting with a big part of my brain tied behind my back but will unfold these ideas over the next year. Posting for conversation. Formal proposals, calls for collaboration later.

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. 

Evolving Research Group Idea: Behavioural Science and the Wider World Research Group

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. 

Bachmann, R., Gleibs, I. H., & Delaney, L. (2026). Social identity and capital income: A social psychological approach to identity economics using UK household data. British Journal of Social Psychology, 65, e70025

Lades, L. K., Zawojska, E., Johnston, R. J., Hanley, N., Delaney, L., and Czajkowski, M. (2025). Anomalies or expected behaviors? Understanding stated preferences and welfare implications in light of contemporary behavioral economics. Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, 19(1), 48–68.

Lades, L. K., & Delaney, L. (2024). Self-control failures, as judged by themselves. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 11(1), Article 1351, 1–14.

Martin, L., Delaney, L., & Doyle, O. (2024). Everyday administrative burdens and inequality. Public Administration Review, 84(4), 660–673.

Laffan, K., Lades, L. K., & Delaney, L. (2023). Paths that lead astray: Examining the situational predictors of intention-behaviour gaps in meat consumption. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 89, Article 102045.

Arulsamy, K., & Delaney, L. (2022). The impact of automatic enrolment on the mental health gap in pension participation: Evidence from the UK. Journal of Health Economics, 86, Article 102673

Lades, L. K., & Delaney, L. (2022). Nudge FORGOOD. Behavioural Public Policy, 6(1), 75–94.

April 2026

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. 

Behavioural Science and Climate Change in Ireland

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.

4th Winter Workshop in Behavioural and Experimental Economics of Food Consumption

Thank you to Sabrina Teyssier and Paolo Crosetto for organising the 4th Winter Workshop in Behavioural and Experimental Economics of Food Consumption. https://lnkd.in/eAZQGB38 It 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 by Jutta Roosen on 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.

LSE/Warwick PhD Behavioural Science

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.

Some discussion points for behavioural science next year

As the term comes to an end, I have had the chance to speak with students across our undergraduate, postgraduate, and executive behavioural science programmes, and those conversations have shaped a set of themes I want to explore more in the voluntary sessions in the new year. 

A recurring theme is the application of behavioural science in corporate settings. Students are thinking not only about how behavioural insights are used in organisations, but about the ethical boundaries and the kinds of innovations that are emerging in areas like product design, organisational culture, and sustainability. 

Closely linked to this is a growing interest in how behavioural interventions operate in community contexts, including NGOs, humanitarian organisations, and other life-saving or high-stakes domains. Many students want to understand how behavioural science interfaces with local knowledge, public health, and community-led action, and what it means to intervene ethically in these environments.

Another area that has come up frequently is the relationship between behavioural science and leadership and career development. Students are asking whether behavioural science is a lifelong professional identity or a foundational skill that supports work across a wide range of sectors. We have been having some interesting discussions including with alumni and external speakers on how people move between roles, how they develop wider domain expertise, and how behavioural skills contribute to leadership over the course of a career.

I have also been hearing more questions about the professionalisation of the field. There is clear interest in the role of professional associations, mentoring, accreditation, and the development of shared ethical standards. This reflects the way the field is maturing, and I plan to bring colleagues from groups such as GAABS into these discussions next term.

Students are obviously thinking about how AI systems influence judgement and decision-making, how they can be used in behavioural research, and how questions of persuasion, misinformation, and autonomy are evolving as AI becomes more integrated into daily life. We have various events in planning on in the new year. 

Finally, a strong theme this term has been the internationalisation of behavioural science. Students from India, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere have raised thoughtful questions about how behavioural science travels across cultural and institutional contexts, and how global perspectives can expand the assumptions embedded in much behavioural research. Several students have already expressed interest in regionally focused work next term, and I hope to support that.

These are some of the the threads that have stayed with me, and they will shape the sessions I run in the new year. 

Behavioural Science and the Wider World Series

Over the last five or six years I have been running the Behavioural Science and the Wider World seminar as a space where colleagues, alumni, policymakers, practitioners, and students can come together to think about how behavioural science is developing and how it is being applied in different settings. During this time the seminar has hosted a very wide range of contributors, including Cass Sunstein, David Halpern, Michael Hallsworth, Lucia Reisch, Laura Giurge, Jet Sanders, Phil Newall, Jas Virhia, Will Sandbrook, and colleagues from Busara, Nudge Lebanon, and several public bodies such as the Dutch Public Health Agency. The topics have ranged from public health, gambling policy, and ethical behavioural science, to AI, labour markets, organisational behaviour, and the practical challenges of running behavioural units around the world. 

