On September 14, the Behavioural Science Centre held a reunion to mark a decade of our MSc Behavioural Science.

We were delighted to have talks on the day from a range of individuals who have been involved with the program over the years. 

Founder director of the MSc program, Dr. Michael Daly, kicked off the day with an incisive summary of his work on population trends in mental distress. Michael demonstrated that the rise in mental distress that has been ascribed to the Covid pandemic in fact predated that event. Another worrying fact to emerge from his work is that the rise in mental distress found among teenage girls has carried through as those girls have entered their twenties. 

Next was a talk from Fionnuala O’Reilly who, since her graduation from our first MSc cohort, has worked at the Behavioural Insights Team, NESTA and is now a PhD student at Oxford. Fionnula talked us through two interventions to promote education. The first was a text message-based intervention to promote literacy. The second was a tweak to HMRC letters advising parents of their eligibility to take up a childcare subsidy. 

We then heard from Dr Bernardo Nunes, one of the first PhD graduates from the behavioural science centre. Bernardo, who now works at start up Workera, talked us through the transition from role-based job matching to skills-based job matching and how machine learning will speed this process. 

Shona Matthews, who recently graduated from the MSc, talked us through her role at the Chartered Bankers Institute. Shona came to the MSc from this role and worked at it part time throughout her MSc. She had useful insights about how she become a “secret agent” of behavioural science within her institution, using it to better evaluate the policy briefs that cross her desk; to advise on the design of surveys; and to smooth the process of organizational change within the institute by applying behavioural audits.

A highlight of the day was a panel discussion on employment in behavioural science. The panel comprised MSc graduates Carina Mueller, a PhD student in psychology at Wageningen, Sam Shand a behavioural consultant at Cowrie consulting and Shona Matthews of the Chartered Bankers Institute. The panel was moderated by our own Dr Till Stowasser, who very deftly opened the conversation up to floor while also keeping time to ask the tough question “what was missing from your training in behavioural science at Stirling that would have helped you better prepare for your current role?” (Answer: maintenance of contact after the teaching term ends. We have promising leads in this direction that we’ll post on in the coming weeks.)

The followed a talk on the past, present and future of behavioural science by the founder director of our Behavioural Science Centre, Prof Liam Delaney (now head of Psychology and Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics). Liam charted the intellectual history of both economics and psychology from the Scottish Enlightenment (Adam Smith and David Hume). The economic channel ran through the welfare approaches of Edgeworth and Jevons and the cognitive models of Herbert Simon. The psychological channel ran through Fechner and psychophysics, behaviorism the cognitive turn and on to Kahneman and Tversky. The talk was a fitting close to an epic event.