45 Best Behavioural Science Thought Leaders Globally

Last updated: June 2026

The 45 people in this directory are the behavioural scientists and applied researchers most actively shaping how the world understands why people do what they do, and what can genuinely change it. As of June 2026, the OECD had identified more than 200 behavioural insights units operating across more than 50 governments worldwide, a figure that reflects how completely behavioural science has moved from a curiosity of academic economics departments into the mainstream of public policy, organisational design, and product development. The field draws on psychology, economics, cognitive science, and neuroscience to explain the gap between how people actually behave and how classical rational-actor models assumed they would.

The intellectual foundations of modern behavioural science owe an enormous debt to Daniel Kahneman, who passed away in March 2024 at the age of 90. His book Thinking, Fast and Slow made concepts like cognitive bias, loss aversion, and the distinction between deliberate and intuitive thinking accessible to a general audience in a way no academic paper had managed before. His Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002, shared with Vernon Smith, legitimised the empirical approach to economic psychology that a generation of researchers had been pursuing, and his influence runs through virtually every entry on this list.

Rather than recycling the same handful of names that appear on every psychology or leadership list, I put together this directory to surface the people genuinely shaping behavioural science right now. The selection required active contribution to the field in 2025 or 2026, a body of work grounded in empirical research, and a public presence that goes beyond historical reputation. The result is a deliberately broad list that spans foundational theorists, methodology builders, applied practitioners, and researchers working on the frontier questions the field is grappling with today: the ethics of nudging at scale, the promise of boosting as an alternative, the intersection of AI and behavioural design, and the application of behavioural insights to the genuinely large problems of our time.

For leaders and organisations looking to apply behavioural science principles to team dynamics, decision quality, and leadership effectiveness, Jonno White, author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold) and a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, works with corporates, schools, and nonprofits globally. For more on how cognitive biases affect leadership decision-making, check out my blog post 'Leadership Decision Fatigue' at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/leadership-decision-fatigue To explore working together, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Why Behavioural Science Matters Right Now

Behavioural science matters now because the gap between what we know about how humans actually make decisions and what most organisations do with that knowledge remains vast. The tools that decades of research have produced, ranging from commitment devices and implementation intentions to default-setting and choice architecture, have demonstrated their value at scale. The Save More Tomorrow programme, developed by Richard Thaler and Shlomo Benartzi, applied the behavioural insight that people find it easier to commit to future behaviour changes than immediate ones, and has helped more than 15 million Americans increase their retirement savings rates as of the most recent published data. That kind of impact, from a single behavioural design principle, is the benchmark the field continues to aim for.

The field is simultaneously under pressure and expanding its reach. The replication crisis in social psychology has forced a reckoning with the quality of the empirical foundations underlying some widely cited nudges. This list deliberately excludes anyone whose core work has been significantly undermined by credible integrity concerns. The result is a list weighted toward researchers with deep, well-replicated bodies of work, not toward those with a single headline-generating study.

At the same time, the scope of behavioural science is expanding. Ralph Hertwig and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute have developed boosting, an approach that aims to build people's decision-making competence rather than steering their choices through architecture, addressing legitimate concerns about autonomy. Susan Michie and the UCL Centre for Behaviour Change have built the COM-B model and Behaviour Change Wheel into global frameworks used by public health systems and governments on every continent. Tali Sharot's work on how AI systems alter human perception and emotional judgment is among the most urgent new research agendas in the field.

For leaders exploring how behavioural insights apply to change management and organisational transformation, check out my blog post on Thought Leaders in Change Management at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-change-management

Engage Jonno White to facilitate an executive offsite that applies behavioural science principles to leadership team decision-making. Contact jonno@consultclarity.org.

How This List Was Compiled

Every person on this list was identified through a systematic search process spanning academic publication databases, institutional faculty pages, recent conference programmes, LinkedIn activity records, and published books. The selection required current active contribution to the field in 2025 or 2026, a primary source dated within the last twelve months confirming the person's role and organisation, a body of work with genuine intellectual substance, and a public presence demonstrating ongoing engagement with the field. The process ran separate discovery searches targeting North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, and the final list includes voices from more than twelve countries.

Category 1: The Foundational Economic Theorists

These eight researchers built behavioural economics as a recognised discipline. Their work challenged the assumption of human rationality at the heart of classical economics and put psychology at the centre of how we understand markets, savings, and policy. Their influence runs directly through the work of every other person on this list.

The foundational question these thinkers answered was deceptively simple: if standard economic models assume people act rationally, and people clearly do not always act rationally, what does that mean for everything we thought we knew? The answers they produced over four decades, from prospect theory and loss aversion through mental accounting, present bias, and the endowment effect, created the empirical vocabulary that behavioural science now uses to understand almost any domain of human choice.

1. Richard Thaler

Richard Thaler is the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioural Science and Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, a member of that faculty since 1995 and a recipient of the 2017 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He spoke at Cornell University's Department of Economics in October 2025.

His co-authored book Nudge, written with Cass Sunstein and published in 2008, gave governments around the world the conceptual framework for Behavioural Insights Teams. The Save More Tomorrow programme, co-developed with Shlomo Benartzi, has directly helped more than 15 million Americans increase retirement savings as of the most recent published data. His work on mental accounting continues to generate research applications in financial wellbeing, healthcare, and consumer behaviour.

2. Cass Sunstein

Cass Sunstein is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School and founder of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School. He served in two administrations, as OIRA Administrator under President Obama and as Senior Counselor to the Secretary of Homeland Security under President Biden. He participated in Behavioral Scientist's Frontiers Conversation Series in May 2025.

