Outside The Matrix: Tiina Likki

Posted on February 11, 2016 by Elina Halonen

Dr Tiina Likki is a Senior Advisor at the Behavioural Insights Team in London where she focuses on labour market and welfare policy. Prior to joining the BIT, she completed a PhD in social psychology at the University of Lausanne where her research focused on public attitudes towards the welfare state in Europe. She also helped set up Tänk, a think tank that aims to introduce to an evidence-based, behavioural science approach to public policy in Finland.

Tell us about your work: how does decision making psychology fit in it?

I’m a social psychologist by training and work for the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT). BIT is a former UK government unit, now a social purpose company that applies behavioural science to policy-making. My current focus is on employment and health and, therefore, I spend a lot of time looking at how the government could better support people getting back to work, or to stay in their current jobs. As a social purpose company, we cover a range of policy areas including education, financial and consumer behaviour, crime, international development, and energy and sustainability. Helping people and societies achieve good outcomes in these areas often boils down to supporting people in ways that allow them to make the right decisions.

Why you decided to go into industry instead of continuing in academia?

Towards the end of my PhD, I became increasingly passionate about the popularisation of science and evidence-based policy. I felt that findings from social psychology and behavioural science were incredibly important and that they should be more widely available for everyone to use. Some academics such as Richard Thaler and Carol Dweck do a great job of sharing their findings through accessible books, but many never make it from journal pages to policy-makers’ reading lists. In my current capacity, I am able to share and apply this vast scientific knowledge to deal with issues that affect large parts of the population. At BIT I have the benefit of being able to run randomized controlled trials and maintain close ties with academics, so I feel like I’m getting the best of both worlds.

What do you enjoy the most in your current role?

I enjoy how the role requires me to look at things from many different perspectives – those of the user, the client, the academic and the civil servant. This requires developing different skillsets in parallel, which can be challenging, but also very rewarding. I get incredibly excited when I get to apply the latest evidence to real issues. For example, I have been reading a lot on mental contrasting and implementation intentions which describe how to set effective goals, maintain the motivation to pursue them, and ensure you take the necessary steps to achieve your goal. I have been using this literature to develop coaching methods for people who are unemployed. I recently came across an article on the same methods in the Harvard Business Review. It is fascinating that the same theories can be applied to both jobseekers who have been out of work for a long time, and to high-level professionals looking to advance in their careers.

Do you see any challenges to the wider adoption of decision making psychology in your field?

I feel that there is an increasing openness among policy-makers globally to make behaviourally informed policy. The huge interest created by the recent BX2015 conference was a really positive sign. In the UK, having the support of past and present senior civil servants, such as Jeremy Heywood and Gus O’Donnell, has really helped a wider audience to see the value in behavioural insights. In my experience there is a real interest among civil servants to learn more, and the number of senior decision makers who have read books like Thinking Fast and Slow and Nudge has grown steadily.

How do you see the relationship between academic researchers and practitioners?

This is a relationship where everyone stands to win from engaging genuinely with each other. Practitioners can gain some truly useful tools and ideas, as well as support in evaluation, while academics can gain an understanding of where their research will have the biggest demand and impact. There is certainly room for more academic institutions to run workshops inviting representatives from policy and industry to share their challenges. Similarly, students could learn a great deal from hands on projects that allow them to apply the behavioural theories they have learned.

What advice would you give to young researchers who might be interested in a career in your field?

If you are about to start academic work in this area (as a student or researcher), see if there are ways to partner with another organisation for field work or results sharing. This will give you a taste of running more applied projects and will help determine whether you enjoy it or whether you prefer to stay in a more traditional academic setting. If you enjoy the experience and decide to move into industry or policy, your applied research experience will give you a strong head start.

BIT profile | LinkedIn

Viewpoint: Three steps forward – a research agenda for behavioural change

Posted on February 5, 2016 by Elina Halonen

Alongside the blog reboot, we also have a new contributor, Tom Wein, who is the founding partner of Aware International, a social enterprise offering behavioural science for international development. Tom will be writing about the practice of applying behavioural science.

Behavioural change has come a long way fast. In recent years, we have developed a far more fine-grained understanding of different behaviours in different contexts, and of the psychological processes behind them. We have a huge list of revealed heuristics and biases. We have too a healthy range of well-evidenced models for grouping and prioritising factors in behaviour, in relatively parsimonious fashion. We have begun (though there is much work to do) to think about how to consistently and transparently link our understanding of a behaviour to recommended interventions to change that behaviour. Neuroscientists and evolutionary psychologists are enthusiastically attacking the problem of where these psychological processes might come from, and work has begun on the effort to validate and investigate findings across cultures.

Of course there is vastly more to do in all these areas. For instance, there are new contexts to examine (the field remains dominated by health and financial behaviours) and our models need further refinement. Doubtless there are new heuristics and biases to uncover too. Yet these are areas that are receiving plenty of researchers attention; there are a number of crucial topics beyond this that remain under-examined.

This piece outlines three interwoven lines of work that seem particularly pressing. These are:

linking linear behaviour change with our understanding of complex systems;
developing a good basis for selecting behaviours to change; and
understanding what we mean by behaviour in the first place.

Underlying all of this, a constant presence, is the need to check our work and replicate our findings.

Behaviour in complex systems

Those interested in behaviour change often contrast their work with that of traditional communications professionals. One of the key differences, they claim, is that behavioural change offers a much tighter focus on achieving a particular, observable change. Focus is surely a good thing, and many ordinary communications campaigns have hopelessly, unmeasurably broad aims – so broad that even if they could possibly succeed, one could never accurately judge their success. Yet the behaviouralist reaction to this can often lead to an overly linear approach. Too often, behavioural change posits a simple causal relationship between a specific campaign and an isolated behaviour. This is not how the world works.

Take, for example, preventing corruption: even the most well-researched, well-designed, tailored campaign to stop civil servants taking bribes will fail, if it fails to address the political and social pressures those civil servants are under from patronage networks below, corrupt benefactors above and co-conspirator peers. These groups have a strong interest in maintaining the corrupt behaviour, and will surely respond to our campaign. Or take obesity: our tightly-focused campaign to improve eating by these people now must be complemented by an understanding of the likely responses by peers and food companies, and by a consciousness of secondary and tertiary consequences.

Economists know quite a lot about the effect of incentives in complex systems; behavioural change advocates will need to match that expertise. A more focused approach to behaviour change brings benefits – but we need a much clearer and better evidenced picture of the downsides, of how and when targeted approaches succeed or fail, and of what the best response might be. Integrating the behavioural change approach with what we know of complex systems and how they come to change is an enormously important, daunting challenge. As a practical means of summarising how change happens in complex political contexts, international development’s Theory of Change approach (which allows actors to make their assumptions about social change explicit) might supply a starting point.

Choosing a behaviour

Most behaviour change approaches assume an objective has already been selected. The behaviours that will achieve that objective are then picked based on some combination of informal ethnography and political acceptability. (Good qualitative work happens sometimes, but it is certainly not the norm). Pragmatic flexibility must be preserved for behaviour change to thrive, but it is surely odd to devote so much detailed effort to determining how to change a behaviour, but so much less effort to figuring out if that is the most sensible thing to do. At the very least, some rules of thumb must be developed. What behaviours are to be candidates, and how are we to prioritise among them?

