Peter Lunt was born in 1956 and educated at the Universities of London and Oxford, receiving his doctoral degree in 1988. He and his graduate students conduct research on various topics in social psychology, the media, and communications.

His initial research and graduate training were in social psychology, looking at the way that lay people explain complex phenomena. After this he developed a line of research in consumption or economic psychology (initially in collaboration with Sonia Livingstone at the London School of Economics) which examined the motivations for saving, borrowing, or spending, the meanings of possessions, the psychology of shopping, generational differences in consumption, and lay accounts of consumption. This research was published with Sonia Livingstone in "Mass Consumption and Personal Identity" (Open University Press, 1992).

A second line of research, again developed in collaboration with Sonia Livingstone, has been concerned with the role of the media in public participation and debate. In "Talk on Television" (Routledge, 1994) and various subsequent papers, he has examined the character, reception, and impact of new forms of participatory programming such as audience discussion programmes. These ideas are related to social theoretical debates over the public sphere.

Peter has also published a number of articles on the history of Social Psychology and recently published an intellectual biography of Stanley Milgram published by Palgrave/MacMillan