Updated: June 12, 2021 | Let me begin by saying I’m not a qualified psychologist, neurobiologist, behaviorist, botanist, or any other “ist”. I’m a passionate student of the field, someone who at one time assumed that all humans behaved rationally, for the most part, and that all organizational policy was built upon solid evidence and sound logic. I came across the discipline of behavioral science while devouring texts on psychology, to learn why I experience social anxiety from time to time, and how to stop it from happening — tips in this department are always welcome and appreciated. 😂️
In recent years, through the study of the mechanisms that drive human behavior, I’ve learned that the ever-complex and capable human being falls victim to irrational decision making…all the time. It’s not because we are inherently stupid, or that our government and organizations are careless, offering up policy on a whim. Quite the contrary, in fact. The human brain has evolved to surpass the cognitive capacity of all living things on Earth, capable of solving incredibly difficult problems.
However, as the world has become more complex and interconnected, and as we’ve become exposed to increasingly more clutter for our brains to compute, we subjugate ourselves to the risk of making more hasty and irrational decisions.
My goal with this post is to offer a brief introduction into the evolution of behavioral science, explore the potential of this discipline to improve lives and solve societal problems, and inspire readers to learn more about what I find to be an incredibly fun and interesting area of study.
Now You’re Just Being Irrational!
Most of us have fallen victim to the affect heuristic one time or another — a form of bias in which our emotions, likes or dislikes determine our conclusions about the world. It’s common, even as we have the internet and a wealth of information at our fingertips, to fall victim to the “What You See Is All There Is” (WYSIATI) heuristic, where we oversimplify complex problems based only on the information that is immediately available at the time. When faced with a choice between a small reward now or a large reward in the future, we often choose instant gratification. When caught up in the heat of a moment, our minds can go on autopilot, largely controlled by the primitive brain and the nervous system, priming us for miscalculations and regretful actions.
Our daily life is based on a number of choices that result in health, wealth, and happiness outcomes. Some choices are inconsequential, such as which shirt to wear today. Other choices are more significant, such as whether to exercise, to stop smoking, to save for retirement, or how to vote in an election.
Much of these decisions derive from logic and reasoning skills inherent only to our species, traits that have evolved over 200,000 years from our hunter gatherer ancestors. As capable as human beings are, there are still barriers to logic that impair our judgement on a regular basis. Our brains take time to mature — teenagers, for example, have undeveloped PFCs (prefrontal cortex) that limit Theory of Mind (the ability to attribute mental states to ourselves and to others) and logical reasoning skills. Even throughout adulthood after our brains have developed, our brains can become overloaded. The taxing work of juggling professional and personal life, the increasing rate of speed of transactions, the evolution of information technology that can lead to information overload, all contributes to limitations in cognitive bandwidth that hinder our capacity to make logical decisions, often leading to uneducated, short term, impulse decision-making.
These are some of the challenges we’ll be confronting in the future, at an individual and organizational level. While it is natural for humans to make mistakes, some mistakes perhaps adding to our quality of life (I mean, who wants to live in a world of monotonous automated robots achieving logical perfection?), improving upon our understanding of these cognitive barriers and the ways in which we can protect ourselves from irrational decision-making will provide for a better quality of life for all.
Let’s Talk About History — Behavioral Science
The behavioral sciences are deeply rooted in psychology — more specifically, a branch of science (such as psychology, sociology, or anthropology) that deals primarily with human action and often seeks to generalize about human behavior in society (Merriam-Webster, 2021).
The origin of behavioral science lies in behaviorism, an experimental science born around the early 20th century by controversial thinker John Watson. Watson, a doctor of psychology, confronted previous schools of thought (suggesting that Freud’s philosophy approach to psychology bordered on mysticism, for instance) and was a pioneer in his theory that behavior is learned, rather than solely inherited.
The 1950s gave rise to a more refined version of behaviorism through the work of psychologist B.F. Skinner, who believed every animal action is shaped by experiences with punishment and reward. A notable example of Skinner’s work involved teaching pigeons to guide bombs during the Second World War. Seriously. A departure from Watson, Skinner pursued the field of behaviorism with the viewpoint that behavior could be shaped to improve the human condition.