His co-authored books span the field: Nudge with Richard Thaler (2008), Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment with Daniel Kahneman and Olivier Sibony (2021), and Look Again with Tali Sharot (2024), examining the psychology of habituation. His ongoing work on "sludge," the administrative friction that prevents people from accessing services they are entitled to, represents one of the most practically significant directions in applied behavioural policy.

3. Eldar Shafir

Eldar Shafir is the Class of 1987 Professor of Behavioral Science and Public Policy at Princeton University, Inaugural Director of Princeton's Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science and Public Policy, and co-founder and Scientific Director of ideas42. His Kahneman-Treisman Center was actively running its Behavioral Science Desk programme in January 2025.

Shafir co-authored Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much with Sendhil Mullainathan. The central insight, that managing scarcity imposes a "bandwidth tax" on mental resources and systematically impairs the quality of decisions in exactly the domains where good decisions matter most, has reshaped how development economists, public health researchers, and social policy designers think about the conditions under which their interventions operate.

4. Sendhil Mullainathan

Sendhil Mullainathan is the Roman Family University Professor of Computation and Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He co-authored Scarcity with Eldar Shafir and co-founded both ideas42 and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT.

His current research applies machine learning to complex problems in human behaviour, social policy, and medicine, building a bridge between the behavioural economics he helped establish and the computational social science defining the field's next generation of methods. He also co-founded Nightingale, a computational medicine initiative, and Pique, an application that changes how people engage with books. He regularly writes for the New York Times on behavioural economics and public policy.

5. Shlomo Benartzi

Shlomo Benartzi is Professor Emeritus and co-founder of the Behavioral Decision Making Group at UCLA's Anderson School of Management, Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Wharton Behavior Change for Good Initiative, and Chief Behavioral Economist for the Allianz Global Investors Center for Behavioral Finance.

His co-creation with Richard Thaler of the Save More Tomorrow programme has been incorporated into the US Pension Protection Act. His current research focuses on digital nudging, examining how people behave differently on screens and how digital environments can be designed to support better financial decisions. He has published extensively in the Wall Street Journal on behavioural finance applications.

6. Robert Cialdini

Robert Cialdini is Regents' Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University and CEO of Influence At Work, his ethical influence training and consulting firm. He gave a seminar on the psychology of persuasion at the University of Arizona in November 2025.

His book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion has sold more than 7 million copies in 49 languages and is the foundational text in the science of social influence. His seven principles of persuasion, including reciprocity, scarcity, authority, social proof, liking, commitment and consistency, and unity, have shaped marketing, policy, and behavioural design practice for four decades. His work has been cited in over 240 peer-reviewed articles.

7. George Loewenstein

George Loewenstein is the Herbert A. Simon University Professor of Economics and Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, one of the field's founders, and a pioneer of neuroeconomics. He holds visiting professor positions at the London School of Economics, the University of Bonn, and the Arctic University of Norway.

His research on the hot-cold empathy gap, the systematic tendency to underestimate how strongly visceral states affect decisions when those states are absent, has direct applications in financial advice, health behaviour, and ethical decision-making. His co-authored paper with Nick Chater on the i-frame and the s-frame in behavioural public policy, arguing that focusing exclusively on individual-level nudges has led the field astray from structural causes, represents one of the most important recent debates in applied behavioural science.

8. David Laibson

David Laibson is the Robert I. Goldman Professor of Economics at Harvard University, Chair of Harvard's Department of Economics, and leader of Harvard's Foundations of Human Behavior Initiative. His CV, updated in August 2025, confirms active research on present bias, household finance, and macroeconomics.

He co-directs the National Institute of Aging Roybal Center for Behavior Change in Health and Savings. His foundational research on hyperbolic discounting, the finding that people's time preferences are not consistent and that they systematically overweight immediate rewards relative to delayed ones, underpins the design of every savings nudge, health programme, and commitment device built on the insight that people genuinely want to behave well but systematically fail to follow through.

Category 2: Behaviour Change Methodology Builders

These five researchers have done the systematic work of turning behavioural insights into rigorous, replicable frameworks for designing, testing, and evaluating interventions. Their methodological contributions are the scaffolding that applied practitioners around the world use. The categories they created and the frameworks they validated are cited in thousands of public health programmes, policy documents, and organisational change initiatives every year.

The scale of their influence is different in kind from the theorists in Category 1. Where the foundational theorists established the intellectual foundations, these researchers built the plumbing. Understanding why human behaviour resists change is one thing; having a tested, evidence-based system for designing interventions that actually shift it is another.

9. Susan Michie

Susan Michie is Director of the UCL Centre for Behaviour Change and Professor of Health Psychology at University College London, recognised in Clarivate's Highly Cited Researchers 2025 list. She led the development of the COM-B model and Behaviour Change Wheel, which have become globally used frameworks for understanding and designing behaviour change interventions. She also leads the Human Behaviour Change Project, which uses artificial intelligence to synthesise evidence from thousands of behavioural science studies at scale.

A 2025 paper she co-authored in Behavioural Public Policy, with Ralph Hertwig, Robert West, and Stephen Reicher, argued for a fundamental shift from nudging to boosting as a primary policy approach to address global challenges. She served on the 2026 Behaviour Change Conference committee. Her work is the single most widely adopted behaviour change methodology in public health systems globally.

