Andrew Ritcheson

Dr Andrew Ritcheson is a psychologist and social scientist who applies his expertise to "clinical, business, military and government settings". Ritcheson runs ASR Consulting and is a former Director and Senior Academic Fellow of the Behavioural Dynamics Institute, part of the Strategic Communication Laboratories group which claims to engage in strategic communication, influence and psychological operations, and election management on a for-profit basis for governments and militaries around the world.

Work with the SCL group

Screen grab from BDi Website on Ritcheson

Andrew Ritcheson was listed on the Behavioural Dynamics Institute(BDi) website as Director and Senior Academic Fellow of the institute from 2008 till late 2009 (see right). He was also Director of Research and Developmentat Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) between 2007 and 2009 - with responsibility for "developing and monitoring the implimentation of sophisticated target audience analysis and strategic communication methodologies" (see right). The work of BDi and SCL is largeley secretive and unpublicised, and any descriptions are general - for example the BDi website states that it "is an academic institute that specialises in understanding influence and persuasion in order to change audiences’ attitudes and behaviour", and that it "specialises in applying its methodology to military and political campaigns, where the audiences are hostile or friendly, national or international". One client of the group has been the Singaporean military; for example, on Ritcheson's Linkedin profile Bernard Lim, the head of the Singapore Ministry of Defence's Applied Behavrioural Sciences Department commends Ritcheson on his work with BDi when they were hired as consultants in 2008. Another aspect of Ritcheson's role for the SCL group was revealed by Dr Ralph Gonsalves, the Prime minsiter of St Vincent and the Grenadines, who revealed Ritcheson's (as well as fellow SCL Director Alexander Nix's) involvement in running the "Vote No" campaign for a referendum on constitutional reform. Gonsalves also revealed that both Ritcheson and Nix were also listed as members of The Athena Trust, which claims to be a "global leader in market research" , using the respective aliases of Dr Andrew Shepherd and Alexander Ashburner - for more information on these events see the SCL Elections profile.

ASR Consulting

ASR Consulting, LLC is a new venture started by Dr Ritcheson in Washington DC in September 2009 and formally launched online and in the press in April 2010. The press release for the company states that it "specializes in delivering innovative, data-driven and measurement-focused psychosocial solutions to key audience research and engagement programs for the commercial, defense and government sectors". The company advertises expertise in a number of areas such as strategic communication, audience and population research, behavioural modeling, psychographic topography and human terrain analysis. - putting it in broadly the same category as the SCL group in terms of potential activities and clients. The company's press release mentions a number of uses for such expertise "from combat commands to public deplomacy" (the latter being a euphemism for propaganda) and notes the increasing importance of strategic communication techiniques due to "the changing characteristics of the battle space and global infosphere, and the sobering recognition that our adversaries are unlikely to be defeated solely by kinetic means". This sort of language suggests that the clients which the consultancy hopes to attract are political and military actors - this is further underlined by reference in the press release to the White House's National Framework for Strategic Communication 2010. The company's website states that "recent projects have included strategic communications campaigns, audience-message alignment, behavioral change initiatives, targeted aid and assistance programs, and projects to assist in countering violent extremism" , showing that the ASR Consulting are breaking into the burgeoning field of private strategic communication, psyops and information operations.