I discovered the behavioral sciences as a matter of happenstance, while researching the biological and social characteristics of mental health disorders. In my study I came upon a book titled The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by best-selling author Michael Lewis. The story follows two giants of psychology, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, as they dive into the intricacies of human behavior, the rationality (or irrationality) of humans, and how our understanding of human behavior can translate into progress, in individual and group capacities. From the late 1960s throughout the better part of the 21st century, Tversky and Kahneman spearheaded the revolutionary discipline that is behavioral economics, a field that combines the psychological study of judgement and decision-making with economics.
By the time Kahneman and Tverksy met they had both established a wealth of experience in experimental and applied psychology; Kahneman applying his knowledge to inform the Israeli military, assessing personality traits among young soldiers, training fighter pilots, later holding a professorship at Hebrew University. Tversky, also fascinated by human decision-making and judgement, made his rounds across the US academic scene, impressing faculty and students alike with his sharp intellect, exploring a range of experiments having to do with decision-making under changing circumstances, exploring the ways we judge similarities and comparisons between two things, and analyzing the behavioral effects of framing. For all their similarities, a contrast existed in that Kahneman pursued questions involving real-world application, with Tversky more concerned with the abstract and theoretical.
The two met in the spring of 1969, when Kahneman invited Tversky to present at a seminar at Hebrew University. Michael Lewis notes in The Undoing Project that this seminar marked a change in Tversky, who was challenged intellectually by Khaneman. The two found each other to be fascinating, building a close working relationship which lasted several years.
The pair went on to pursue a range of studies, exploring the errors and biases inherent in human decision-making. In 1974, their article titled “Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” was published in Science magazine, gaining notoriety and widespread interest among the science community. An excerpt from the paper:
Many decisions are based on beliefs concerning the likelihood of uncertain events such as the outcome of an election, the guilt of a defendant, or the future value of the dollar. These beliefs are usually expressed in statements such as “I think that . . . ,” “chances are …,””it is unlikely that …,”and so forth. Occasionally, beliefs concerning uncertain events are expressed in numerical form as odds or subjective probabilities. What determines such beliefs? How do people assess the prob- ability of an uncertain event or the value of an uncertain quantity? This article shows that people rely on a limited number of heuristic principles which reduce the complex tasks of assessing probabilities and predicting values to simpler judgmental operations. In general, these heuristics are quite useful, but sometimes they lead to severe and systematic errors (Tversky and Khaneman, 1974).
This partnership provided the world with invaluable insight into the human mind, sparking an explosion of behavioral economics research that continues to inform solutions to problems to this day—problems associated with healthcare, poverty, criminal justice system reform, inequality, government policy, organizational management, environmental protection, and more around the world.
Few have contributed as much to the discipline of behavioral economics as Nobel Prize winning economist Richard Thaler and American legal scholar Cass Sunstein. In their 2008 book Nudge, advancing and in many cases adding to the findings of Tversky and Kahneman, Thaler and Sunstein draw a distinction between humans and econs, or irrational and rational decision-makers. They examine choice architects, those responsible for organizing the context for which people make decisions, and how these choice architects can “nudge” people into making better decisions, while maintaining freedom to choose — a concept Thaler and Sunstein have coined “libertarian paternalism”.
Throughout Nudge, the authors present the many biases, the framing of information, the loss aversion, the adherence to social and group norms, and the vulnerability to temptations and automatic systems that inform our decision-making everyday. Thaler and Sunstein go on to offer examples of how choice architecture, through mechanisms such as 1) designing better default choices that encourage logical decision-making, 2) making systems as forgiving as possible to correct for inevitable human error, 3) providing feedback to improve decision-making, 4) improvements to “information mapping” making choices easier to understand, and much more.
They present concepts and examples of the ways evidence-based choice architecture can help people manage their money, make better health and education choices, and reduce environmental pollution. You can order Nudge through Penguin Random House here.
In his 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman pulls from his revolutionary work with the late Amos Tversky while adding an insightful analysis of human psychology and decision-making, introducing us to two modes of thinking; one based on automatic operation, the other around complex computation. He sheds light on the effects of cognitive load — the taxing of the human brain via the attention and effort required to process complex tasks or several tasks at once — and the tendency to let our automatic system, System 1, assume control in times of cognitive stress. As our System 1 takes over, we are often left vulnerable to irrational and often biased decision-making, based on a set of mental shortcuts called heuristics, defined by Kahneman as “simple procedures that helps find adequate, yet often imperfect, answers to difficult questions.”
It should be noted, that while heuristics can oversimplify complex questions, there are times when relying on heuristics is necessary — such as catching a speeding baseball thrown our direction, where running the numbers and calculating the ball’s speed and trajectory may not be in our best interest (see the gaze heuristic).