I am now putting together and finalising the format for next year’s series, and giving some thought to how the seminar might develop in the years ahead. There are several directions that seem promising. Some sessions may remain in the familiar conversational style, but I am also considering panel discussions that bring together multiple perspectives on a theme, as well as continuing occasional online sessions to allow participation from the much broader community of alumni and collaborators around the world. I am also thinking about ways to create more direct engagement between our MSc students and senior practitioners, and about how the seminar can continue to function as a point of reunion for those who have passed through the programme. As I work on this, I would be very interested in thoughts or suggestions from anyone who has attended, spoken at, or followed the series.

Books from LSE PBS Colleagues

A snapshot from earlier in the year of books published by colleagues in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science. There has been a psychology department since 1964 and it merged with the behavioural science group in 2016 to form the current department. I have been working a bit on what came before the 1964 Department in terms of pre-cursors and I hope to give a couple of lectures on this in 2026. 

Forgoodframework

In the mid to late 2000s I was teaching economics & psychology students about behavioural economics & a particular emerging interdisciplinary strand that was going to be applied increasingly to public policy & regulation. This led to regular & interesting discussions about issues like autonomy, potential manipulation & the institutional environment. A lot of the literature emerging after the landmark publication of Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein was either focused a lot on effectiveness or on the other hand quite high level and abstract in terms of philosophical stances. We began to keep a reading list to keep track of papers across disciplines that could be useful in helping develop pragmatic ethical positions. It is a little out of date now as it is hard to keep up but still contains dozens of interesting papers on ethics of nudging and related areas,  As you might imagine, students started to wonder whether this could be parsed in some way and Leonhard Lades and I developed the FORGOOD framework as an attempt to provide a solid anchor to discuss key ethical issues in applied behavioural science projects. I have used versions of this every year in classes across Dublin, Stirling, and LSE and in many policy and executive talks. They create some of the most interesting and engaging small group seminars with many discussions and arguments about applications across a range of areas. Increasingly, I use it to help students clarify their own ethical stances and how that might shape their career aspirations, and it has been integrated into teaching across undergraduate, postgraduate, and executive courses. We also use it as a pre-mortem tool in a variety of settings and along with Bishin Ho and Annabel Gillard have developed an initiative around it to developing a range of tools for the ethical use of behavioural science in finance, tech, and related settings. The framework has been widely used in other settings including as one of the main references for the recent and very useful OECD document on how to integrate ethics in behavioural science projects. Aside from the framework, the emerging literature on ethical aspects of behavioural science is in my view incredibly interesting, and creating many new possibilities for how we develop and evaluate behaviorally-informed projects at different levels of scale. It has been great again to work with students across different classes this year and I am looking forward to working on future developments on it that we are currently writing and using in seminars.

Some great people to read

On his Substack (and before anyone starts, I am not getting a Substack, I’m quite happy here on Blogger with my two confirmed readers), Cass Sunstein lists scholars who have influenced him the most, restricting his list to people he knew. Posner, Rawls, Elster, Ullmann-Margalit, Thaler, and Kahneman is quite a list. I have met two of these brilliant scholars (Kahneman and Thaler) but I will give a list of people below that are awe-inspiring even if I haven't met them. I spent a lot of my formative years reading Freud, Hume, Keynes, Schumpeter, Mill, Rawls and a lot of moral philosophers. I have spoke before about how reading Kahneman and Tversky's work gave me some focus and I have largely worked within that broad tradition since. Cass himself is someone I have interacted with a lot and the most influential scholar for me in terms of thinking through connections between psychology, behavioural economics, regulation, and policy. I am assuming most people who read here will know where to find work by him and by Richard Thaler and Daniel Kahneman.

Elster's works been a constant companion over the years. Ulysses and the Sirens and Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences are both marvellous and bring together many concepts in behavioural science with political and institutional thinking.

Parfit's Reasons and Persons is another one that I hope any philosophically-minded behavioural student gets a chance to read at some point. You can search "Parfit" in the blog search bar to find many posts her on the great moral philosopher, including a post here on an ongoing project on his past valuation arguments.

Nancy Folbre's work on economics and the family has constantly recurred when I am talking with students about issues such as gender, care, and the general sense that traditional economic accounts overlook the role of these factors in societal allocation. If you want to connect feminist economics with critical discussion of traditional utility theory, among many other things, her work is outstanding, clear, and very pragmatic in its orientation.