10. Fabiana Lorencatto

Fabiana Lorencatto is Professor of Behavioural and Implementation Sciences at the UCL Centre for Behaviour Change, a position to which she was promoted in June 2025 in recognition of her outstanding contributions to the field. Her research designs and evaluates behaviour change interventions in healthcare, covering antimicrobial resistance, infection prevention, medication adherence, and maternal health.

As Co-Director of the UCL Centre for Behaviour Change, she leads the Centre's formative research and intervention development work across large multidisciplinary programmes. Her promotion in 2025 reflects the international recognition of implementation science as a discipline in its own right, separate from but complementary to the theory-building work of the field's foundational generation.

11. Ralph Hertwig

Ralph Hertwig is Director of the Center for Adaptive Rationality at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. He is internationally known for developing "boosting," an alternative to nudging that aims to strengthen the decision-making competence of individuals rather than steering their choices through architecture.

His 2025 Annual Review of Psychology paper with Stefan Herzog, Boosting: Empowering Citizens with Behavioral Science, articulated why fostering human agency is especially important in an era when digital technologies and AI systems exert increasing pressure on autonomous decision-making. He also co-authored a 2025 paper in Behavioural Public Policy with Susan Michie, Robert West, and Stephen Reicher on moving from nudging to boosting to address global challenges.

12. Katy Milkman

Katy Milkman is the James G. Dinan Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, co-founder and co-director of the Behavior Change for Good Initiative at Penn, and host of Charles Schwab's Choiceology podcast. Her research on the "fresh start effect" demonstrated that temporal landmarks encourage behaviour change by creating a sense of psychological separation from past failures.

Her temptation bundling strategy, pairing activities people resist with things they enjoy, has been adopted in gym and health programme design. A paper she co-authored with Angela Duckworth and colleagues on targeting behavioural interventions based on baseline motivation was published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes in 2026. Her book How to Change became a Wall Street Journal bestseller in 2021 and remains a reference text for practitioners.

13. Theresa Marteau

Theresa Marteau is Director of the Behaviour and Health Research Unit in the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow and Director of Studies for Psychological and Behavioural Sciences at Christ's College, Cambridge. She was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2017 for services to public health.

Her research focuses on non-conscious processes as targets for behaviour change interventions, a shift she made deliberately after finding that interventions targeting conscious risk information rarely produced lasting behaviour change in health contexts. Her work on the behavioural mechanisms linking wider determinants of health, such as poverty and the built environment, to health behaviours has direct implications for public health policy design.

Category 3: Applied Behavioural Insights in Policy and Practice

The eight people in this category have translated research into systems, institutions, and programmes that operate at scale. Several of them built or now lead the institutions that have done the most to embed behavioural science in government and business globally. Their work is characterised by real-world application, randomised testing, and a commitment to measuring whether interventions actually change the behaviours they aim at.

For organisations seeking to understand how change management and behaviour change intersect at the team and organisational level, check out my blog post on Thought Leaders in Organisational Development at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-organisational-development

Jonno White works with leadership teams to build the psychological safety, accountability, and communication practices that behavioural science research identifies as most impactful. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

14. Michael Hallsworth

Michael Hallsworth is the Chief Behavioural Scientist at the Behavioural Insights Team, the role to which he was promoted in June 2024 after previously serving as Managing Director of BIT Americas. He holds a PhD in behavioural economics from Imperial College London and is Distinguished Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author of Behavioral Insights (MIT Press, 2020).

His 2025 book The Hypocrisy Trap, also from MIT Press, examines the behavioural science of criticism and how changing what we criticise can change behaviour. He co-authored the EAST framework (Easy, Attractive, Social, Timely), which has been the practical guide for behavioural insights teams working in government and organisations worldwide for more than a decade.

15. David Halpern

David Halpern is Director of the Downing Battcock Institute at Cambridge, a role he moved into following his departure from BIT in July 2024 after fourteen years as its founding CEO. He joined the Board of the Competition and Markets Authority as a non-executive director in April 2026. Appointed CBE in 2023, he founded BIT in 2010 as the world's first government institution dedicated to applying behavioural science.

Halpern grew BIT over fourteen years from a small team in 10 Downing Street into a 250-person global social enterprise conducting work in more than 75 countries. He served as the UK's What Works National Adviser from 2013 to 2022. His book Inside the Nudge Unit remains the most accessible account of how behavioural science was institutionalised in UK government.

16. Kristen Berman

Kristen Berman is the CEO and co-founder of Irrational Labs, a behavioural product design company she founded in 2013 that has worked with Google, PayPal, Airbnb, Microsoft, Netflix, and hundreds of other organisations to redesign products using behavioural economics. She was a featured speaker in Behavioral Scientist's Frontiers Conversation Series in November 2025.

She also co-founded Common Cents Lab at Duke University, which has run more than 50 behavioural experiments to improve financial wellbeing for low-to-middle income Americans. Her Product Teardowns Substack and the 3B Framework of Behavioural Design she developed bring rigorous behavioural science to the product manager and UX designer communities in a form they can act on directly.

17. Piyush Tantia

Piyush Tantia is Chief Innovation Officer and Board Member at ideas42, the social science R&D lab he co-founded with Eldar Shafir. He has overseen more than 100 innovation projects across more than 30 countries, applying behavioural science to household finance, education, international development, criminal justice, and healthcare.