Just as we use search strategies for identifying the relevant papers, we need to establish search strategies for listing the behaviours we could seek to change in order to deliver a given policy objective. Then, we need to choose between the various options. How to do so? We need some criteria on which to judge behaviours, which at the very least makes assumptions explicit. As an initial set of considerations, those criteria should probably include the relevance of the behaviour to the eventual policy objective, the measurability of the outcome, an estimate of the likelihood of achieving the outcome and the ethics of altering this behaviour.

Without some more rigorous basis, we will design the interventions that suit us, or that suit the powerful. What is more, we will never have a justificatory basis for selecting a non-obvious route to change. This work will of course have to be linked to the understandings of systems called for above.

What is a behaviour?

If we are to list and choose between behaviours, then we must know what a behaviour is; it is not clear that we currently do. Some suggested objectives are clearly broad and non-behavioural in nature. Similarly there is clearly a lower-bound – no one advocates three separate behaviour change campaigns to address reaching for the seatbelt, pulling the seatbelt down and securing it – but many cases are more marginal. Yet there is surely an ideal level of human action – not too vague, not too specific – at which change campaigns should aim. We just don’t know what that level is.

Without a good definition of the behaviour that we claim is at the centre of our approach, what response are we to give to those who suggest that we use a national communication campaign to ‘promote healthy lifestyles’, other than our general intuition that this is too vague to do much good? How are we to review the effectiveness of interventions, if we are less than certain what level of human action it is supposed to alter? This is more than a philosophical loose end; it is a gap at the heart of the enterprise. Much has already been written on the question of individuating actions in the philosophy and psychology of action literatures, but the behavioural change field has not examined or incorporated it.

Replication

We press always ahead into new areas, as we should. But our excitement at breaking new ground must be tempered by a realisation that much of our current knowledge is in doubt. Psychology is no science at all until it can replicate its findings, and sort the true from the merely promising. Too many of the most exciting discoveries of recent decades remain for now in epistemological limbo, neither false nor true, and we can only move forward with a solid base, and with healthy institutions that ensure that future results will receive the same scrutiny. This is not the place to propose how that should work, but any articulation of the discipline’s future that omits this duty is inadequate.

Practical, usable, explainable solutions in these three areas of research, plus the task of replication, would put us well on the road to an ‘end-to-end’ behavioural change approach, and begin to provide a transparent and explicit basis for decision-making at every level below that of high level policy and priority selection (which will properly remain the domain of consensus politics, not technocracy). Get to work!

You can learn more about Tom on our ‘Who we are’ page.

Tom is grateful to Dr. Chris Mills and the UCL Centre for Ethics and Law, who organised the November 2015 workshop on ‘Behavioural Public Policy: Theory and Practice’, at which many of these thoughts were crystallised. He is further grateful to both Chris and Dr. Jeroen Nieboer of LSE for their valuable comments on an initial draft.

Research Heroes: Dilip Soman

Posted on February 2, 2016 by Elina Halonen

Our first Research Hero of 2016 is Dilip Soman who is a professor at the Rotman School of Management and the Munk School at the University of Toronto, and the co-director of the university’s Behavioural Economics in Action research cluster. His research interests are in the area of decision-making, financial wellbeing, health behaviours and inclusive innovation. He is the author of several books, including the recently published The Last Mile, works with several governments, businesses and NGO’s in the area of behavioural insights and teaches an open online class (MOOC) on Behavioural Insights. In his past life, with degrees in engineering (B.E., Bombay), management (MBA, IIM) and the Behavioural Sciences (Ph.D., Chicago), he has worked in sales and advertising, consulted for several organizations, as well as taught at the University of Colorado and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He currently serves as a senior policy advisor at the Privy Council Office of the Government of Canada.

I wish someone had told me at the beginning of my career…

….to spend a lot more time studying, understanding and developing (one’s own) philosophy of science. Many graduate students get thrown into a massive drift of domain specific knowledge right from the get go. And today, with all the pressures of publishing and getting started with your research early, there is even less of an emphasis on understanding the philosophy behind everything we do.

I most admire academically…

Richard Thaler. He hasn’t written as many papers as he could have over his career, but he taught us to try and make each paper important and meaningful. I could cheat and give you more names, but I’ll stop at the “most” admired.

The best research project I have worked on during my career…

The early work with John Gourville on transaction decoupling and payment depreciation. We were able to out some structure on the mental accounting model, and we had a lot of fun working on those papers. In one of the papers, we received data from a theater company on ticket sales and attendance. The data came in several shoeboxes stuffed with ticket stubs and paper order forms, and it too eons to get it into usable form. We did a number of other field studies (many which never made it to the paper) on ski slopes and at cricket games.

The worst research project I have worked on during my career…

Honestly, none! There were some I fleetingly felt I should never have done, but on deeper reflection I learnt even from the ones that didn’t work out for whatever reason!

The most amazing or memorable experience when I was doing research…

I won’t zero in on one, but doing fieldwork is always throws up the best moments. I did a bit of work in India a few years back on savings and healthcare behaviours. Many of the field studies didn’t work out given the sheer difficulty of achieving experimental control, but in a very small way we were able to change people’s lives and the happiness and gratitude they expressed more than made up for the unsuccessful studies!

The one story I always wanted to tell but never had a chance…

Sometime in 1999, I received a paper on Dual Processes in Cognition to review. I was suitably confused as to why I had received it and politely wrote to the editor saying that I didn’t feel I had the expertise to review it. Several years later, I found out that Steve Sloman had received a paper on mental accounting to review and was similarly suitably confused! Unlike me, he told me that he labored through and completed the review. These were the days of manual paper processing, and clearly someone had confused Sloman and Soman!

A research project I wish I had done…

In many situations in life – in decisions relating to health, family, careers – we spend a lot of time agonizing over choices; and we do so with the implicit belief that there is some “truth” underlying each option and our job as decision-makers is to find the correct option. I’m beginning to think that we tend to overweight the importance of “the choice.” There are also a series of post-choice decisions that we need to make that will help shape the outcome of the choice. You could, for instance, end up at an seemingly inferior job but do well and actually succeed in your career; you could seek and find happiness in a city that wasn’t your top choice for places to live in. So I guess the study I would like to run is one which tests whether choices we believe are important in life actually determine success and happiness. As you can see, a good study like this one would need more than money!

If I wasn’t doing this, I would be…

A physicist (I turned down admission to a Physics program to study Business) or a not-very-good cricket player.

The biggest challenge for our field in the next 10 years…

Both rigour and relevance. As a field I think we need to do a lot more to formalize our models – not necessarily through math – and test them more rigorously. A lot of researchers today answer conceptual questions about their model with empirical data. And we need to be relevant to someone – policy, welfare, business, consumers… anyone (this doesn’t simply mean being applied applied).

My advice for young researchers at the start of their career is…

Two – first, leave the comfort of the lab. There is a whole world outside that is overflowing with data. Even if you choose to primarily do lab experiments, go out and observe behaviour or identify phenomena that you can test. Second, you could do research that explains a lot of phenomena parsimoniously (but none perfectly), or you could do research that explains a phenomenon thoroughly (but doesn’t explain much else). While the world might push you towards the latter, I think the former lives longer and has much more of an impact!

Departmental profile | LinkedIn | Twitter

InDecision: rebooted

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Elina Halonen

reboot indecision image After a very long break, InDecision is finally coming back.

