Can Behavioural Insights Shape Policy-making All Over the World? [Audio]

Speaker(s): Professor Liam Delaney, Dr Barbara Fasolo, Dr Adam Oliver, Dr Jet Sanders | Insights from psychology and behavioural economics are shaping policy-making all over the world, and the LSE is helping to make this happening. In the last decade methods and insights from behavioural science have been increasingly applied to inform policy decision-making all over the world. The UK has led this global trend since 2010, when the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) - the ‘nudge unit’ - was set up within the Cabinet Office. Since then, behavioural units have been created in more than 200 public institutions – not only governments, but also international institutions (e.g. World Bank, WHO, OECD, EU), and national regulators (e.g. in the UK the Financial Conduct Authority - FCA; NEST; Public Health England - PHE) – as well as in many NGOs and non-profit companies. Since the very beginning, the LSE has been a key part of this fast-growing trend. On the teaching side, for example, the LSE Executive MSc in Behavioural Science is the world-first (and only) executive Master programme to have trained, to date, more than 250 leaders of such behavioural units across the world. On the research side, moreover, the LSE has behavioural expertise that has been regularly applied to policy projects for the betterment of society. This event will discuss these trends and the various research collaborations that behavioural scientists across all the LSE have been developing in a variety of policy domains by working together with numerous partner institutions. Liam Delaney (@LiamDelaneyEcon) is Professor of Economics at UCD and Visiting Professor of Economics at Stirling University. A former Fulbright and Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellow, he was Deputy Director of the UCD Geary Institute from 2008 to 2011, and Deputy Dean of Stirling Management School from 2011 to 2016. He has worked at the intersection of economics and psychology for his career and has published widely in both economics and psychology journals, including Economic Journal, Journal of European Economics Association, Health Psychology, Psychological Science, and Journal of Applied Psychology. Dr Barbara Fasolo (@barbarafasolo) is Associate Professor of Behavioural Science in the Department of Management and Head of the Behavioral Research Lab. She studies how people make decisions that involve risk, trade-offs, and complexity and is interested in choice architecture that helps good decision making. Dr Adam Oliver (@1969ajo) is a behavioural economist and behavioural public policy analyst at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His edited the collection ‘Behavioural Public Policy’ (Cambridge UP, 2013), and authored the books, ‘The Origins of Behavioural Public Policy’ (Cambridge UP, 2017) and ‘Reciprocity and the Art of Behavioural Public Policy’ (Cambridge UP, 2019). He edits the journals Health Economics, Policy and Law, and Behavioural Public Policy. Dr Jet Sanders (@jetgsanders) finds patterns that can be used to change behaviour for social good, with a particular interest in time, health and wellbeing. Jet completed a PhD in experimental psychology, worked as a Principal Behavioural Insights Advisor in Public Health England’s Behavioural Insights Team and is now an Assistant Professor at the Psychological and Behavioural Science Department of the London School of Economics. Dr Matteo M Galizzi (@Matteo_Galizzi) is Associate Professor of Behavioural Science and Co-Director of the Executive MSc in Behavioural Science in the LSE Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science. @LSEBehavioural Twitter hashtags for this event: #LSEFestival #ShapetheWorld This event is part of the LSE Festival: Shape the World running from Monday 2 to Saturday 7 March 2020, with a series of events exploring how social science can make the world a better place.