Nancy Cartwright is another person who I regularly return to and who constantly provides stimulating ideas on method and on causality in particular. Among many well-known works, her highly-cited book "Hunting Causes and Using Them: Approaches in Philosophy and Economics" is a fascinating discussion of the many different ideas of causality that are at play when we talk about relationships between social and economic quantities. More recently, many readers will recall her paper on understanding and misunderstanding of randomised trials with Angus Deaton which has been widely cited in the discussions around the use of RCTs in evidence-based public policy (See reply from Guido Imbens for a sense of the parameters of the discussion). Cartwright is obviously working within technical literature but is far from an obscurantist and I believe any social science researcher would benefit from engaging with her work. A recent paper below "Rigour versus the need for evidential diversity" is particularly relevant to many current debates about how behavioural and social science is being embedded into public policy organisations. It gives always a strong sense of points made across her work on the limits of randomised trials, the nature of causality, and the tensions between the development of generalised theories and context-specific usable knowledge.

This is not an exhaustive list and you can look around the blog for many others.

Early November 2025 Behavioural Science and Policy Links

Former Colombian president and Nobel peace prize winner Juan Manuel Santos spoke at LSE this week as part of the new Global School of Sustainability event series. It was an interesting and wide ranging discussion on the Colombian peace process and the future of armed conflicts and democracy. It is available here. 

Dilip Soman on why behavioural scientists should be more like cartographers. 

I enjoyed listening to Emma Pinchbeck, head of the UK Climate Change Committee on the rest is politics podcast. She is an effective communicator and spoke clearly about several issues facing UK energy policy in the next few years. Towards the end, she touches on the role behavioural science work plays in a world that is quite dominated by engineers and economists, and speaks favourably in particular about the role of citizen assemblies. I have been part of the Irish climate change advisory council for the last 18 months or, and it has been fascinating to work through the behavioural dimensions of a wide range of issues relating to climate adaptation and mitigation. 

Excellent blogpost by Leonhard Lades, Malte Dold, Kate Laffan, Paul Lohmann, Andriy Ivchenko, and Manu Savani summarising the recent International Behavioural Public Policy conference. 

Michael Inzlicht on whether a small amount of drinking is a good thing in academia. I am glad he wrote the article even at risk of annoying people. Whether you agree with him or not, people talk about this type of stuff offline and we should start to reclaim this type of discussion online as well. Floating this with various people, the reactions ranged from very high disagreement and a sense that moving far away from academic drinking cultures was a good thing to people who felt very strongly that he was voicing something important, and that we are losing a lot in the decline in social drinking in academia.I am anti-social bordering on hermetic at the moment due to the (hopefully temporary) mis-anthropism that comes with running a Department. I have also not drank alcohol for a few years largely due to a desire to reset default options that were prevalent in the environment when I was entering adulthood. But that wasn't always the case and I have had some fun beers with a variety of people from around the world over the years. So if I had a vote, it would be to keep it somewhere in the mix but not as the norm and not pushed too much. Walking tours I have always found to be a good way of bringing people together and if some of them want to find a pub after so be it.  

Some teaching prompts for ethical, institutional, historical, and interdisciplinary aspects of behavioural science

Some prompts from classes that I will never get bored of discussing with students. Our courses like most other involve a lot of theory and detailed methodological work. Setting these in historical, ethical, multi-disciplinary, & institutional context is hopefully stimulating. This term I am teaching PB300, Advances in Psychological and Behavioural Science to our undergraduates. This includes a policy simulation exercise that unfolds over the course of the year and PB405, the MSc Foundations in Behavioural Science module that also includes a set of extension lectures called "Behavioural Science and the Wider World" that includes guest lectures, debates, and conceptual discussions about institutional applications. 

i) An outline of the evolution of the relationships between economics and psychology over the centuries (full details, recorded lecture, and readings here) 

ii) The legendary Behavioural Change Wheel of Susan Michie and colleagues, something that allows for incredibly rich discussions of the nature and purpose of behavioural science

iii) The FORGOOD ethics framework that we have evolved from these classes as a now widely used professional reflection tool to prompt pragmatic discussion of the ethical dimensions of behavioural policy. Some readings and links to OECD checklists etc., linked here

iv) The well-known OECD behavioural science global map constructed by Faisal Naru and team. Has since been updated in an excellent paper in Behavioural Science & Policy but I have a soft spot for the first map. It is a very inspiring prompt to trigger discussion about going from theory & methods to institutional applications across the world. 