He was a featured speaker in Behavioral Scientist's Frontiers Conversation Series, discussing innovation in behavioural design in an era of increasing AI capability. He is a frequent lecturer at Harvard, Wharton, Yale, and Columbia, and was a 2021-22 Causal Inference Fellow at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

18. Ivo Vlaev

Ivo Vlaev is Professor of Behavioural Psychology at the Centre for Behavioural and Implementation Science Interventions at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore. He holds a PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Oxford and is a co-author of the UK Cabinet Office's influential MINDSPACE report. He presented at a BISI research webinar in November 2025.

His research integrates psychology, neuroscience, and economics to advance a unified theory of behaviour change, tested through interventions in health, finance, education, and the environment. His Singapore base places him at the centre of the rapidly growing behavioural insights ecosystem in Southeast Asia and his advisory work spans governments and organisations globally.

19. Nina Mazar

Nina Mazar is Professor of Marketing at Boston University's Questrom School of Business, co-founder of BEworks (one of the first commercial consulting firms dedicated to applying behavioural science to real-world challenges), and a Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2023 member. A 2025 paper she co-authored in Nature Human Behaviour examined the conditions under which honesty oaths reduce dishonesty in real-world settings.

She helped establish the World Bank's Behavioral Insights Initiative and co-directed Rotman's Behavioral Economics in Action research centre. Her research spans ethical decision-making, marketing, environmental behaviour, and financial wellbeing, consistently asking how environmental cues and social norms shape the choices people believe they are making freely.

20. Dilip Soman

Dilip Soman holds the Canada Research Chair in Behavioural Science and Economics at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, renewed by Canada's SSHRC in March 2025. He founded Behavioural Economics in Action at Rotman, Canada's first academic centre dedicated to applying behavioural economics to policy and organisations, and is the author of The Last Mile.

He was a keynote speaker at Rotman's 2026 Lifelong Learning Conference in May 2026. His EdX course on behavioural economics has enrolled learners globally and represents one of the field's most effective knowledge-transfer mechanisms outside the traditional academic channel. His book The Last Mile examines how behaviour change interventions succeed or fail in their final stage of delivery.

21. Uri Gneezy

Uri Gneezy is the Epstein/Atkinson Chair in Behavioral Economics and Professor of Economics and Strategy at the Rady School of Management at UC San Diego. A 2026 paper he co-authored in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization on experimental methods confirms his current research activity.

He is internationally known for his work on incentives and their unintended consequences, particularly the finding that small financial incentives can crowd out intrinsic motivation and actually reduce the behaviours they are designed to encourage. His book Mixed Signals: How Incentives Really Work (Yale University Press, 2023) brought these insights to a practitioner audience. His field experiments with companies span habit formation, gender differences in competitive behaviour, and the crowding out of prosocial norms.

Category 4: Decision Science, Cognition, and Neuroscience

The nine researchers in this category have advanced fundamental understanding of how the human mind processes information, forms beliefs, and regulates emotion. Their work is the empirical foundation that applied behavioural science stands on. Without the cognitive psychology and neuroscience research this category represents, behavioural economics would be a collection of documented anomalies without a mechanistic account of where they come from.

22. Tali Sharot

Tali Sharot is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Department of Experimental Psychology at University College London and holds a faculty appointment at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. She directs the Affective Brain Lab at UCL and received a Wellcome Discovery Award in March 2025 to study cognitive rewards, the brain mechanisms by which thinking itself becomes pleasurable or aversive.

Her research integrates neuroscience, behavioural economics, and psychology to examine how emotion and motivation shape beliefs and decisions. She co-authored Look Again with Cass Sunstein in 2024, examining the psychology of habituation and how to counteract the tendency to stop noticing what is most important through repetition. A 2025 paper in Communications Psychology examined escalating risk-taking and its link to emotional habituation.

23. Ethan Kross

Ethan Kross is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, where he directs the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory. His book Chatter: The Voice in Our Head has been translated into more than 40 languages. Shift: Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You was published by Crown in February 2025.

A companion workbook to Chatter was published by Clarkson Potter, Penguin Random House in early 2026. He gave a book talk at Northwestern University in February 2026. His research directly addresses one of the most important practical questions in human performance: how to think clearly under emotional pressure, and what evidence-based tools actually work for managing the inner critic that undermines decision-making and effectiveness.

24. Wendy Wood

Wendy Wood is Provost Professor Emerita of Psychology and Business at the University of Southern California. The American Psychological Association's Monitor on Psychology featured her work in January 2026 as one of the most important contributions to applied psychology, identifying her as the field's leading authority on habit science. Her research has accumulated close to 60,000 academic citations.

Her research demonstrates that close to 43 percent of daily human behaviour is driven by habitual context-response associations rather than conscious deliberate choice, with profound implications for how organisations, health systems, and public policy designers think about sustainable behaviour change. Her book Good Habits, Bad Habits argues that environment design is often more powerful than willpower or motivation as a mechanism for lasting change.

25. Baruch Fischhoff

Baruch Fischhoff is the Howard Heinz University Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy and the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy and Technology. He is a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine, and served as founding chair of the FDA's Risk Communication Advisory Committee.

He identified the hindsight bias in 1975 and has spent fifty years studying how people understand, communicate, and act on uncertain information. His 2025 book Bounded Disciplines and Unbounded Problems, the Clarendon Lectures in Management published by Oxford University Press, examines why disciplinary specialisation has made it harder to address the genuinely complex problems facing modern societies. A companion volume, Decisions, was published by MIT Press in 2025.

26. Mahzarin Banaji

Mahzarin Banaji is the Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. She is internationally recognised for her work on implicit cognition, particularly the development of the Implicit Association Test alongside Anthony Greenwald, a tool used in millions of research studies and organisational settings to measure implicit attitudes.

