Dr Alexander Goddard

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

Most of what goes wrong between people (in relationships, organisations, and politics) is a failure of dialogue. Yet it is often overlooked. Dialogue involves rhetoric and manipulation as much as reason and goodwill – and it increasingly entails AI. This course provides theory and practical training to navigate complex dialogues showing how the differences between us can, not only lead to conflict, but also, become generative and creative.

Topics include: dialogue, rhetoric, and persuasion; misunderstandings and repair; non-verbal cues and detection technologies; deception, its detection and interrogation techniques; conflict and conflict mediation; voice and speaking-up; listening, dismissing, and defensiveness; negotiation and bargaining; creative dialogues; inner dialogue and debate in the stream of thought; authentic vs AI dialogues; and digital dialogues in democracy.

Weekly interactive workshops include: a deception exercise where students practise lying and detecting lies; a live negotiation simulation; prompt engineering with AI dialogue agents; in-depth transcript analysis; and using computational tools to analyse talk.

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.

A 500-word plan outlining the approach to the summative assessment. 

Coleman, P. T., Deutsch, M., & Marcus, E. C. (Eds.). (2014). The handbook of conflict resolution: Theory and practice. John Wiley & Sons.

Corti, K., & Gillespie, A. (2016). Co-constructing intersubjectivity with artificial conversational agents: People are more likely to initiate repairs of misunderstandings with agents represented as human. Computers in Human Behavior, 58, 431-442.

Dingemanse, M., & Enfield, N. J. (2023). Interactive repair and the foundations of language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 28(1), 30–42. 

Goddard, A., & Gillespie, A. (2025). Conversational repairs on Reddit: Widely initiated but often uncompleted. Plos one, 20(1), e0316618.

Harmon, D. J. (2019). When the Fed speaks: Arguments, emotions, and the microfoundations of institutions. Administrative Science Quarterly, 64(3), 542-575.

Ireland, M. E. et al. (2011). Language style matching predicts relationship initiation and stability. Psychological Science, 22(1), 39–44.

Marková, I. (2016). The dialogical mind: common sense and ethics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Laestadius, L. et al. (2024). Too human and not human enough: A grounded theory analysis of mental health harms from emotional dependence on the social chatbot Replika. New Media & Society, 26(10), 5923-5941.

Noort, M. C. et al. (2019). Speaking up to prevent harm: A systematic review of the safety voice literature. Safety Science, 117, 375-387.

Pandolfo, A. M. et al. (2025). Safety listening in high‐risk situations: A qualitative analysis of responses to safety voice in aviation. Risk Analysis, 45(11), 3700-3723.

Vrij, A. et al. (2019). Reading lies: Nonverbal communication and deception. Annual Review of Psychology, 70(1), 295–317.

Zartman, I. W., & Rubin, J. Z. (2025). Power and negotiation. University of Michigan Press.

Essay (100%, 3000 words).

There will be a post-submission oral interview. This does not count towards your final grade.