For a number of reasons, the blog has been on a break for 18 months – partly because some of the team went on the job market and have focused on settling into their new jobs, and partly because I have focused on other parts of my life.

Now, once everyone’s lives have started to settle, the time has come to reboot InDecision.

While we will continue to bring you interviews with Research Heroes, those who have stepped Outside The (academic) Matrix and who are applying behavioural science In The Wild, we will also include new content for young researchers as well as new types of interviews later on in the year.

We are also curious about who our readers are: originally we thought that this blog would only be read by a small group of academics but over time the readership has expanded considerably so we would like to know just who is reading and what type of content you like the most, so in the near future we’ll be doing a short survey – when you see it, please take it.

This month we have the pleasure of featuring Professor Dilip Soman in our Research Hero series, Dr Tiina Likki from the UK’s Behavioural Insights Team and several posts tailored for young researchers by our regular contributor Dr Troy Campbell.

Enjoy!

Elina

Outside the Matrix: Lizzy Leigh

Posted on July 28, 2014 by Elina Halonen

Continuing our interview series with people who have moved into industry after completing their PhD, this week we speak to Lizzy Leigh, a behavioural research analyst at Swiss Re in London. She has a PhD in Health Psychology from University College London, focusing on the psychological aspects of recovery from coronary artery bypass graft surgery.

Tell us about your work: how does decision making psychology fit in it? I work for one of the largest reinsurance companies globally. Reinsurance is insurance for insurance companies, and as well as taking on the majority of the risk, we act as consultants, employing experts from a range of fields, who can advise on medical conditions (for critical illness insurance), predictors of longevity and mortality (for life insurance), occupational therapists (to help get claimants back to work) and so on. My background is in psychology, and I work in a research and development team of about 10 (the majority outside of the UK) academics who take on pieces of research that will be beneficial for our clients, the insurance companies. Though my PhD is in health psychology, I now work almost exclusively in behavioural economics. We take insights from behavioural science and apply them to all areas of insurance where decisions are made, through live field trials with our clients. For example, we suggest changes to underwriting (application) form questions regarding health behaviour and medical conditions, to try and encourage the applicant to be honest and accurate in their answer. We also suggest changes to letters, websites, telephone scripts and apps, helping our clients to achieve what they’re looking for, be it better retention, faster turn around of claims or click through rates on a website. We have the mantra of ‘test, test, test’ and we are now beginning to get some early positive results back. So we directly apply concepts from the literature into practice, improving what we know as the findings come back.

Why you decide to go into industry instead of continuing in academia? I was in academia for 5 years after my undergraduate (psychology) and masters (health psychology), working as a research assistant in two different departments for 2 years then completing my PhD for the final 3. My decision to leave academia wasn’t a certain one. My current job was brought to my attention by a fellow PhD student, but the application deadline was the day after I submitted my thesis and the first interview was the day after my mock viva (in which my thesis was ripped to shreds). So I didn’t have much time to prepare, and didn’t think for one second that I would get the job. The company I work for is relatively unique in the way it combines academia with business, employing lots of people with masters in all sorts of subjects, and the occasional person with a PhD too, and I had no idea the opportunity existed. I now see how low my confidence was at the end of my PhD and how much higher it is now I don’t work in academia any more, and I really enjoy working in a job where I am valued and given loads of new opportunities, which is exactly what I needed following the gruelling final year of my PhD.

What do you enjoy the most in your current role? When interviewed for my role I was asked, how did I feel I would cope with moving from focusing on one project for 3 years to dealing with several all at once in the new job. I said I was looking forward to the challenge, but now that I’ve settled in I think this is one of the things I enjoy the most. That, and the fact that application of the theory happens pretty quickly. In fact, there’s barely enough time to read the literature before I’m expected to make suggestions about a client’s website/letter etc. The results still take a while to come, but knowing the client is happy and you got great results make them worth the wait.

Do you see any challenges to the wider adoption of decision making psychology in your field? We have a few challenges in terms of: a) client buy in, and b) client willingness to try out tests, but even if we get great results and convince everybody that the new behavioural economic informed ways of communicating are better than the originals. Insurance is in many ways an old fashioned, and slow to keep up industry. Underwriters have decades of experience in working out how to ask people questions in a way that will elicit accurate information, and don’t necessarily agree with suggestions of new ways to do it. The majority of life insurance policies in many markets are sold via agents or independent financial advisors. If those guys don’t read the question as we’ve redesigned it then we have little control over that. Perhaps as there is a gradual move towards policies being sold online we will have better control of our application of behavioural science, but whether we like it or not, if someone wants to deliberately not disclose the truth, there’s little that insurance, as the industry currently stands, can do about it.

How do you see the relationship between academic researchers and practitioners? The best insight I can give here is on the relationship between academic researchers and people who work in industry who are interested in research. The company I work for is very interested in topics surrounding epidemiology, medicine, economics and so on and so we have collaborations with researchers in those fields and others. From my time here I’ve been gaining some insight on how academic researchers perceive private sector companies who could possibly fund academic research and vice versa. I have been surprised and pleased to observe a very mutual respect from both sides, and not the stereotypical perceptions you might expect.

What advice would you give to young researchers who might be interested in a career in your field? My perception is that it’s such an interesting topic, it’s quite possible to pick it up quickly, so I would recommend not spending too long trying to understand the theory but try and get stuck straight in with doing testing (I’m sure plenty will disagree). I also strongly recommend thinking outside the box of where you could work. I have since met others using behavioural science in the insurance setting, and I believe there is a place for it in every industry, so think how you could take it to that industry.

LinkedIn | Twitter | Academia.edu

In The Wild: Nathalie Spencer

Posted on June 30, 2014 by Elina Halonen

Photo credit: Amin Akhtar

Continuing our In The Wild practitioner series, this week we’re pleased to feature Nathalie Spencer who is a behavioural economist in the RSA’s Social Brain Centre (The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in the UK), a team whose role is to explore how a better understanding of human nature and behaviour change can be applied to help overcome various challenges of today. With a business degree (McGill University) and several years’ experience working in the private sector, Nathalie returned to university to complete a Masters degree in Behavioural Economics (Maastricht University), and has since been working primarily in the third sector with the RSA’s Social Brain Centre, engaged in research and writing in various areas including behaviour change, decision-making, and cognitive biases.

Tell me about your work: how does decision making psychology fit in it? I work in the Social Brain Centre at The RSA, as a Senior Researcher. The Social Brain Centre uses new views of human nature as a fresh perspective on some of our most enduring and persistent social challenges. We apply decision-making psychology and behavioural science more generally to areas as diverse as educational disadvantage, innovation, climate change, and financial capability (coming soon!). Understanding what motivates people, the factors that influence decisions and behaviour, where and how we pay our attention, and the barriers to behaviour change are all key areas of focus for our team.

I’m also engaged in several other projects outside of The RSA, including consulting, pro bono projects, and freelance work all in the field of behavioural science including JDM. For example, I write monthly for ING’s eZonomics website, relating concepts from decision making psychology to issues of personal finance and money management. I find writing these articles a great exercise in bringing theory right back down to a practical level.