She received an honorary doctorate from Yale University at its 2024 commencement ceremony. Her work on the social origins of implicit attitudes, examining how group membership and cultural exposure shape the mental associations people form without awareness or intention, has direct implications for organisational life, from hiring and performance reviews to team dynamics and leadership assessment.

27. Gerd Gigerenzen

Gerd Gigerenzen is Director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the Faculty of Health Sciences Brandenburg at the University of Potsdam, which since 2026 has also been affiliated with the Brandenburg Medical School Theodor Fontane. He is former Director of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.

His work offers an important counterpoint to the dominant behavioural economics narrative that human cognitive biases represent systematic irrationality. He argues instead that many heuristics are ecologically rational, meaning they produce good decisions in the environments they evolved in, and that the goal of policy should be to build environments that fit human heuristics rather than to design around human limitations. His research on risk communication has directly influenced how statistical information is presented in medical, legal, and policy contexts.

28. Nick Chater

Nick Chater is Professor of Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School, where he founded the Behavioural Science group, building it into the largest of its kind in Europe. He received the David E. Rumelhart Prize in 2023, the Cognitive Science Society's lifetime achievement award, for his contributions to cognitive and behavioural science.

His book The Mind Is Flat argues that the familiar idea of a subconscious mind with deep hidden motivations is an illusion, and that human thought and behaviour are instead generated in the moment through improvisation on past patterns. His research collaboration with George Loewenstein on the i-frame and the s-frame in behavioural policy addresses one of the most important debates currently dividing the field: whether focusing on individual-level nudges has distracted policymakers from addressing the structural conditions that drive collective behaviour.

29. Colin Camerer

Colin Camerer is the Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Finance and Economics at the California Institute of Technology and Director of the T&C Chen Center for Social and Decision Neuroscience. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2013. A past president of the Society for Neuroeconomics and the Economic Science Association, he is one of the pioneers who helped establish neuroeconomics as a discipline.

His research combines neuroscience methods, including fMRI and EEG, with economic experiments to understand the brain mechanisms underlying strategic behaviour, self-control, market participation, and trust. He has published more than 180 peer-reviewed articles and chairs the Russell Sage Foundation Behavioral Economics Roundtable, one of the most important ongoing forums for the field's theoretical development.

30. Molly Crockett

Molly Crockett is Associate Professor of Psychology at Yale University and a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics. Her research examines the psychological and neural mechanisms of morality, altruism, and economic decision-making, integrating social psychology with computational neuroscience.

She holds a PhD from Cambridge and completed a Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Zurich. Her work on the neuroscience of moral decision-making, examining how the brain distinguishes between personal and impersonal harms and how neurochemicals modulate moral judgment, sits at the intersection of neuroscience and ethics in a way directly relevant to questions about AI systems, automated decision-making, and the design of ethical choice environments.

Category 5: Behavioural Design for the Workplace and Organisations

The seven researchers in this category apply behavioural science to how organisations operate, how leaders behave, and how workplaces can be designed to bring out people's best decision-making. Their work is particularly relevant to any leader trying to make organisational culture, talent decisions, and team performance genuinely better rather than superficially more impressive.

Understanding human behaviour in organisational settings requires understanding both the cognitive biases documented in individual decision-making research and the social processes that amplify or constrain those biases in group and institutional contexts. The people here work across that full range.

31. Iris Bohnet

Iris Bohnet is the Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government and Co-Director of the Women and Public Policy Programme at Harvard Kennedy School, and Faculty Director of the social sciences at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. She participated in the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in January 2026.

Her co-authored book Make Work Fair: Data-Driven Design for Real Results, written with Siri Chilazi and published by Harper Business in January 2025, was named a Financial Times Best Business Book of 2025 and winner of the SABEW Best in Business Book Award. The book argues that fairness at work requires designing systems rather than de-biasing individual attitudes, a fundamentally behavioural approach to one of the most contested questions in contemporary organisational life.

32. Siri Chilazi

Siri Chilazi is a Senior Researcher at the Women and Public Policy Programme at Harvard Kennedy School and co-author of Make Work Fair with Iris Bohnet. Since the book's publication in January 2025 she has spoken at hundreds of large events worldwide.

Her field experiments with organisations test specific, practical changes to hiring, performance review, and promotion processes, providing the kind of evidence-based accountability that many well-intentioned diversity and inclusion programmes have historically lacked. Her work sits directly at the intersection of behavioural science methodology and the practical reality of organisational change.

33. Niro Sivanathan

Niro Sivanathan is Professor of Organisational Behaviour at the London Business School, confirmed in a BetterUp Science Board role in June 2025. His research on power, status, and organisational behaviour has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Human Behaviour, and Administrative Science Quarterly. His TED Talk was selected by TED as one of the top ten talks of 2021.

His research on argument dilution, the finding that adding weak arguments to a strong argument reduces rather than increases persuasive impact, has direct and practically important implications for how leaders and organisations communicate. An LBS podcast in 2025 features Sivanathan discussing how uncertainty drives people to seek dominant rather than collaborative leadership, and what effective leaders do differently in those conditions.

34. Zoe Chance

Zoe Chance is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing at the Yale School of Management, where her MBA course Mastering Influence and Persuasion has been the most popular elective in the programme for several years running. Her speaker profile at Stern Strategy Group was updated in April 2026, confirming her continued active engagement.

