Statistician and Economist (ENSAE, Paris), PhD in Psychology (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, supervisor Serge Moscovici), Habilitation in Psychology.
Saadi has 30+ 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 five 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 six years, and was a member of the steering committee of the Commissariat general du Plan (French Prime Minister’s forecast and planning unit). Saadi has been a consultant for global corporations in several sectors, chaired national research programme and evaluated many others, is a member of scientific advisory boards in several top universities and large industries.
Saadi pioneered the use of text mining in social psychology for the analysis of social representations, he 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 still on-going after 30 years, the most recent being the World Pandemic Research Network (WPRN) of which he is lead coordinator, and the Food Socioscope.
Saadi has 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 has published six books: on eating (Penser Manger, Presses Universitaires de France), design (Designing User-Friendly Augmented Work Environments, Springer), digitisation (Numériser le travail: Lavoisier), sustainability (System Innovation for Sustainability 4, Routledge), societal psychology (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 is made available free of charge courtesy of Cambridge University Press here. His latest book, Why People Do What They Do: And How to Get Them to Change (Polity, 2024) is a handbook for changemakers.
See Saadi’s visionary inaugural lecture at LSE in 2010, a more recent one at Stanford on the design of AI agents, and his blog in Psychology Today, Changing for the Better.
Saadi is a member of the French National Academy of Technologies, and of the European Academy (Academia Europaea). Saadi is happy to supervise PhD students on a wide variety of topics, as long as they are prepared to do solid empirical work and he likes the topic.