Workshops and Engagements

I regularly deliver talks, workshops, and executive sessions for organizations and institutions interested in applying behavioral science to real-world challenges. My sessions draw on over two decades of work at the intersection of economics, psychology, and public policy, and have been delivered to audiences across finance, technology, health, government, and academia.

If you are interested in arranging a workshop, keynote, or advisory session, please get in touch via email or connect with me directly on LinkedIn.

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FORGOOD Framework: Ethical Behavioural Science

Alongside my collaborators Bishin Ho and Annabel Gillard, I co-developed the FORGOOD Framework initiative — a practical tool for embedding ethics into behavioral science projects across sectors such as finance, technology, and public policy.

The framework builds on the original FORGOOD ethics framework, which I co-developed with Leonhard Lades. It is featured in OECD guidance on integrating ethics into applied behavioral science and has been used in executive education, policy design, and academic teaching.

Those specifically interested in exploring the ethical dimensions of behavioral science — including organizational governance, the ethics of influence, and responsible innovation — can find more information and opportunities to collaborate at forgoodframework.com.

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Workshop: Behavioral Science for Better Decisions

I have delivered this workshop to a wide range of executive audiences across finance, pharma, technology, and government, helping leaders and teams apply insights from behavioral economics and psychology to improve decision-making in complex environments.

The session introduces key ideas from behavioral science and demonstrates how they can be used to refine strategy, communication, and policy design. Participants learn to recognize and manage judgment biases, understand practical frameworks such as MINDSPACE and EAST, and strengthen organizational decision-making processes.

Key topics include:

• How people actually make decisions — and the implications for leaders and policymakers

• Tools and frameworks for applying behavioral insights

• Improving executive and team decision processes by reducing “noise”

• Lessons from global applications, including OECD case studies

Participants receive curated resources from leading thinkers along with optional readings for further exploration.

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Workshop: Behavioral Economics and the Future of Financial Services

I have delivered this workshop to executives and professionals across finance, regulation, and consumer policy, exploring how behavioral economics can help explain and improve decision-making in financial markets.

The session examines how consumers make choices about complex products such as mortgages, credit cards, and pensions — and why traditional economic assumptions often fail to capture real behavior. Using insights from psychology and experimental economics, participants learn to identify key biases that shape financial decisions and to consider how behavioral insights can inform product design, communication, and regulatory strategy.

Key topics include:

• How people make financial decisions under uncertainty

• Heuristics and biases: anchoring, availability, representativeness, framing, and intertemporal choice

• Behaviorally informed approaches to mortgage, credit, and savings markets

• Lessons from regulatory and policy applications (including detailed case studies from across industry and regulation)

• Implications for innovation and responsible consumer engagement

This workshop provides participants with a clear understanding of how behavioral economics is reshaping the landscape of modern financial services — from customer experience to compliance — and why it matters for the future of the sector.

18th Annual Irish Economics, Psychology, and Policy Conference:

The next Irish Workshop on Economics and Psychology will take place on 14th November 2025 at the University of Galway. Contact Féidhlim McGowan (University of Galway) if you would like to attend or register here. 

The provisional schedule gives a good snapshot of how behavioural science is evolving in Ireland — with work that spans public health, sustainability, communication, and the fast-moving interface between behavioural science and AI.

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Session 1: Health and Travel
10:00–10:20 — Maria Lee (ESRI): Why do caregivers delay infant immunisations? Irish nurse perspectives
10:20–10:40 — Lilia Wasserka-Zhurakhovska (University of Galway): Who Deserves Care? The Role of Lifestyle and Health in Healthcare Decision-Making
10:40–11:00 — Shane Timmons (ESRI): Sharing is Scaring? Effects of infrastructure design on perceived danger and fairness in shared road spaces
11:00–11:20 — Adam J. Shier (ESRI): Misperceptions of the Cost of Car Use and Ownership
11:20–11:35 — Coffee Break

Session 2: Information and Belief-Updating
11:35–11:55 — Pete Lunn (ESRI): How Researchers and Policymakers Update Beliefs in Response to New Evidence
11:55–12:15 — Vasilisa Werner (University of Galway): Destructive Communication
12:15–12:35 — Suhas Vijayakumar (UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School): How and When Resource Scarcity Shapes Sharing of Lay Information
12:35–12:55 — Tobias Werner (University of Southampton): Experimental Evidence That Conversational AI Can Steer Consumer Behavior Without Detection
12:55–14:00 — Lunch