Her 4Ps Framework for Behaviour Change has been applied in Google's global food policy to encourage healthier choices through environmental design rather than willpower demands. Her book Influence is Your Superpower: The Science of Winning Hearts, Sparking Change, and Making Good Things Happen draws on her research and teaching to present evidence-based influence strategies that work without compromising integrity.

35. Paul Dolan

Paul Dolan is Professor of Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he founded the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science and directs the Executive MSc in Behavioural Science. He appeared at the Nordic Happiness Summit in Stockholm in May 2026.

He is lead author of the MINDSPACE report and created the wellbeing questions used by the UK Office for National Statistics to monitor national wellbeing. His 2025 book Beliefism examines the behavioural science of why people hold on to beliefs that divide them from others. His podcast Breaking Beliefism extends this research into an ongoing public conversation about disagreement, perspective-taking, and the conditions that make genuine dialogue possible.

36. Angela Duckworth

Angela Duckworth is the Rosa Lee and Ephraim M. Engelman Endowed Term Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, founder and CEO of Character Lab, and author of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, a number one New York Times bestseller.

Her research on grit, the combination of passion and long-term perseverance, and self-control as the single best predictor of achievement across multiple domains, has shaped how educators, coaches, and organisations think about human potential. A 2026 paper co-authored with Katy Milkman and others in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes examined how targeting behavioural interventions based on baseline motivation significantly increases vaccine uptake.

37. Vanessa Bohns

Vanessa Bohns is the Braunstein Family Professor and Chair of Organizational Behavior at Cornell University's ILR School, a professorship that began in November 2025 following her appointment announced by Cornell Chronicle in April 2025. Her research centres on social influence, compliance, and consent.

A 2025 paper in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes examined perspective differences in how people gauge informed consent. Her forthcoming 2026 book Should I Say Something? The Science of What to Share and What to Keep to Yourself addresses the practical question of when speaking up is worth the risk and when silence is genuinely the better choice, drawing on two decades of research into why it is so hard to ask for things and so hard to say no.

Category 6: Social Behaviour, Morality, and Cooperation

The eight researchers in this final category examine how people are shaped by and in turn shape the social environments they inhabit. Their work addresses the questions that matter most for organisations, democratic societies, and collective action on shared problems: how group identities drive behaviour, how moral judgements are made and distorted, how misinformation spreads, and how cooperation can be designed rather than hoped for.

For more on applying insights from social psychology and behaviour change to team culture and leadership, check out my blog post on 35 Essential Thought Leaders on Team Culture at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/35-essential-thought-leaders-on-team-culture

Bring Jonno White into your next leadership offsite to facilitate the difficult team conversations that build the conditions for genuine cooperation and high performance. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

38. Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at the NYU Stern School of Business. He delivered the MIT Karl Taylor Compton Lecture in March 2026 and served as commencement speaker at NYU's all-university commencement ceremony in May 2026.

His book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list and has been the intellectual foundation for a global policy conversation about smartphones, social media, and adolescent mental health. His earlier book The Righteous Mind remains one of the most useful frameworks for understanding political polarisation and cross-cultural communication that behavioural science has produced.

39. Lara Aknin

Lara Aknin is a Distinguished Professor of Social Psychology at Simon Fraser University in Canada, where she directs the Helping and Happiness Lab. A 2026 paper in Motivation and Emotion with her SFU colleagues examined the unexpected effects of encouraging gratitude expression on reconnection with old friends.

Her research consistently demonstrates that prosocial behaviour, giving time, money, or help to others, produces wellbeing benefits across very different cultural and economic contexts, including large-scale studies conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic. The universality of these findings across cultures has direct implications for organisational wellbeing programmes and for policymakers designing volunteer and charitable giving incentive systems.

40. Elizabeth Dunn

Elizabeth Dunn is a Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia, co-author of Happy Money: The Science of Happier Spending with Michael Norton, and co-author of the forthcoming Leave the Lights On: How Joyful Decisions Can Save Our Species, written with Jiaying Zhao and published by Avery, Penguin Random House in 2026.

Her research demonstrates that how people spend money and time matters far more than how much they have, and identifies the specific conditions under which prosocial spending, experiential spending, and time-saving purchases reliably increase wellbeing. She received the Society for Experimental Social Psychology's Career Trajectory Award in 2025. Her new book extends her wellbeing research to climate behaviour, identifying the sustainable choices that are also personally rewarding.

41. Jay Van Bavel

Jay Van Bavel is Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University, Director of the Center for Conflict and Cooperation at NYU, and Professor at the Norwegian School of Economics. He co-authored The Power of Us: Harnessing Our Shared Identities to Improve Performance, Increase Cooperation, and Promote Social Harmony with Dominic Packer.

His research examines how social identities shape the mind, brain, and behaviour, from the way group membership alters perceptual experience to how partisan identity drives the acceptance or rejection of factual information. His work on identity-based motivated reasoning is among the most practically important research currently available for understanding organisational culture, political communication, and collective action on shared challenges.

42. Betsy Levy Paluck

Betsy Levy Paluck is Professor of Psychology and Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and Deputy Director of Princeton's Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science and Public Policy.

She is internationally known for her research on prejudice reduction through social norms, including large-scale field experiments examining whether media exposure to alternative social models reduces ethnic prejudice and reconciliation reluctance. Her work consistently demonstrates that social norms, the shared beliefs about what other people do and approve, are among the most powerful levers for shifting collective behaviour at scale. Her methodological rigour gives her findings an ecological validity that much prejudice research lacks.

