This course is available on the MSc in Behavioural Science, MSc in Organisational and Social Psychology, MSc in Social and Cultural Psychology, MSc in Social and Public Communication and MSc in Societal and Environmental Psychology. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit. This course uses controlled access as part of the course selection process. For information on controlled access courses, including eligibility, application processes, deadlines, and departmental contact details, please refer to the Controlled Access Courses webpage.

How to apply: All PBS 0.5-unit courses in Winter Term are controlled access and capped. Students enrolled on PBS programmes will be given priority.

Each course is available with permission as an outside option to students outside of PBS where regulations permit, providing there is space. All students must submit a short statement (around 100 words) outlining their motivation for enrolling on the course, which will be considered by the course convenor.

Deadline for application: Please apply as soon as possible after the opening of course selection for all courses.

For queries contact: Pbs.msc@lse.ac.uk

The objectives of the course are:

1. to provide students with an understanding of the social, psychological and cognitive processes underpinning the consumption of goods and services and their impact;
2. to explore alternative ways of relating to users/consumers than those based solely on market and competition and use these understandings to develop/move towards alternative sustainable routes for consumption; and
3. to prepare students to build better business models (e.g. social entrepreneurship, more sustainable, and so on) for the provision of goods and services.

The course will address the psychology of consumption at different levels of analysis: individual, group and societal. It will ground this psychology in the relevant literature, and teach students foundational theories, allowing them to develop a mental model of human behaviour as it relates to consumption.

This is not a standard marketing or consumer research course. It is not about brand territories and market shares, but about how understanding various psychological processes in conjunction with these forces can provide us with tools to improve the world. How can we leverage consumer psychology to solve our sustainability problem?

15 hours of lectures and 10 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.

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

1 x essay plan submitted in the WT.

• Belk, R. W. (1988). Possessions and the extended self. Journal of Consumer Research, 15(2), 139-168.
• Bocken, N. M., Niessen, L., Gossen, M., Das, A., & Zielińska, M. (2025). Marketing in the anthropocene: A future agenda for research and practice. AMS Review, 15(1), 23-47.
• 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.
• Vlieger de Oliveira, S. E., Wache, C., & Raithel, S. (2024). The role of possessions for the extended self of sustainability-concerned anti-consumers. AMS Review, 14(3), 220-238.
• White, K., Habib, R., & Hardisty, D. J. (2019). How to SHIFT consumer behaviors to be more sustainable: A literature review and guiding framework. Journal of Marketing, 83(3), 22-49.

Essay (100%, 3000 words).

The assignment is part of the learning process: analysing a real case and making sound recommendations will help to provide students with the transferable skills necessary to make the world a better place. In the first part, 'memorandum' (1,000 words), you will be asked to prepare a memorandum or open letter to the head of an organisation of your choice, with recommendations to improve the organisation by making it more sustainable. The recommendations must be realistic – they must be achievable and make business sense. In the second part of the essay, 'justification' (2,000 words), you will justify the specific recommendations presented in the memorandum with reference to theoretical and empirical literature and concepts. We encourage the best essays to be published as open letters. The essay will include an oral component where students must defend their work