Science, Technology and Public Sphere

This group comprises two social psychology staff members (Gaskell, Bauer) and their MPhil/PhD students working in related fields (Howard, Kolka, Allum, Stares, Jost).

The group has existed since 1995 and contributes social psychological analysis and research to the interdisciplinary field of science, technology and society [STS]. The focus is on strategic technological developments such as nuclear power, information technology, and genetic engineering as they are subject to public imagination, enthusiasm and controversy. Members of the group are involved in international research and offer an environment for the conduct of PhD research.

Topics of research are: risk as representation; measurement of attitudes, perceptions, and scientific literacy; the 'public understanding of science' movement; images of expertise; cultural indicators of science; actor networks, public opinion, participation and regulatory regimes; resistance and institutional learning; things and norms; towards a social psychology of objectification.

The group hosts the London Public Understanding of Science seminar (with IC and UCL), and is part of LSE's BIOS seminar series. Members of the group entertain close relations to Eurobarometer, the Science Museum London, LSE Methodology Institute, LSE Risk Centre and the new LSE BIOS research centre, co-ordinates an international network of research teams in 16 countries. The group maintains several large-scale databases for the purpose of comparative and longitudinal research and received funding from the EU, WHO, Leverhulm Trust, Wellcome Trust, and ESRC.

The Group's Databases for research

• International survey data on public understanding of science (UK, EU-15, USA, Canada, Bulgaria, Brazil);
• Science media monitoring: 'Science in the Media Archive, 1946-present' at the Science Museum London (UK, Bulgaria, Italy; data collection processes modelled on this study are in progress in USA and Brazil; a proposal has been submitted to OST to consider media monitoring as part of the statistics of the UK science base);
• Biotechnology in regulation, mass media and public perception (EU-15, USA, Canada, Japan, Norway, Switzerland, Poland 1973-2002);
• BSE/CJD in the mass media 1985-2000 (UK, Italy, Germany, Finland).

Research students

Chairperson: Dr Martin W.Bauer

View Dr Bauer's LSE Experts page

View Dr Bauer's Research page

Recent developments

Towards a ‘Bemetology’ (behavioural meteorology) - continuous experience sampling and observation using a mobile phone network

This project, initially conceived as a pilot project to specify the mobile phone technology, will explore the feasibility of using an existing mobile telephone network to collect continuous data on individuals' everyday life, e.g. stress level, mood, happiness or observations about their surroundings such as noise, annoyances, social interactions. This may either be done by event sampling or by time sampling. Volunteers will be calling or be automatically called regularly on their mobile phone, and they will respond to a single pre-arranged question on their keypad over a period of time of several weeks. There will be no direct communication between caller and called to minimize disturbance of the respondent. The collected information includes number calling/called, timing (minutes, hour, day) and the caller response. The project will explore and test several methodological specification of automatic or semi-automatic implementations with a mobile phone network, and explore the level of respondent disturbance and acceptance of such a procedure over a longer time period. The key to continuous observation is minimizing respondent disturbance. If this methodology can be made to work with the help of mobile technology, this may have revolutionary implications for social and psychological data streams, which hitherto are nearly exclusively based on point-measurements, this in marked contrast to other fields of scientific enquiry into dynamic systems. The project is part of an international collaboration of Martin W. Bauer with Gerhard Fassnacht (BEO-Lab, University of Bern) and with Saadi Lahlou (EHESS & EDF R&D Lab of Design for Cognition, Paris).

'Objectification / Reification group'
Martin Bauer received in 2001 seed funding from Social Psychology to invite a group of like minded researchers to form a discussion / research group on the topic of 'objects, objectification and reification' with a view to formulating a programme 'towards a social psychology of objectification'. The group met in December 2001 at the LSE; it has presented a symposium at the BPS Social Psychology Conference at the LSE 2003 with the title 'Towards a social psychology of objectification' (H.Miller, Nottingham; S.Brown, Loughbrough, S.Lahlou, Paris; G.Duveen, Cambridge).

Nanotechnology

Value and value change: international comparisons

Interdisciplinary Links

At the core of the system, the three research groups contribute to and benefit from the Social Psychology Staff/postgraduate seminar, and the seminar series in Social Psychology, organised in the Institute on a monthly basis with a full programme of internationally renowned presenters. On the periphery, the groups maintain a variety of active interdisciplinary links, in LSE and throughout the word. This indicates the richness and importance of the interdisciplinary contribution which research founded in social psychology makes at LSE.

In addition, the Community health and development research group and the Organisational research group contribute to the research programme of the London Multimedia lab for Audiovisual composition and Composition, and joint research nit of the Institute of Psychology at LSE and the Department of Media Arts at Royal Holloway University of London. The Institute's Organisational research group (particularly through its joint activities with Cap Gemini Ernst and Young/Innovate UK in researching ad developing accelerated solutions environments) is centrally involved in the development of LSE-lab. The coordinator of the Organisational Research Group, Professor Humphreys, is a member of he core group developing LSe-Lab, in developing LSE-lab as a school-wide research, interaction and communication facility. The Institute's Science, and technology and society research group provides the Institute's input to BIOS, (centre for the study of bioscience, biomedicine, biotechnology and society: the coordinator of this research group (Professor George Gaskell) is Associate Director of BIOS.