43. David Rand

David Rand is the Erwin H. Schell Professor and Professor of Management Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and Director of the Human Cooperation Laboratory and the Applied Cooperation Team. A research grant running from July 2023 to June 2026 confirms his current active research.

His work combines behavioural experiments with computational models to understand misinformation sharing and cooperation. His research finding that misinformation sharing is often the result of inattention rather than motivated partisan deception, and that simple accuracy prompts can significantly reduce its spread, was tested in field experiments with millions of users on Facebook and Twitter and has directly influenced platform content moderation policy.

44. Nava Ashraf

Nava Ashraf is Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Research Director of the Marshall Institute for Philanthropy and Social Entrepreneurship, and Co-Director of the psychology and economics programme within STICERD at LSE. A working paper published in March 2026 confirms her current active research.

Her work combines insights from behavioural science with development economics and field experiments in low-income settings, examining how psychological factors, including aspirations, social norms, and identity, shape economic decisions in contexts where traditional economic interventions have produced disappointing results. Her research on savings behaviour, health, and gender in developing countries is among the most rigorous and policy-relevant behavioural economics work currently being conducted.

45. Jon Jachimowicz

Jon Jachimowicz is Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Organizational Behavior Unit at Harvard Business School, actively publishing research in 2025. His research examines passion as a psychological phenomenon, asking what passion actually is, how it develops, and whether organisations systematically misunderstand it in ways that harm both workers and performance.

He has demonstrated that passion is not simply a trait people either have or lack but rather a dynamic state that requires cultivation. The common advice to "follow your passion" can mislead people when it implies passion is a fixed internal compass rather than something that grows through competent engagement. His work challenges one of the most widely repeated pieces of career and leadership advice with careful, pre-registered empirical research that has direct implications for talent development and organisational culture.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

Several people deserve acknowledgement even though this list focused primarily on those actively publishing in 2025 or 2026. Daniel Kahneman, who passed away in March 2024, would have anchored any list of behavioural science thought leaders compiled before his death, and his foundational work on cognitive biases, prospect theory, and dual-process thinking remains the intellectual bedrock of the entire field. Amos Tversky, his long-time collaborator who died in 1996, contributed foundational work so significant that much of what behavioural science now takes for granted traces directly to their joint papers. Richard Layard at LSE pioneered the economics of happiness and its application to policy in ways that several people on this list built directly on. Elisabeth Costa, the new Managing Director of BIT UK, is worth watching as the organisation Halpern built continues its global growth.

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Applying Behavioural Science

The most common mistake leaders and organisations make when engaging with behavioural science is treating it as a bag of tricks rather than a discipline with coherent underlying principles. Pulling out a nudge here or a commitment device there, without understanding the behavioural mechanism it addresses, typically produces disappointing results and sometimes produces outcomes opposite to those intended. Uri Gneezy's research on incentive crowding-out is the canonical example: a financial reward introduced into a context where intrinsic motivation was doing the work frequently destroys exactly the behaviour it was supposed to reinforce.

A second pervasive mistake is assuming that interventions validated in one population or setting will transfer unchanged to a different one. The field's replication crisis has made this clearer than it was a decade ago. Susan Michie's COM-B model and Behaviour Change Wheel exist precisely because behaviour change requires diagnosing the specific Capability, Opportunity, and Motivation barriers operating in a specific context before designing an intervention. What works in one country or demographic often works less well or not at all in another.

Third, and perhaps most consequentially, leaders consistently underestimate the power of defaults and physical environments as determinants of behaviour, and overestimate the power of communication and messaging. Wendy Wood's research is clear: telling people to change their behaviour works far less reliably than designing environments in which the desirable behaviour is the easy or automatic one. The organisations that get the most from behavioural science are those that redesign processes, spaces, and systems, not just communications.

The fourth common mistake is deploying behavioural interventions without genuine ethical scrutiny. Ralph Hertwig's case for boosting over nudging reflects a serious concern that choice architecture, even when beneficial, can be deployed in ways that undermine the autonomy and agency of the people it is applied to. Organisations that adopt behavioural science tools without thinking carefully about who benefits and what alternative approaches were considered are operating in ethically contested territory that the field itself is actively debating.

Finally, organisations routinely confuse correlation-based insight with intervention-ready knowledge. Knowing that certain types of people behave in certain ways under certain conditions does not automatically tell you how to change anyone's behaviour. Building genuine behavioural science capacity requires understanding the difference between description and mechanism, because only the latter enables reliable design.

Implementation Guide: Applying Behavioural Science in Your Organisation

The most reliably effective starting point is diagnostic rather than prescriptive. Before selecting any behavioural intervention, apply the COM-B model or a similar diagnostic framework to understand why the behaviour you want to change is not happening. Is the barrier primarily one of Capability (people lack the knowledge or skills), Opportunity (the environment does not support the behaviour), or Motivation (people do not value or prioritise the behaviour)? Different barriers require different intervention designs, and an intervention aimed at the wrong barrier will not work regardless of how technically sophisticated it is.

Once the barrier is diagnosed, run a small test before scaling. The most consistent finding in applied behavioural science is that intuitions about what will work are frequently wrong, including the intuitions of trained behavioural scientists. The history of the field is populated with interventions that made strong theoretical sense and failed in practice, and with interventions that seemed almost too simple to matter and produced large effects. Testing at small scale before committing resources to a large rollout is not just good practice; in behavioural science it is mandatory discipline.

When designing for defaults, start with enrolment rather than communication. The consistently most powerful finding in retirement savings, organ donation, green energy programmes, and healthcare adherence is that changing the default from opt-in to opt-out, while preserving people's ability to choose otherwise, produces far larger behaviour change than any amount of educational communication. If you are designing a process where you want most people to take a particular action, make that action the path of least resistance.