How did you first become interested in decision making psychology? At one point while commuting to work in my old career, I read Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational. I couldn’t stop thinking about the book and how fascinating the research in the field was. So I realised that I needed to do something about this new-found interest and looked into Behavioural Economics programmes in Europe and the USA. Maastricht University offered an amazing programme that ticked all the boxes on my list (one year, taught in English, with a lot of student participation). The MSc in behavioural economics was so much fun and served both to deepen my understanding and to fuel my interest in the field even more. After I finished my degree, some of the professors from the programme and I ran a couple of experiments based on my masters thesis. While we didn’t get the results we expected, the experience gave me a taste for running trials and an appreciation of some of the practical constraints of conducting experiments.

What type of research do you find most interesting, useful or exciting? A few years ago I would have said that RCTs in peer reviewed journals are the most useful, for their isolation of effects, rigour, and neutrality. Now, however, I appreciate white papers which have more of an injunction or discussion, and see the value in other research methodologies besides (or in conjunction with) RCTs, too. In terms of content, I’m always very interested in variations on the classic experiments or ‘games’ (dictator, public good, ultimatum, etc) which provide a fuller, richer picture of our behaviour in those settings. Something which particularly interests me right now is intrapersonal empathy gaps, because I think this concept can go some way towards improving our understanding about why it can appear as if our decisions and behaviour is at odds with our own wellbeing, and it throws up all sorts of other good questions about stability of preferences, commitment devices, and others. Additionally, I find the evolutionary perspective on our decision making and behaviour really fascinating, and am hoping to learn more about this.

Do you see any challenges to the wider adoption of decision making psychology in your field? I think that some people (still) perceive these approaches as being manipulative. There is a perception that a better understanding of how we make decisions will result in abuse through sneaky or deceptive use. True, it can be used to a person’s detriment and to the benefit of the ‘choice architect’ – whether that is a commercial enterprise, a government or public body, or some other organisation. But it doesn’t have to. And, we know from the decision making psychology field that decisions are influenced by context; they never happen in a vacuum devoid of some sort of framing. So the question becomes whether you prefer decisions to be influenced by a haphazard design, as would be the case if not using behavioural science approaches, or to have some thought put into the design of the choice environment to help people to make decisions that are in their own best interest. But a consideration is still “who decides what is in someone’s best interest” (and preference instability can further muddy the waters). I think we’ll see discussions get louder around the ethical considerations of using these approaches as the field continues to grow in popularity.

How do you see the relationship between academic researchers and practitioners? It’s a great question. The RSA’s Action and Research Centre (of which the Social Brain is a part) is a ‘think-and-do-tank’, so our work often seems to straddle academia, policy and practice. We aim to take the key insights about human nature from the academic literature and translate them into answers for the questions “why does this matter to the average person or to us as a society?” and “how does this perspective help us to understand the stubborn problems of our times?”

Outside of think-tanks, I think the relationship between academics and the rest of the world is getting stronger, perhaps thanks to the popular books such as Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow which have reached a wide audience. These books pique interest in the field but also illustrate the amount of research and number of experiments that underpin the interesting insights. My impression is that practitioners and academics are working together more frequently, and this is a win-win situation. Academic consultancies, such as the Behavioural Economics Lab, can help to bridge this gap by providing the expertise to carry out experiments for organisations who want to apply insights from the field to their own work.

Networking events can be an excellent way to bring together practitioners and academics (and enthusiasts!). London seems to be a hot-spot for this right now, with the London Behavioural Economics Network ‘behavioural boozenomics’ monthly meetups, and these are branching out to other key cities like New York and Copenhagen as well. I have met so many interesting people at these events, often resulting in direct collaboration.

What advice would you give to young researchers who might be interested in a career in your field? Ask bigger questions. In academia you almost necessarily have to narrow your focus and investigate one very small part of a larger picture. However when working in a think-tank and hoping to influence policy makers and practitioners, you need to really understand how these insights affect the ‘real world’. You have to communicate your ideas well, in an appropriate manner to engage whichever audience you are trying to reach. In this sector, work can be more exploratory; rather than seeking to prove a hypothesis, there is value in putting forward reasonable conjectures, grounded in research, and encouraging greater discussion around and further investigation into those ideas put forward.

LinkedIn | @economiclogic | Blog

Star Track: Marcel Zeelenberg

Posted on April 30, 2014 by Elina Halonen

This week on Star Track we’re moving across the Atlantic over to Europe with professor Marcel Zeelenberg who is the head of the department of social psychology at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. After receiving his PhD from University of Amsterdam in 1996, he held posts at Eindhoven University of Technology and University of Sussex before moving to Tilburg in 1998 (first in the Marketing Department, and since 2000 in the Social Psychology Department). He’s also the academic director of the Tilburg Institute for Behavioral Economics Research who organise an annual symposium on psychology and economics. His research interests include impact of emotion on decision making, consumer decision making and financial behavior.

I wanted to pursue an academic career in this field because… I ended up studying psychology simply because my brother did it, and he liked it. I started out studying Biomedical Sciences, but found out quickly that this was not something for me. My brother, also rather oblivious about how he was going to make a living, ended up studying psychology (I forgot why). Since he is older than I am, and I always followed his footsteps, I thought it would be something for me as well and it turned out to be one of the best decisions I had made so far. Both of us ended up majoring in cognitive psychology at Leiden University which is where we met Willem-Albert Wagenaar who was extremely influential in fueling my interest in psychology in general and in JDM research in particular. He was inspiring, supportive and super smart, and the best teacher you can imagine. I followed all the courses he taught, including one on gambling (using his own book “Paradoxes of Gambling Behavior”) and one on the psychology of decision making (using Frank Yates’ book). Later on, through social psychologists Henk Wilke and Eric van Dijk I got introduced to social decision making and economic psychology. Looking back, I think the solid basic training at Leiden University clearly prepared me for a career in academia.

In 1992 I was thrilled to be able to work on a PhD project on affect in decision making at the University of Amsterdam (supervised by Joop van der Pligt, Tony Manstead and Nanne de Vries) where my interest in emotion was formed and where I also started working on regret (and later, with Wilco van Dijk on disappointment). That is also when I met Jane Beattie, who also had a big impact on me: Jane and I had submitted a Marie Curie proposal for me to do a postdoc under her supervision at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, but before the funding came through, Jane got ill and died. In the end we got the funding, but with Jane gone, Brighton lost most of its appeal. Luckily, I found a postdoc with Gideon Keren, at Eindhoven University of Technology, and soon after that a tenure track position at Tilburg Univesity (where I still am), where I started to work with Rik Pieters.

I mention all of these people, because for me pursuing a career in academia is so much the result of working with inspiring people and being able to educate yourself continuously. What other job allows you create your own work and study things that you think are relevant or interesting?

I find the inspiration for my research mostly from… Half of it, I think, comes from observations of everyday behavior that I would like to understand. The other half comes from reading papers or seeing talks and thinking, “hmm, that does not work that way. That is actually much more simple than that!” Eric van Dijk taught me that each time you read an article and think “hmm”, you have an idea for a new article. I was skeptical when he first told me that, but over the years I have learned that he is right. I actually tell my students the same thing now and hope it helps them to come to new research ideas easier (a thing that I found difficult in the beginning).

When people ask me what I do, I say… I say that I am a psychologist, and then quickly explain that I study decision making , emotions and how those two interact. Most people find it interesting and want to learn more. I have always had mixed reactions upon telling that I am a psychologist because people more often equate it with being a therapist than with being a scientist. I could say that I am a behavioral economist because it covers most of what I am doing but because I have no formal training in economics that does not feel appropriate.