Session 3: Environment and Sustainability
14:00–14:20 — Bob van Rugge (UCD): Administrative Burdens for Home Retrofitting: A Sludge Audit of an Irish One-Stop-Shop
14:20–14:40 — Ciarán Lavin (SEAI): When are the Co-benefits Enough? An Experimental Study of Support for Energy Sufficiency Policies in Ireland
14:40–15:00 — Romina Landeo (UCC): Public Servants as Behavioural Agents: Understanding Organisational Change for Climate Action in Local Government
15:00–15:20 — Lucie Martin (ESRI): Mental Models of Economic Paradigms for Sustainability
15:20–15:40 — Marie-Christin Lanser (University of Galway): Acceptance of Alternative Energy Sources Amongst the Irish Public: Insights from a Discrete Choice Experiment
15:40–16:00 — Coffee Break

16:00–17:00 — Keynote Presentation
Prof. Holger A. Rau (University of Göttingen) — Gender differences in preferences and their implications for public policy.

Organisers: Féidhlim McGowan, Shane Timmons, Liam Delaney. 

AI and Behavioural Applications

As part of our initiative on ethical behavioural science in industry application, I have been doing a lot of background research and workshops on emerging issues in the use of AI in behavioural applications. I gave a talk recently to an industry audience led by Capco, and spoke in a Chatham house style session at the Institute of Chartered Accounts looking at the intersection of regulation and productivity, with a particular focus on AI applications. I have been mostly making the point that we need to bring AI innovations under the scrutiny of sober evaluation and ethical frameworks and in particular to examine end-points where the outputs of AI influence real-world consumer and citizen behaviour in consequential ways. 

Below are some useful links and resources that have been helping me think through some of the issues: 

We did a really interesting session on this that I chaired in LSE last October. The video of the event is available here. 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming various aspects of behavioural science. For example, AI-driven models are being used to predict human behaviour and decision-making, and to design personalized behavioural interventions. AI can also be used to generate artificial research participants on whom behavioural interventions can be tested instead of on humans. AI is creating many new opportunities and challenges in behavioural science, disrupting the discipline to the degree that researchers, practitioners, and any behavioural science enthusiasts are trying to keep up with the new developments and understand how to best navigate the rapidly changing landscape. In this public event, speakers who are associated with pioneering work on AI in relation to behavioural science, as part of their own research or organisational initiatives, will discuss their views on how AI will change and is already changing behavioural science. This will involve touching upon topics such as the implications of AI for behavioural scientists in academia, public, and private sectors, new skills that will be required by behavioural scientists of the future, and impact on behavioural science education. Speakers: Alexandra Chesterfield Elisabeth Costa Professor Oliver Hauser Dr Dario Krpan Professor Susan Michie Professor Robert West Chair: Liam Delaney

2. We also had a talk last year by Cass Sunstein on his forthcoming book Imperfect Oracle. This book is really useful for getting an understanding of the limits of AI understanding. He also gave a talk last week in LSE on his other new book Manipulation that has several really interesting insights on the extent to which different type of AI influence could be considered manipulative. 

3. My colleague Ben Tappin was one of a team of authors that recently published a fascinating paper on the extent to which LLMS are becoming better at being persuasive across a range of issues. An example of the work he and colleagues have been doing is here. This is quite nuanced work painting a complex picture of how persuasive LLMS are becoming. 

4. I am on the scientific board of Behavioural Research UK and there is quite a bit of discussion through that group on the potential for AI to inform the production of systematic reviews in behavioural science. This is still ongoing and I will post about it at a later stage but there are clearly several groups working to produce principles that will allow AI to be used in a way that is transparent and accountable. 

5. Stuart Mills in Leeds is always good to read and talk to about issues at the intersection of AI, ethics, and consumers. One example is the following paper. Mills S, Costa S, Sunstein CR. 2023. AI, Behavioural Science, and Consumer Welfare. Journal of Consumer Policy. 387-400+. More generally, he has been writing very interesting work on the implications of very direct personalised AI influence.

6. Against the uncritical adoption of AI in academia is a comment piece by a collective of academics that is stimulating to read. 

7. See one recent attempt in PNAS to map the terrain. Stimulating paper but also a reminder of how opaque a lot of the current AI technology is. Meng (2024) "AI emerges as the frontier in behavioral science".