PB403      One Unit
Societal and Environmental Psychology

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

By adopting a societal rather than an individualistic perspective on human psychology, this course studies individual and collective agents in their social, economic, institutional, and ecological environments. Particular emphasis is placed on the influence of values on thought and behaviour, and the importance of fundamental needs to be met and capabilities to be nurtured within planetary boundaries, while addressing the urgency of the climate crisis.

In doing so, this course explores new ways of crafting sustainable Production-Consumption Systems and managing the transition from the current state to a more sustainable one, taking into account actual human beings (Homo Sapiens) rather than Homo Economicus. This endeavour is informed by a realistic psychology, with a critical but practical, societal approach and concrete application to real cases to move from an economic to an eco-systemic perspective.

We thus consider Homo Sapiens with its rationality, but also with its embodied, emotional, social and cultural dimensions, in order to explain the social-psychological aspects of economic and political phenomena. Furthermore, our framework recognises the importance of context and socio-technical constraints, as well as societal regulation in implementing collective choices for a better way of being and living in the future.

Students are provided with a solid critical approach through the analysis of fundamental social-psychological concepts, updated with recent literature from a multidisciplinary perspective. They will use the content of the course to address contemporary issues. They will also be provided with a framework, Installation Theory, to analyse and channel actual behaviour to become the changemakers needed to contribute to the societal transformation. Finally, they apply the skills they have learnt in the course, by working in groups, to make real cases of economic life more sustainable.

Framed by our distinctive societal approach to economic and environmental psychology, articulating history of thought and contemporary analyses, this course trains students to enable and support transformative behavioural change in settings characterised by cultural diversity, a need for sustainability and alternative models of growth.

8 hours of lectures and 6 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.
20 hours of seminars and 20 hours of lectures in the Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn and Winter Term.

Students will be expected to produce one mini-essay and one oral presentation that precedes each summative.

There is no single text for PB403 but one may find the following texts useful:

• Basso, F., & Herrmann-Pillath, C. (2024). Embodiment, Political Economy and Human Flourishing: An Embodied Cognition Approach to Economic Life (Chapter 8). Palgrave Macmillan.
• Basso, F., & Krpan, D. (2023). The WISER framework of behavioural change interventions for mindful human flourishing. The Lancet Planetary Health, 7(2), e106-e108.
• Diamond, J. (2005). Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Penguin Books.
• Howarth, C., Campbell, C., Cornish, F., Franks, B., Garcia-Lorenzo, L., Gillespie, A., Gleibs, I., Gonvales-Portelinha, I., Jovchelovitch, S., Lahlou, S., Mannell, J., Reader, T, & Tennant, C. (2013). Insights from societal psychology: The contextual politics of change. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 1(1), 364-384.
• Himmelweit, H. T. & Gaskell G. (1990). Societal Psychology. Sage Publications.
• Lahlou, S. (2017) Installation Theory. The Societal Construction and Regulation of Individual Behaviour. Cambridge University Press.
• Lahlou, S. (2024). Why People Do what They Do. And How to Make Them Change. Polity.
• Linnér, B. O., & Wibeck, V. (2019). Sustainability Transformations: Agents and Drivers Across Societies. Cambridge University Press.
• Nelson, J. A. (2018). Economics for humans. University of Chicago Press.
• Raworth, K. (2018). Doughnut economics: Seven ways to think like a 21st century economist. Chelsea Green Publishing.
• Uexküll, J. von. (2010). A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans. With a Theory of Meaning. University of Minnesota Press.

Essay (100%, 5000 words)

This component of assessment includes an element of group work.

This component of assessment includes an element of group work. 
Essay with oral assessment component.