About the Behavioural Research Unit

Who we are and what we do

The Behavioural Research Unit (BRU) is a multidisciplinary team of behavioural scientists that specialises in applying behavioural science to policy.

We are a mixture of behavioural economists and psychologists. We believe that this combination of perspectives is important for producing good research on people’s decision making and behaviour. (The distinction between behavioural economics and economic psychology is discussed in this paper).

We work with multiple Irish government departments and state agencies. You can find out more about these programmes here.

Our studies are mostly undertaken in Ireland, but we also work internationally with the OECD and the European Commission. Most of our work employs experiments, conducted in the laboratory, online or in the field (e.g. randomised controlled trials). We believe that more experiments should be undertaken for policy (read why in this paper).