The paper that has most influenced me is… There is no single paper that I can name. I have read many interesting papers, but I can mention 2 papers that I like a lot and that I think are underappreciated.

Beattie, J., Baron, J., Hershey, J. C., & Spranca, M. D. (1994). Psychological determinants of decision attitude. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 7, 129–144.

I read this paper shortly before I met Jane Beattie for the first time. I liked it then and still like it. They introduce the concept of decision attitude (in analogy to risk attitude), which refers to the propensity to make or avoid making decisions. People can show decision aversion and decision seeking.

Jones. S. K., Frisch, D., Yurak, T. J., & Kim, E. (1998). Choices and opportunities: Another effect of framing on decisions. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 11, 211–226.

I remember seeing Steven Jones give a talk about this paper in 1997. The point they make is that decision researchers typically study decision making by confronting participants with a choice between alternatives (do you choose brand A or brand B?), while in daily life we often do not compare alternatives, but simply evaluate the attractiveness of a single option (you favorite band has a new CD out, do you buy it?). And then they show that there are important differences between choices and opportunities and that research about choices cannot simply be projected on opportunities.

I like these articles because they show that we can learn so much from looking at how people make decisions in the real world. I also admire the authors for being able to bring these ideas back into more mainstream JDM research. These are articles where I whish I had written them.

The best research project I have worked on during my career… This is a hard one. I am inclined to say that the things that we are working on today are the best we have been doing but that is not the type of answer that you would be interested in. So, what I like best is projects that evolve in something bigger: they may start out as a single paper, but then quickly new questions pop up and new studies need to be done. That has happened a few times now, first with our research on regret and disappointment and later on with our research on shame and guilt. And currently we are working on the economic psychology of greed (this is Terri Seuntjens’ PhD project) and we generate so many ideas for studies that it is impossible to run them all.

Also, over the past years we have become more and more interested in examining mundane financial decisions (insurances, pensions, poverty, etc.) which is gratifying because of their direct relevance. There are so many interesting problems to study – it is an embarrassment of riches.

If I wasn’t doing this, I would be… The justice system and the law have always intrigued me. During my undergraduate years I have taken some courses in law and forensic science (what we would call CSI-studies now). I think I could be a lawyer.

The most important quality for a researcher to have is… Stamina! I mean we are all smart and well educated, but I think a large factor in success is to simply do the work that is needed. There are so many obstacles in our work and the delay of gratification is extensive. It can take years to become an expert in something and many studies to give the insights that you hoped beforehand. Data collection can be difficult. Journals do not always like your work. Also, especially in the beginning of a career jobs are often temporary and you may need to move several times before getting a tenured position. Without stamina you will give up.

The biggest challenge for our field in the next 10 years… That must be solid science. We need to change how we do research and how we report about doing research. There are many good initiatives (archive data, share materials, increase transparency about data collection and analysis, facilitate replication; basically things that we all learned as undergraduates and that the open science framework is doing now) and we need to journals to take responsibility as well (Jon Baron is doing an excellent job with Judgment and Decision Making, by also publishing data and materials with the articles). We also we need to accept that results are most often not perfect, so we should not demand perfect data. And, because we are not p-hacking anymore (Simmons, Nelson, & Simonsohn, 2013), we need larger sample sizes and should accept (or embrace) that we can publish less papers.

My advice for young researchers at the start of their career is… Find a topic you really like and go for it. Do not get demotivated because no one else is studying it. I never recommend a student to investigate something that is fashionable. The risk is that by the time you get your work done, either someone else has been working on the same questions, that people got bored with it and the topic is not fashionable any more, or worse, that you are not really into it and your work shows that.

The one thing I’ve found most challenging is… When I was a PhD student I constantly questioned whether I would have good ideas, or better, ideas that were good enough to acquire a position. I felt comfortable about my skills because I found the education at Leiden University to be thorough but my capacity to ask the right questions was never really put to the test before I started my PhD project and then I felt that it all came down to being creative and smart and that made me uncertain.

It also did not help that JDM research is not main stream at most departments, causing me to be peripheral with respect to research in most places I worked. It takes so long to get feedback from the field (you need to develop your studies, run them, write them up, get them published, and only then people can read them), that for a long time I feared that one day someone would found out that they made a mistake by appointing me (I think I suffered from the imposter syndrome.). That did not happen, and slowly I found out that there were people that liked my work and that there were good students that wanted to work with me.

It took some time to find out that what I was doing was good enough and interesting to others. Thus I think the most challenging thing was to be persistent and believe that my own ideas were worthwhile investigating.

The call for papers for 13th TIBER Symposium 2014 is now open: deadline for abstract submissions is 18th May. The symposium itself is on 22nd August with keynote speakers Shane Frederick from Yale University and Richard Zeckhauser from Harvard University.

Departmental webpage

Outside the Matrix: Dan Lockton

Posted on April 22, 2014 by Elina Halonen

This week we’re returning to our Outside the Matrix series with Dan Lockton who is a senior associate at the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, a specialist research centre at the Royal College of Art in London, and does freelance work as Requisite Variety. He received his PhD in Design for Behaviour Change from Brunel University, based around the Design with Intent toolkit, and has worked on behavioural research projects, particularly on energy use, at the University of Warwick and at Brunel, before his current role in a collaborative project between the RCA, Imperial College London, the Institute for Sustainability and a number of European partners. Before returning to academia, Dan worked on a range of commercial product design and R&D projects; he also has a Cambridge-MIT Institute Master’s in Technology Policy from the University of Cambridge (Judge Business School), and a BSc in Industrial Design Engineering from Brunel.

Tell us about your work: how does decision making psychology fit in it? All design necessarily embodies models of people’s behaviour—assumptions about how people will make decisions, and behave, when using, interacting with or otherwise experiencing products, services, or environments. It’s a fairly basic component of design, although it’s perhaps only rarely considered explicitly as being about decision making psychology. Whether or not designers think about their work in these terms, it is going to have an impact on how people behave, so it’s important to try to understand users’ decision processes, and how design affects them (or should be affected by them). So both in research projects themselves, and in teaching design students how to do ‘people-centred’ design research, psychology plays a big role in my work.

Understanding how different people make decisions, through research in real contexts, becomes even more crucial when trying to do ‘design for behaviour change’, of course. You end up (hopefully) confronting and questioning many of the models and assumptions that you previously had, and develop much more nuanced models of behaviour which usefully preserve the variety of real-life differences.

In my current main project, SusLab (which is a small part of a major European project), I’m working with Flora Bowden on reducing domestic energy use through a combination of technology and behaviour change, but we’re taking a much more people-centred approach than much of the work in this field has done previously—doing ethnographic research with householders to uncover much more detailed insights about what people are actually doing when they are ‘using energy’—the psychology of the decision processes involved, the mental models people have of the systems around them, and the social contexts of practices such as heating, entertainment and cleaning. We then co-design and prototype new products and services (somewhat grudgingly termed interventions) with householders, so that they are not test subjects, but participants in developing their own ways of changing their own behaviour. This is the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design’s forté —including people better in design processes, from ageing populations and users with special needs to particular communities underserved by the assumptions embedded in the systems around them.

