We Are All in This Together: has COVID-19 taught us how to save the world?

Can the massive shift in the way we now relate to each other, and the rules we choose to live by, help us tackle other collective threats to humanity, like climate change? 

We need coordinated and cooperative collective action. Experts in behavioural public policy and sustainability discuss how the experience of the pandemic can be leveraged to enable new, transformative behaviours and policies.

Meet our speakers and chair 

Sanchayan Banerjee (@SanchayanBanerj) is a third-year doctoral candidate in Environmental Economics at LSE. He is an Associate Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy and teaches in the area of applied environmental, developmental and quantitative economics. His doctoral thesis focusses on extending the theory of Nudge Plus, a modification of the toolkit of the policymaker which embeds reflective strategies in a nudge to improve its efficacy and preserve the autonomy and agency of the decision maker. 

Nick Chater (@NickJChater) is Professor of Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School. He works on the cognitive and social foundations of rationality and language. He has published more than 250 papers, co-authored or edited more than a dozen books, has won four national awards for psychological research, and has served as Associate Editor for the journals Cognitive Science, Psychological Review, and Psychological Science. He was elected a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society in 2010 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 2012. He is co-founder of the research consultancy Decision Technology and is a member, representing behavioural science, on the UK’s Climate Change Committee. His is the author of The Mind is Flat (Penguin, 2018)

Adam Oliver (@1969ajo) is a behavioural economist and behavioural public policy analyst at LSE. He has published and taught widely in the areas of health economics and policy, behavioural economics and behavioural public policy. He is a founding Editor in Chief of the journals Health Economics, Policy and Law and Behavioural Public Policy. He edited the book, also titled Behavioural Public Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and authored The Origins of Behavioural Public Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and Reciprocity and the Art of Behavioural Public Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2019). 

Ganga Shreedhar (@geeshree) is Assistant Professor in Behavioural Sciences at LSE’s Department of Psychological and Behavioural Sciences, and an Affiliate at the Department of Geography and Environment, The Grantham Research Institute for Climate Change and the Environment, and the Inclusion Initiative. She is an applied behavioural and experimental economist studying how to change human behaviour in ways that simultaneously benefit people and the planet by designing and analysing interventions that help understand consumer and citizen beliefs, preferences and behaviours. 

Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington is Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at LSE, Visiting Researcher at the Department of Political Science and Government at Aarhus University, and Associate Editor of the British Journal of Psychology. Her research focuses on the interface between socioeconomic conditions, social relations, and decision-making in personal and political domains. 

More about this event

This event is part of the LSE Festival: Shaping the Post-COVID World running from Monday 1 to Saturday 6 March 2021, with a series of events exploring the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis and how social science research can shape it.

The Department of Geography and Environment (@LSEGeography) is a centre of international academic excellence in economic, urban and development geography, environmental social science and climate change.

The Department of Social Policy (@LSESocialPolicy) is an internationally recognised centre of research and teaching in social and public policy. From its foundation in 1912 it has carried out cutting edge research on core social problems, and helped to develop policy solutions.

The Department of Psychological & Behavioural Science (@LSE_PBS) is a growing community of researchers, intellectuals, and students who investigate the human mind and behaviour in a societal context. Our department conducts cutting-edge psychological and behavioural research that is both based in and applied to the real world.

Twitter hashtags for this event: #LSEFestival

Podcast & Video

A podcast of this event is available to download from We Are All in This Together: has COVID-19 taught us how to save the world?

A video of this event is available to watch at We Are All in This Together: has COVID-19 taught us how to save the world?