Dr Lee Hogarth

Office hours Term 1 2026-27: Wednesdays 1-2 (in office WSL232) and Thursday 10-11 (MS Teams). But feel free to email me to arrange a meeting anytime. I can offer general guidance and welfare to tutees, and module specific guidance for PSY1202, PSY2209, PSY3437 and PSYM231. Exceptions in reading Term 1 week 6, where both office hours will be online.

Postgraduate Research opportunities: Lee Hogarth is open to email enquires from students with their own funding interested in pursuing an MSc by Research or PhD. I am also open to supporting students who would like to apply to the China Scholarship Council, Commonwealth Scholarship, or other PhD funding scheme.

About me:

Lee Hogarth is a critical addiction psychologist. Historically, he studied risk factors and treatment mechanisms in addiction, encompassing epidemiology, experimental dissection of motivational processes, and small-scale clinical trials. His most highly cited work from these earlier outputs critically evaluated translational learning theories of addiction, especially habit theory. Developed these critical themes more recently, Hogarth has used experimental framing studies to demonstrate epistemic harms arising from scientific discourse that frames addiction as a compulsive brain disease rather than a choice motivated by socioeconomic stress. The compulsive brain disease frame damages the recovery self-efficacy and therapeutic alliance of people who use drugs by characterising them as constitutionally damaged and helpless. Indeed, his most recent meta-scientific work using quantitative content analysis (language coding) suggests that scientific authors’ attribution of constitutional deficits to people who use drugs is a form of prejudice echoing eugenic era narratives, potentially motivated by professional incentives. His current research strategy seeks to promote economic redistribution strategies to improve public health by quantifying (exposing) biases in knowledge systems constructed by the powerful to serve their commercial interests at the expense of marginalised communities. His work on biases in knowledge production should in time develop applications for media literacy and mis/disinformation resilience training, relevant to prejudice reduction, radicalisation and psychological defence.

Qualifications:

BSc Hons 1st, Sussex,
PhD, Cambridge

Career:

I received my PhD from Cambridge University in 2000 for research on associative learning risk factors for human addiction supervised by Prof Anthony Dickinson. I then obtained two grants (Wellcome, BBSRC) supporting 7 years of postdoctoral research on the psychopharmacology of addiction at Sussex University with Prof Theodora Duka. I obtained a lectureship at Nottingham University in 2007 and shortly after was awarded an MRC young investigators award for 3 years of research on individual differences in vulnerability to addiction. I took up a Senior Lectureship at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Australia, in 2012, under the academic lead of Prof Simon Killcross. Finally, I returned home in 2013 to take up an Associate Professorship at Exeter University to teach and research the risk factors and intervention startegies for addiction.