Saadi Lahlou

Statistician and Economist (ENSAE, Paris), PhD in Psychology (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, supervisor Serge Moscovici), Habilitation in Psychology.

Saadi, has 25+ years of experience of management in Industry, Research and Government. Starting with an early headship of a research department at the age of 27, he has directed 5 research units: the Department of Consumer Science at Crédoc, the Research group on Sociology of Organizations at Electricité de France, the Laboratory of Design for Cognition at EDF R&D, the Department Social Psychology at LSE – which has since become PBS, and currently the Paris Institute for Advanced Study. He also directed the doctoral programme in Social Psychology at LSE for 6 years, and was a member of the steering committee of the Commissariat general du Plan (French Prime Minister’s forecast and planning unit). Saadi also has been a consultant for global corporations in several sectors, chaired national research programme and evaluated many others, is a member of scientific advisory bords in several top universities and large industries.

Saadi pioneered the use of text mining in social psychology for the analysis of social representations, he also developed Subjective Evidence-Based Ethnography, equipping participants with miniature wearable video cameras that provide first-person perspective of the subject’s actions and trigger extremely detailed accounts of subjective experience. He built several large scale scientific surveys, observatory and databases, several now still on-going after 30 years, the most recent being the World Pandemic Research Network (WPRN) of which he is lead coordinator.

Saadi published 100+ articles and chapters on subjects ranging from the sociology of suicide or network effects in science to cognitive attractors, privacy in the digital era, obesity stigma, or simulation for medical training. He published 5 books: on eating (Penser Manger, Presses Universitaires de France), Design (Designing User-Friendly Augmented Work Environments, Springer), digitization (Numériser le travail: Lavoisier), sustainability (System Innovation for Sustainability 4, Routledge), and the most recent (Installation theory, Cambridge University Press) which presents a framework to analyse behaviour and change it, that helps redesign businesses to become more sustainable. The first chapter was made available free of charge by courtesy of Cambridge University Press here.

See Saadi’s inaugural lecture at LSE in 2010, and a more recent one at Stanford on the design of AI agents.

Expertise Details

Social Psychology; Innovation; Workplace Studies; Behavioural Change; Consumer Behaviour; Qualitative Research; Digital Ethnography; Text Mining