As a bonus to this deep dive into our most irrational tendencies, Kahneman offers excellent anecdotes at the end of each chapter to connect with real world examples, and the book acts as a helpful guide to help us become better decision-makers. A highly recommended read.
How does behavioral science surround your life? What decisions have you made today? Did you use System 1 or System 2 to make these decisions? Can you think of a time when heuristics guided your decision-making?
Pinky and the Highly Complex Brain
How much of our behavior is determined by genetics? How much of our behavior is determined by our experiences? Spoiler alert: it’s complicated!
In his best-selling book Behave, neuroscientist and primatologist Robert Sapolsky examines in great detail the degree to which genetic attributes and lived experiences (even prenatal) influence our behavior over time.
Sapolsky takes the reader through a beautiful deep dive of the evolution of the brain. The ancient, automatic processes that keep our regulatory system functioning. The emotional responses, the aggression mediation, the pro- and antisocial behaviors affiliated with the limbic system. And the latest development in the logical, analytical processes of the cortex, housing the ever important executive branch and “decider” of the brain, the prefrontal cortex (PFC).
The dopamine system, responsible for processing rewards, pleasure, and happiness, activates when humans think about sex, when hungry humans think about food, when humans cooperate with one another, and even in acts of punishing wrongdoers. Notably, Sapolsky adds that there is a dopaminergic activation during schadenfreude, when a subject gloats over the downfall of someone they envy.
Much of human behavior derives from subliminal or unconscious cuing, often initiated in milliseconds, a mechanism of the limbic system.
Consider the subliminal sensory trigger in the fusiform face area, the cortical region the specializes in facial recognition. Sapolsky explains that unfamiliar faces (or objects that are emotionally salient to the individual) can result in the activation of the amygdala.
For example, Elizabeth Phelps of NYU found that subjects shown pictures of other-race faces were more susceptible to “fear conditioning”, the learned association of a sensory cue with fear, than subjects who were shown same-race faces. Crucially, the longer we allow ourselves time to process a visual, the more time we give our cognitive PFC system to take executive control and deviate from the amygdaloid response.
So where do these behaviors stem from? Should we blame our parents, or our ancestors for the passing down of genes? Well, not necessarily. While behavioral traits are influenced by genetic structure to a degree, Sapolsky explains that the effect of any particular gene is typically tiny, and that to understand the behavioral influence of a gene we must also understand what said gene does in a particular environment. The behavioral influence of genes is context dependent based on a range of factors: coevolution, ecology, cultural norms, much of which is experienced and learned at a young age, and how genes interact with a network of other genes.
Take for example the discrepancy regarding the effects of serotonin levels on aggression. A 1979 study found low levels of serotonin to be associated with increased human aggression. This finding was then replicated via related studies among various mammals, insects, crustaceans, and more, linking low serotonin levels to increases in impulse aggression. Voilà, low serotonin equals increased aggression.
Not so fast. In 1993, much acclaim was made of a study published in Science magazine about the high-activity variants of MAO-A, a gene that degrades serotonin and leaves a higher volume of the protein intact in the synapse. In the study, it was reported that a MAO-A gene deficiency, thus leading to elevated serotonin levels, was associated with a “disturbed regulation of impulsive aggression.” This finding was replicated with mouse studies in which the MAO-A gene was deactivated.
It wasn’t long before the MAO-A gene found popular acclaim in the media, being referred to as the “warrior gene”. Sapolsky noted that prison sentences had been lessened in at least two cases due to the argument that the criminal was inevitably fated to violence because of this gene!
So which causes aggression?! Higher or lower levels of serotonin? Clearly we have a discrepancy. Sapolsky details that in each of the studies, there are confounding variables that can lead to impulse aggression, and that the behavioral influence of the MAO-A gene, like any gene on its own, is minuscule. It provides evidence that genetic determinism is flawed, and that behavior associated with genetic makeup is highly context- and environment-dependent.
Genetic determinism may be flawed, but does that mean genes have no bearing on our behavior? Not necessarily. Recent studies indicate that although genetic structure can predispose us to particular behavioral traits, our behavior is strongly influenced by environmental interactions.
There is a mountain of information available in Sapolsky’s Behave. I highly recommend checking it out.
Do you share common behavioral traits with your family? How have experiences or the environment you live in shaped your behavior?