Reducing energy use is a major societal challenge—there is a vast array of projects and initiatives, from government, industry and academia as well as more locally driven schemes, all aiming to tackle different aspects of the problem. However, many approaches, including the UK’s smart metering rollout, largely treat ‘energy demand’ as something almost homogeneous, to be addressed primarily through pricing-based feedback, rather than being based on an understanding why people use energy in the first place—what are they actually doing? We think that people don’t set out to ‘use energy’: instead, they’re solving everyday problems, meeting needs for comfort, light, food, cleaning and entertainment, with a heavy dose of psychology in there, and sometimes with an emotional dimension too.

Equally, people’s understandings—mental models—of what energy is, and how their actions relate to its use, and their use of heuristics for deciding what actions to take, are under-explored, and could be extremely important in developing ways of visualising or engaging with energy use which are meaningful for householders. This is where ethnographic research, and in-context research on decision-making in real life, can provide insights which are directly useful for the design process.

The overall project covers a broad scope of work and expertise, including environmental scientists and architects alongside design researchers, and benefits from ‘Living Lab’ instrumented houses in each country, which will provide a platform (albeit artificial) for demonstrating and trialling the interventions developed, before they are installed in houses in real life.

How did you first become interested in decision making psychology? I first got interested in the area while doing my Master’s back in 2004-5. For my project, I was looking at how technologies, and the structure of systems, have been used to influence (and control) public behaviour, and as such, approaches such as B.J. Fogg’s Persuasive Technology were very relevant. While Persuasive Technology has tended not to employ ‘behavioural economics’ techniques too much, it was initially through this angle of ‘persuasion’ that I read people like Robert Cialdini, then followed the thread through to learn more about cognitive biases and heuristics, from authors such as Scott Plous, the Russell Sage Foundation-supported collections of Tversky, Kahneman, Gilovich, Slovic et al’s papers, then Gigerenzer and the ABC group’s work. Herbert Simon’s work has also been a huge influence, because his multidisciplinarity enabled so many parallels to be drawn between different fields. It was partly through his work, I think, that I became interested in cybernetics and this whole body of work from the 1940s onwards which attempted to draw together systems across human psychology, technology and nature, but which in public consciousness seems mainly to be about people with robotic hands.

In parallel, I was familiar with concepts such as heuristics, affordances and mental models from the cognitive ergonomics literature, one of the other main intersections between design and psychology. Here, the work of people such as Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen is hugely influential; this had first become interesting when I was in industry, working on some products which really would have benefitted from a better understanding of the intended customers’ perceptions, thought processes, needs and abilities, and I was hungry to learn more about how to do this. The idea of applying psychological insights to the design process greatly appealed to me: I had something of an engineer’s mindset that wanted, Laplace’s demon-like, to be able to integrate all phenomena, social and physical, into something ‘actionable’ from a design standpoint. While I now appreciate my naïvety, the vision of this ‘system’ was a good inspiration for taking things further.

For my PhD—supervised by David Harrison (Brunel) from the ‘design’ side and Neville Stanton (Southampton) from the ‘psychology’ side—I tried to bring together insights relevant to behaviour change from lots of different disciplines, including behavioural economics, into a form which designers could use during design processes, for products, services and environments, with a focus on influencing more sustainable and socially beneficial behaviour. Various iterations were developed, via lots of workshops with designers and other stakeholders, ending up with the Design with Intent toolkit. This is still a work in progress, though it’s had to take back seat to some more practical projects in the last couple of years, but I hope in 2014 to be able to release a new version together with, perhaps, a book.

Why you decide to stay in academia instead of going into industry?
I like to think I’ve found the best of both worlds: the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design acts as a consultancy for many of its projects with commercial clients, but also (as part of the Royal College of Art) works as part of many academic research projects (though always with a practical focus). During my first six months here, I’ve worked on commercial projects for new startups and a mobility products manufacturer, as well as two academic research projects. Alongside this job I also do some freelance consultancy in industry, which often involves running workshops on design and behaviour, writing articles, and generating early-stage ideas for companies interested in including a ‘behavioural’ element in their design processes.

There are advantages and disadvantages of academic and industrial work contexts. The freedom to pursue ‘pure’ knowledge (whatever that really means), and indeed more open-ended research, with longer timeframes, is a wonderful aspect of academia, a luxury that most companies cannot really afford given the constraints of the market. However, I found the bureaucracy at both Brunel and the University of Warwick crushingly slow: there was a lot of research that just never got done because the system made sure it took too long, or involved too much paperwork to bother with. That was deeply frustrating, when there are many very good researchers at both institutions who would thrive given a bit more freedom to do things. The RCA (perhaps because it’s so small) is refreshingly fast: it’s possible to decide to try something in the morning and go and do it in the afternoon, or even immediately.

Perhaps also, despite being relatively knowledgeable about behaviour change—one of the biggest buzzwords of the last five years!—I was very reluctant to go straight into a commercial application of the work which has no social benefit. I don’t want to use insights to sell people more things they don’t need, or exploit biases and heuristics to segment and profile consumers to target them with more advertising. I apply John Rawls’s ‘veil of ignorance’ wherever I can: I hate it when advertisers and marketers make assumptions about me, and my likely behaviour, so I don’t particularly want to do that to other people. That rules out a lot of organisations who want people with ‘behaviour change’ credentials.

What do you enjoy the most in your current role? While doing lots of projects is a lot of work, and there’s a tendency for this sort of thing to take over your life, in all honesty this is a very enjoyable job. Meeting lots of different people—members of the public—and actually involving them in the research: designing with them rather than for them, is incredibly satisfying. Also, I think most of the people working for the Helen Hamlyn Centre, because their jobs involve so much research with the public, are actually genuinely nice people.So they’re great to work with.

Do you see any challenges to the wider adoption of decision making psychology in your field? Most designers are not trained in psychology, so there is always a barrier to adoption. There is also the risk that highly popularised approaches and trends, such as what Nudge has become, lose their nuance and the cautious scientific approach when they just become another soundbite or quick-fix ‘solution’, applied to any context without doing any actual user research. And I’m aware that Design with Intent was essentially this, a context-free toolbox of ideas to apply to any situation, and I now see it as a major flaw which needs to be addressed in future versions.

But if I see the DDB/VW Piano Stairs video one more time used as a kind of example universal panacea for deeply complex social problems (“Design can fix anything, just look at how they made taking the stairs fun!!!!”) then I’ll scream, or more likely mumble something grumpily at the back of the room.

How do you see the relationship between academic researchers and practitioners? Design isn’t really an academic subject in itself—it’s a process. I might have a PhD in it, but I’ll be honest and say that it’s lacking in a lot of formal theory. That isn’t a bad thing, necessarily—again, Herbert Simon (in The Sciences of the Artificial) and then Donald Schön (in The Reflective Practitioner) did good jobs of explaining in different ways why it is aqualitatively different approach to knowledge the natural sciences—but what it does mean is that the most interesting and useful research for designers is often not in design at all, but in other fields that overlap. Designers need to be learning from psychologists, anthropologists, social researchers, economists, biologists, and actual practitioners in other fields. It also means there are a lot of design research papers which are basically restatements of the “What is design? What does it mean to be a designer?” question, which are fine but become tiring after a while.

So, to return to the question, academic ‘design’ research is generally very poor at being useful to practitioners. Part of this is the eternal language / framing barrier between academia and practice—there are so many assumptions about terminology and so on which prevent easy engagement—but there is also the access problem. Design consultancies very rarely subscribe to academic journals, and even if they do subscribe to design journals, it’s probably journals from outside the field (see above) that would bring more useful insights anyway. When I did a brief survey on this, these were a few of the points which came up.

