Dr Alex Goddard

Fellow in Psychological and Behavioural Science

London School of Economics

a.j.goddard@lse.ac.uk
Scholar GitHub LinkedIn CV (Academic) CV (Professional)
Dr Alex Goddard

Dr Alex Goddard is an LSE Fellow in Psychological and Behavioural Science. His research focuses on the quality of dialogue: how people reach consensus, maintain common ground, and repair norm violations. His research draws on deliberative theory, social psychology, and conversation analysis to study text-based interaction across contexts — online communities, complaints, organisational feedback, and human–AI exchange. He develops AI-assisted computational tools and psychometric methods for measuring interaction dynamics at scale: from norm violations on Reddit to hospital responses to patient complaints. Underlying all of this is a single question: what makes a good and bad conversation?

In addition to his research, Alex has worked professionally in psychometrics and has consulted for various organisations across different sectors. He currently teaches on the MSc in Social and Cultural Psychology and Social and Public Communications at the LSE.

Research Areas

  • Quality of dialogue

    What makes a conversation productive, civil, or democratic? I study the conditions under which dialogue succeeds or fails across online communities, institutions, and human–AI exchange.

  • Conversational repair

    How do people address misunderstandings and norm violations mid-conversation? I study the mechanisms by which participants restore dialogue after breakdown.

  • Text measurement in psychology

    Developing rigorous methods for turning unstructured text into reliable psychological measures, including the RAMP framework for high-validity text classification.

  • AI-assisted text analysis

    Using large language models and machine learning to classify and quantify psychological constructs in text at scale — from Reddit threads to institutional feedback.

Publications

  • RAMP: The Repeated Adjustment of Measurement Protocols method for developing textual measures in psychology

    Goddard, A., Gillespie, A. · Psychological Methods · 2025

  • Conversational repairs on Reddit: Widely initiated but often uncompleted

    Goddard, A., Gillespie, A. · PLOS ONE · 2025

  • Validating the use of large language models for psychological text classification

    Bunt, H., Goddard, A., Reader, T., Gillespie, A. · Frontiers in Social Psychology · 2025

  • Textual indicators of deliberative dialogue: A systematic review of methods for studying the quality of online dialogues

    Goddard, A., Gillespie, A. · Social Science Computer Review · 2023

In progress

  • Measuring Corrective Culture in Hospital Responses to Patient Concerns about Safety and Quality Raised Online

    Goddard, A., Reader, T.W., Gillespie, A. · Safety Science · revise and resubmit

  • "We don't ban you immediately for an offense": Reddit moderators reveal the importance of norm violations for maintaining the quality of online dialogue

    Goddard, A., Bunt, H., Gillespie, A., Heitmayer, M.

  • Opening the black box: Safety voice and listening underpin team situation awareness and aviation accident severity

    Pandolfo, A.M., Goddard, A., Reader, T.W., Gillespie, A.