Show Me The Evidence — Organizational Policy
Learning more about the human brain and building our understanding of human behavior allows us to develop more effective policy. Greater access to data, better computer systems, advancements in statistical techniques, and randomized control trials have given researchers and policymakers better footing on designing policy that delivers real impact. The more we can rely on evidence-based policy to guide us in the future, the less we’ll need to rely on the whims of influential and powerful individuals, who are prone to the same irrational decision-making as the rest of us.
Behavioral science has become a staple of governance and policy formulation in recent years, helping to improve quality of life through finance, education, healthcare, employment, political participation, and much more. In 2010, the U.K. government became an early adopter of behavioral science as a means to guiding policy by launching the Behavioural Insights Team. Unofficially coined the “Nudge Unit”, the BIT team continues to inform organizational policymaking as a social purpose limited company. In 2015, the Obama administration issued an executive order to enact the Behavioral Science Insights Policy Directive, encouraging departments and agencies to leverage behavioral insights to improve policymaking at the executive level.
Examples of behavioral science (see also “behavioral development economics”) in practice include: 1) increases in retirement savings driven by the Save More Tomorrow program, 2) the use of social norms to reduce home energy consumption, 3) the use of framing to reduce alcohol consumption among young adults, 4) the use of defaults to enroll millions of Americans for health insurance coverage through the Affordable Care Act, 5) attempts to slow the spread of misinformation (and curb our worst impulses) through Twitter’s two-step posting process, 6) the simplification of a summons form and introduction of a text notification program to reduce failure to appears in NYC, 7) the use of automatic enrollment proposed in the voting rights bill H.R.1, the For the People Act of 2021.
Behavioral science as a mechanism for better policy has already yielded impressive results. With continued progress in our understanding of behavior, using cognitive analysis methods such as fMRI scans, and with a push toward behavioral science- and evidence-based policy, there is room to grow yet. As one example, cutting edge research is currently being conducted in how we perceive time, and how we view our future selves.
Psychologist and researcher Hal Hershfield of UCLA has identified, through fMRI analysis, patterns in which individuals view their future selves as a complete stranger, which may explain why many of us tend to put off long term decisions, like maintaining a healthy low carb diet, in lieu of short term gains, like devouring a large pepperoni pizza (If this sounds like I’m writing from experience it’s because I am).
Through his work, Hershfield and research collaborators have found that the mere event of seeing a digitally altered photo of ourselves, one in which we appear much older, can actually alter our behavior. Read more on Professor Hershfield’s research of the future self here.
Behavioral science will continue to inform policy that provides society with better information, increased transparency, more efficiency, and more freedom for people to make informed choices that improve their health, wealth, and happiness.
So how do organizational leaders inspire and achieve behavioral change?
In his 2006 book The Happiness Hypothesis, psychologist Jonathan Haidt introduces a helpful analogy to depict our emotional decision making as an elephant, and our rational decision making as a rider on the elephant. In Haidt’s analogy, our ability to exercise rationality in decision making extends only so far as our ability to control our emotions. The rider (calculated, logical, reasonable) may see danger ahead and attempt to steer the elephant (emotional, lazy, skittish) in another direction, but ultimately the rider surrenders control to the larger, more powerful mammal. Many of us can relate — the feeling we get before ditching our diets for that yummy ice cream; the appeal of laying on the couch binging Netflix as opposed to going to the gym; the instant gratification of a material purchase as opposed to contributing to our long term savings or planning for retirement.
Jonathan Haidt’s Elephant and the Rider analogy provides an excellent foundation for leaders, organizations, and individuals alike in the pursuit of inspiring behavioral change for good. In their 2010 book Switch, brothers Chip Heath and Dan Heath elaborate on Haidt’s concept, offering deeper context into how decision makers can 1) direct the rider, 2) motivate the elephant, and adding a third driver, 3) shape the path, to behavior change.
To direct the rider, for example, the authors suggest “looking for the bright spots” in a problem, given the human tendency to over analyze and become complacent in problem solving. The Heaths offer great examples of leaders and decision makers who have identified bright spots and capitalized on the success to solve complex problems.
To motivate the elephant, the authors suggest “finding the feeling”. As humans we can become so fixated on strategy, structure, procedure, or systems that we lose sight of the most important issues that lie ahead. The Heaths provide examples in which highly successful change agents are able to speak to the Elephant (emotion) as well as to the Rider (logic).