What advice would you give to young researchers who might be interested in a career in your field? I would very much like to see more designers drawing on the heuristics work of Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter Todd, et al, and exploring what this means in the context of design for behaviour change and design in general, given that bounded rationality seen as a reality, and essentially adaptive, rather than a ‘defect’ in human decision-making, seems to marry up quite well with the tenets of ethnography and people-centred design. Some people have started to do it, e.g. Yvonne Rogers at UCL, but there is a massive opportunity for some very interesting work here.

Also, consider cybernetics. Read Hugh Dubberly and Paul Pangaro’s work and think about systems more broadly than the disciplinary boundaries within which you may have been educated. In general, read as much as you can, outside of what you think ‘your subject’ is. The most interesting innovations always occur at the boundaries between fields.

More than anything else, work on projects where you do research with real people, in real, everyday life contexts, rather than only in lab studies. It will change how you model behaviour, how you think about people, and how you understand decision making.

Visit Dan’s website: http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk/dan-lockton/

Viewpoint: Why I’m Leaving Academia

Posted on April 7, 2014 by Elina Halonen

This week we’re featuring a guest post from Ben Kozary, a PhD candidate at the University of Newcastle in Australia. After getting to know Ben at various conferences over the past year, the InDecision team was disappointed to hear about his decision to leave academia – partly because he’s an excellent and passionate researcher, partly because we wouldn’t benefit from his jovial company at future conferences! However, his reasons for leaving echoed many dinner conversations we’ve had with fellow PhD students so we asked him to write about his experience and his decision to move to industry. Over to Ben…

To say I’ve learnt a lot during my PhD candidature would be an understatement. From a single blank page, I now know more than most people in the world about my particular topic area. I understand the research process: from planning and designing a study; to conducting it; and then writing it up clearly – so that readers may be certain about what I did, how I did it, what I found, and why it’s important. I’ve met a variety of people from around the world, with similar interests and passions to me, and forged close friendships with many of them. And I’ve learnt that academia might well be the best career path in the world. After all, you get to choose your own research area; you have flexible working hours; you get to play around with ideas, concepts and data, and make new and often exciting discoveries; and you get to attend conferences (meaning you get to travel extensively, and usually at your employer’s expense), where you can socialise (often at open bars) under the guise of “networking”. Why, then, you might be wondering, would I want to leave all of that behind?

My journey through the PhD program has been fairly typical; I’ve gone through all of the usual stages. I’ve been stressed in the lead-up to (and during) my proposal defence. I’ve had imposter syndrome. And I’ve been worried about being scooped, and/or finding “that paper”, which presents the exact research I’m doing, but does it better than me. But now, as I begin my final year of the four year Australian program, I’m feeling comfortable with, and confident in, the work I’ve produced so far in my dissertation. And yet, I’m also disillusioned – because, for all of its positives, I’ve come to see academia as a broken institution.

That there are problems facing academic research is not news, especially in psychology. Stapel and Smeesters, researcher degrees of freedom and bias, (the lack of) statistical power and precision, the “replication crisis” and “theoretical amnesia”, social and behavioural priming: the list goes on. However, these problems are not altogether removed from one another; in fact, they highlight what I believe is a larger, underlying issue.

Academic research is no longer about a search for the truth

Stapel and Smeesters are two high profile examples of fraud, which represents an extreme exploitation of researcher degrees of freedom. But what makes any researcher “massage” their data? The bias towards publishing only positive results is no doubt a driving force. Does that excuse cases of fraud? Absolutely not. My point, however, is that there are clear pressures on the academic community to “publish or perish”. Consequently, academic research is largely an exercise in career development and promotion, and no longer (if, indeed, it ever was) an objective search for the truth.

For instance, the lack of statistical power evident in our field has been known for more than fifty years, with Cohen (1962) first highlighting the problem, and Rossi (1990) and Maxwell (2004) providing further prompts. Additionally, Cohen (1990; 1994) reminded us of the many issues associated with null-hypothesis significance testing – issues that were raised as far back as 1938 – and yet, it still remains the predominant form of data analysis for experimental researchers in the psychology field. To address these issues, Cohen (1994: 1002) suggested a move to estimation:

“Everyone knows” that confidence intervals contain all the information to be found in significance tests and much more. […] Yet they are rarely to be found in the literature. I suspect that the main reason they are not reported is that they are so embarrassingly large! But their sheer size should move us toward improving our measurement by seeking to reduce the unreliable and invalid part of the variance in our measures (as Student himself recommended almost a century ago). Also, their width provides us with the analogue of power analysis in significance testing – larger sample sizes reduce the size of confidence intervals as they increase the statistical power of NHST.

Twenty years later, and we’re finally starting to see some changes. Unfortunately, the field now has to suffer the consequences of being slow to change. Even if all our studies were powered at the conventional level of 80% (Cohen, 1988; 1992), they would still be imprecise; that is, the width of their 95% confidence intervals would be approximately ±70% of the point estimate or effect size (Goodman and Berlin, 1994). In practical terms, that means that if we used Cohen’s d as an effect size metric (for the standardised difference between two means), and we found that it was “medium” (that is, d = 0.50), the 95% confidence interval would range from 0.15 to 0.85. This is exactly what Cohen (1994) was talking about when he said the confidence intervals in our field are “so embarrassingly large”: in this case, the interval tells us that we can be 95% confident the true effect size is potentially smaller than “small” (0.20), larger than “large” (0.80), or somewhere in between. Remember, however, that many of the studies in our field are underpowered, which makes the findings even more imprecise than what is illustrated here; that is, the 95% confidence intervals are even wider. And so, I wonder: How many papers have been published in our field in the last twenty years, while we’ve been slow to change? And how many of these papers have reported results at least as meaningless as this example?

I suspect that part of the reason for the slow adoption of estimation techniques is due to the uncertainty they bring to the data. Significance testing is characterised by dichotomous thinking: an effect is either statistically significant or it is not. In other words, significance testing is seen as easier to conduct and analyse, relative to estimation; however, it does not allow for the same degree of clarity in our findings. By reporting confidence intervals (and highlighting uncertainty), we reduce the risk of committing one of the cardinal sins of consumer psychology: overgeneralisation. Furthermore, you may be surprised to learn that estimation is just as easy to conduct as significance testing, and even easier to report (because you can extrapolate greater meaning from your results).

Replication versus theoretical development

When you consider the lack of precision in our field, in conjunction with the magnitude of the problems of researcher degrees of freedom and publication bias, is it any wonder that so many replication attempts are unsuccessful? The issue of failed replications is then compounded further by the lack of theoretical development that takes place in our discipline, which creates additional problems. The incentive structure upon which the academic institution is situated implies that success (in the form of promotion and grants) comes to those who publish a high number of high quality papers (as determined by the journal in which they are published). As a result, we have a discipline that lacks both internal and external relevance, due to the multitude of standalone empirical findings that fail to address the full scope of consumer behaviour (Pham, 2013). In that sense, it seems to me that replication is at odds with theoretical development, when, in fact, the two should be working in tandem; that is, replication should guide theoretical development.

