ESRI Seminar: "Social Influences in Expert Opinion: Implications for Policy Advice"

Speaker: Professor Michelle Baddeley, University College London

Venue: ESRI, Whitaker Square, Sir John Rogerson’s Quay, Dublin 2

Academic and other experts play a pivotal role in providing new insights for policy-makers - in a range of spheres from competition policy and consumer protection, communications/energy/financial regulation, through to health policy - to name just a few. We usually believe that experts are offering impartial and unbiased advice, based around an objective assessment of evidence and the careful application of robust research methodologies. In practice, however, uncertainty, insufficient information, unreliable data or flawed analysis can limit the expert's ability to untangle good theories, hypotheses and evidence from bad. Robust statistical methods, careful experimental design and clear hypotheses can guide the expert but impartial advice is often compromised by a range of behavioural and socio-psychological constraints. Heuristics and biases generally and social influences in particular, can have significant negative consequences for the public, especially if misleading research findings are used to guide public policy or affect decision‐making in medicine and beyond. This presentation will focus on some of the social influences and biases that can distort the path of academic research, especially in the context of academic research for policy-makers. It will explore some of the ways in which socially driven bias can distort the evolution of knowledge and explore some policy implications, including ways to ensure that expert advice is devised and applied in the most robust and objective ways possible.

Professor Michelle Baddeley

Michelle Baddeley is Professor in Economics and Finance at the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment, University College London (UCL). She has a BA (Psychology) and BEcon from University of Queensland, and an MPhil/PhD (Economics) from the University of Cambridge. She was a member of UCL’s Green Economy Policy Commission, and is an Associate Researcher with the Energy Policy Research Group at Cambridge. She has an active interest in public policy and is a member of the  Hazardous Substances Advisory Committee and an Associate Fellow with the Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP) at Cambridge. She is on the editorial boards for the Journal of Cybersecurity and the Journal of Economic Psychology. She is also on the advisory board of the Society for the Advancement of Behavioral Economics (SABE).