And finally, to shape the path, the Heaths reference work by Stanford psychologist Lee Ross in the finding that humans tend to ignore the situational forces that shape behavior—a tendency Ross has coined the “Fundamental Attribution Error”. Ross found that we tend to attribute people’s behavior to the way they are, rather than to the situation they are in. (Heath & Heath, 2010) The authors offer examples in which we can alter the path to reduce the friction to change, including a study that examined the situational impact on encouraging college students to donate to a food drive, to a business manager simplifying a time-sheet process to improve employee hourly reporting, to improving administrative accuracy in a hospital by reducing the distractions inflicted upon nurses by other medical staff.
What are some modern organizational polices that you’ve recognized at work, in school, or in your community? Have you noticed any nudges, been enrolled in a program by default, received a nudge based on social norms, or maybe received a notification as a reminder to complete a task?
Choice and Individual Responsibility
Although there is a bright future in evidence-based policymaking, the success or failure of these policy directives will depend on the ability and willingness of individuals to leverage this newfound guidance to make better choices on a day-by-day basis. Even the best, evidence-based policy in the world can’t assure all individuals in a society will exercise strong logic when making decisions. After all, we’ve already determined that it is human nature to succumb to irrational decision-making, driven by biases, impulsive thinking, loss aversion, fear of missing out, or any number of common mental errors. Nor is it possible for everyone to hold a complete knowledge base about every topic or activity we’re engaged in at any given moment. Choices are most often met with some degree of ignorance and decisions are most often made based on a set of heuristics.
Based on the literature cited above, some exercises that can help us get a handle on our worst biases, impulses, and lapses in judgement, include but are not limited to: 1) becoming more comfortable in knowing what we don’t know, 2) keeping our emotions in check by remembering to pause and reflect before making decisions, or before reacting to a perceived slight, 3) thinking more broadly and critically about complex problems, avoiding the WYSIATI heuristic, 4) avoiding the Us/Them dichotomy by practicing perspective taking with Thems, individuating out group members to eliminate harmful stereotypes in the process (an effective way to accomplish this is to work with Thems toward a common goal), and 5) giving ourselves a break when we inevitably fall victim to one of the multitude of the aforementioned human errors, while giving others the opportunity to correct their own errors or miscalculations before passing on judgement. And avoiding, if we can, the natural yet counterproductive human tendency to engage in schadenfreude — the act of reveling in another’s misfortune.
Healthy Habits in News Literacy
A Loose, Yet Important Anecdote on Individual Choice and Responsibility 🙃️
While the news can be a tremendous source of information and guidance for society, and a free press is crucial for any functioning democracy, the constant inflow of information (much of which is emotionally charged and negative) can take an emotional toll on us we’re not careful. Media organizations from the corporate mainstream television programs to the independent blogs, YouTube, and Discord channels are fighting for the ever shrinking attention span of the cognitively overloaded consumer. With this in mind, it’s no surprise how the news we consume is becoming more dramatic and ideologically partisan by the day. As long as democratic societies have a free press, it will be on each of us to decide 1) which information sources to consume, 2) how much to consume, and 3) how to come to our own evidence-based conclusions, educating ourselves so that we can distinguish between objective fact and subjective opinion.
There are some simple steps we can take to reduce the likelihood of consuming bad information.
A good starting point is to do our best to check our emotions, and our biases, to avoid falling victim to confirmation bias (the tendency to search for, interpret and recall information in a way that supports what we already believe). A proven way to do this is to pause before reacting (or sharing) the content.
At a minimum, the content we’re consuming should name a source; a journalist, author, or producer. Without a name to link to the content, the information lacks accountability. After all, where is the risk on the side of the information provider if no one is responsible for publishing phony or misleading content?
We should confirm the information has been replicated or backed up by at least 1–2 other sources. If it hasn’t there’s a good change the information we’re consuming is based in opinion rather than fact, or is potentially harmful misinformation.
In today’s tech savvy world of photoshopped images and now deepfake media, we should take care in confirming the visual content we’re consuming and sharing is legitimate. If the information contains visuals, it’s wise to run a reverse image search to make sure the visuals aren’t fictitious or manipulated.
For more healthy news consumption tips and resources, check out the News Literacy Project.
How have you conditioned your mind or your surroundings to improve your decision making? What nudges, mental notes, behavioral processes motivate you to practice healthy habits such as exercise, healthy eating, or improved financial management?