Implementation intentions, the specific commitment in the form of "I will do X when Y happens" rather than simply "I intend to do X," consistently improve follow-through across health, financial, and educational contexts. If you are running a behaviour change programme, build into the experience a moment where participants form specific if-then plans rather than general resolutions. The difference in outcomes between these two forms of commitment is reliably large and the practical cost of building the if-then moment into a programme is close to zero.

Finally, measure behaviour rather than attitudes or intentions. Attitudes are cheap to report and intentions are rarely honoured; only measured behaviour tells you whether an intervention worked.

Jonno White's facilitation work with executive teams specifically includes post-session accountability structures designed to translate team commitments into measurable behaviour change. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to explore a facilitation session for your leadership team, or book a keynote on applying these principles to leadership and organisational performance.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between behavioural science, behavioural economics, and psychology?

Behavioural science is the broadest term, encompassing any scientific study of human behaviour. Psychology has been studying human behaviour since the late nineteenth century, using laboratory experiments, clinical observation, and survey research to understand cognition, emotion, personality, and social interaction. Behavioural economics emerged in the 1970s and 1980s through the work of Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and Richard Thaler, applying psychological insights specifically to economic decision-making. Behavioural science as practised today draws on all three traditions, adding neuroscience, computational methods, and field experimental evidence to the mix.

What is nudge theory and does it still hold up?

Nudge theory describes interventions that steer behaviour in a desired direction by altering the choice environment rather than banning options or changing incentives. Classic nudges include default enrolment in retirement savings plans, placement of healthier food at eye level, and organ donation opt-out systems. The evidence base for nudging is substantial for specific contexts, but effect sizes vary considerably across populations and settings, and questions about the ethical implications of nudging at scale are live debates. The emergence of boosting as an alternative approach, aiming to build decision-making competence rather than steer choices, reflects genuine scientific evolution rather than simply fashion.

How can a leader without a background in behavioural science start applying it?

Three starting points have the best evidence base. First, change your defaults: audit your processes and redesign so the path of least resistance produces what you actually want. Second, reduce friction for good behaviours and increase it for unwanted ones. Third, build specific accountability commitments rather than general ones: when a team commits to "checking in monthly," ask them to name the specific date, time, channel, and format. The specificity of implementation intentions consistently improves follow-through. The environment does far more of the work than communication.

Who are the most important behavioural scientists working on climate and sustainability?

Several people on this list are working directly on the intersection of behavioural science and climate behaviour. Elizabeth Dunn's forthcoming 2026 book Leave the Lights On explicitly addresses how joyful decision-making can encourage sustainable behaviour. Ralph Hertwig has argued for boosting as the appropriate approach to climate behaviour change, building citizen capacity for complex risk decisions. Betsy Levy Paluck's work on social norms as levers for collective behaviour change is directly applicable to the challenge of normalising sustainable choices. Nick Chater and George Loewenstein's paper on the i-frame and s-frame addresses the structural critique that focusing exclusively on individual nudges distracts from the systemic changes that climate challenges require.

Final Thoughts

The field of behavioural science is undergoing a genuine reckoning in 2026. The replication crisis has forced a harder look at the quality of foundational studies. The rise of AI-optimised digital environments has made the ethics of behavioural design more urgent than at any point since Thaler and Sunstein published Nudge. The questions Ralph Hertwig is asking about boosting versus nudging, about whether behaviour change policy should aim to strengthen human agency rather than route around it, are among the most important intellectual debates currently under way.

What does not change is the fundamental insight that launched the field: people are not the rational actors that classical economics assumed, and understanding how they actually think and decide is both more interesting and more practically useful than the fiction of homo economicus. The 45 people on this list have done more than any other group of researchers to replace that fiction with evidence, and their work, individually and collectively, is genuinely making decisions better at scale.

For leaders and organisations wanting to apply these insights to the practical questions of team performance, decision quality, and organisational change, Jonno White, author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold), Certified Working Genius Facilitator, and host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast (230+ episodes, listeners in 150+ countries), facilitates working sessions that translate behavioural science research into specific team commitments and accountability structures. Whether virtual or face to face, international travel to work with Jonno is far more affordable than clients typically expect. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to explore what a keynote, workshop, or executive offsite might look like for your organisation.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, author of Step Up or Step Out, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Sources

OECD (2025): Behavioural insights units across governments globally, as cited in Yu-kai Chou article, April 2026. UCL Centre for Behaviour Change (2025): Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers 2025 recognition of Professor Susan Michie and Professor Robert West, UCL CBC Impact Report, December 2025. Herzog, S.M. and Hertwig, R. (2025): Boosting: Empowering Citizens with Behavioral Science, Annual Review of Psychology, 76, 851-881. Benartzi, S. and Thaler, R.H.: Save More Tomorrow programme outcomes, as documented in CHIBE at the University of Pennsylvania and peer-reviewed publications.

Next Read

Behavioural science research has some of its most direct applications in team culture and the conditions that allow teams to perform. The people on this list, from Katy Milkman on implementation intentions to Vanessa Bohns on social influence to Jonathan Haidt on moral foundations, offer frameworks directly applicable to the team dynamics that determine whether organisations realise their potential. For the leaders whose work most directly addresses these questions from a team culture perspective:

Keep reading: https://www.consultclarity.org/post/35-essential-thought-leaders-on-team-culture