Over time, some of you may have observed (as I have) that single papers are now expected to “do more”. Papers will regularly report four or more experiments, in which they will identify an effect; perform a direct and/or conceptual replication; identify moderators and/or mediators and/or boundary conditions; and rule out alternative process accounts. I have heard criticism directed at this approach, usually from fellow PhD candidates, that there is an unfair expectation on the new generation of researchers to do more work to achieve what the previous generation did. In other words, that the seminal/classic papers in the field, upon which now-senior academics were awarded tenure, do less than what emerging and early career researchers are currently expected to do in their papers. I do not share this view that there is an issue of hypocrisy; rather, my criticism is that as the expectation that papers “do more” has grown, there is now less incentive for academics to engage in theoretical development. The “flashy” research is what gets noticed and, in turn, what gets its author(s) promoted and wins them grants. Why, then, would anyone waste their time trying to further develop an area of work that someone else has already covered so thoroughly – especially when, if you fail to replicate their basic effect, you will find it extremely difficult to publish in a flagship journal (where the “flashiest” research appears)?

This observation also begs the question: where has this expectation that papers “do more” come from? As other scientific fields (particularly the hard sciences) have reported more breakthroughs over time, I suspect that psychology has desired to keep up. The mind, however, in its intangibility, is too complex to allow for regular breakthroughs; there are simply too many variables that can come into effect, especially when behaviour is also brought into the equation. Such an issue is highlighted no more clearly than in the case of behavioural priming. Yet, with the development of a general theory of priming, researchers can target their efforts at identifying the varied and complex “unknown moderators” of the phenomenon and, in turn, design experiments that are more likely to replicate (Cesario, 2014). Consequently, the expectation for single papers to thoroughly explain an entire process is removed – and our replications can then do what they’re supposed to: enhance precision and uncover truth.

The system is broken

The psychology field seems resistant to regressing to simpler papers that take the time to develop theory, and contribute to knowledge in a cumulative fashion. Reviewers continue to request additional experiments, rather than to demand greater clarity from reported studies (for example, in the form of effect sizes and confidence intervals), and/or to encourage further theoretical development. Put simply, there is an implicit assumption that papers need to be “determining” when, in fact, they should be “contributing”. As Cumming (2014: 23) argues, it is important that a study “be considered alongside any comparable past studies and with the assumption that future studies will build on its contribution.”

In that regard, it would seem that the editorial/publication process is arguably the larger, underlying issue contributing (predominantly, though not necessarily solely) to the many problems afflicting academic research in psychology. But what is driving this issue? Could it be that the peer review process, which seems fantastic in theory, doesn’t work in practice? I believe that is certainly a possibility.

Something else I’ve come to learn throughout my PhD journey is that successful academic research requires mastery of several skills: you need to be able to plan your time; communicate your ideas clearly; think critically; explore issues from a “big picture” or macro perspective, as well as at the micro level; undertake conceptual development; design and execute studies; and be proficient at statistical analysis (assuming, of course, that you’re not an interpretive researcher). Interestingly, William Shockley, way back in 1957, posited that producing a piece of research involves clearing eight specific hurdles – and that these hurdles are essentially all equal. In other words, successful research calls for a researcher to be adept at each stage of the research process. However, in reality, it is often that the case that we are very adept (sometimes exceptional) at a few aspects, and merely satisfactory at others. The aim of the peer review process is to correct or otherwise improve the areas we are less adept at, which should – theoretically – result in a strong (sometimes exceptional) piece of research. Multiple reviewers evaluate a manuscript in an attempt to overcome these individual shortfalls; yet, look at the state of the discipline! The peer review process is clearly not working.

I’m not advocating abandoning the peer review process; I believe it is one of the cornerstones of scientific progress. What I am proposing, however, is for an adjustment to the system – and I’m not the first to do so. What if we, as has been suggested, move to a system of pre-registration? What if credit for publications in such a system were two-fold, with some going towards the conceptual development (resulting in the registered study), and some going towards the analysis and write-up? Such a system naturally lends itself to specialisation, so, what if we expected less of our researchers? That is, what if we were free to focus on those aspects of research that we’re good at (whether that’s, for example, conceptual development or data analysis), leaving our shortfalls to other researchers? What if the peer review process became specialised, with experts in the literature reviewing the proposed studies, and experts in data analysis reviewing the completed studies? This system also lends itself to collaboration and, therefore, to further skill development, because the experts in a particular aspect of research are well-recognised. The PhD process would remain more or less the same under this system, as it would allow emerging researchers to identify – honestly – their research strengths and weaknesses, before specialising after they complete grad school. There are, no doubt, issues with this proposal that I have not thought of, but to me, it suggests a stronger and more effective peer review process than the current one.

A recipe for change

Unfortunately, I don’t believe these issues that I’ve outlined are going to change – at least not in a hurry, if the slow adoption of estimation techniques is anything to go by. For that reason, when I finish my PhD later this year, I will be leaving academia to pursue a career in market research, where obtaining truth from the data to deliver actionable insights to clients is of the utmost importance. Some may view this decision as synonymous with giving up, but it’s not a choice I’ve made lightly; I simply feel as though I have the opportunity to pursue a more meaningful career in research outside of academia – and I’m very much looking forward to the opportunities and challenges that lay ahead for me in industry.

For those who choose to remain in academia, it is your responsibility to promote positive change; that responsibility does not rest solely on the journals. It has been suggested that researchers boycott the flagship journals if they don’t agree with their policies – but that is really only an option for tenured professors, unless you’re willing to risk career self-sabotage (which, I’m betting, most emerging and early career researchers are not). The push for change, therefore, needs to come predominantly (though not solely) from senior academics, in two ways: 1) in research training, as advisors and supervisors of PhDs and post-docs; and 2) as reviewers for journals, and members of editorial boards. Furthermore, universities should offer greater support to their academics, to enable them to take the time to produce higher quality research that strives to discover the truth. Grant committees, also, may need to re-evaluate their criteria for awarding research grants, and focus more on quality and meaningful research, as opposed to research that is “flashy” and/or “more newsworthy”. And the next generation of academics (that is, the emerging and early career researchers) should familiarise themselves with these issues, so that they may make up their own minds about where they stand, how they feel, and how best to move forward; the future of the academic institution is, after all, in their hands.

Outside The Matrix: Paul Picciano

Posted on January 28, 2014 by Elina Halonen

In our first 2014 Outside The Matrix interview we meet Paul Picciano who is a Senior Human-Systems Engineer at Aptima, Inc., a leading human-centered engineering firm based near Boston, MA. At Aptima, he applies a diverse set of cognitive engineering methods to improve human performance in the military, intelligence community, air traffic management, and health care. His approach to supporting humans operating in complex environments leverages system design and training to enhance decision processes. Dr. Picciano earned a Ph.D. in Cognitive and Neural Science from the University of Utah, a M.S. in Human Factors and Ergonomics from San Jose State University, and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Tufts University.

Dr. Picciano was also one of the speakers at the InDecision dinner for young researchers organised at the recent Society for Judgment and Decision Making conference in Toronto.

Tell me about your work: how does decision making psychology fit in it? Most of the work we do involves human operators that must collect data from the environment, analyze and make sense of the input, and select and execute a course of action. The conditions under which they work typically involve uncertainty and time pressure, modulated by goals, objectives, and priorities that change over time.

My favorite part of the job is getting out there and observing and interacting with the experts (and sometimes novices), performing their craft. This has garnered provided access to operating rooms, air traffic control towers, Navy ships, and various command centers for organizations ranging from the Air Force to the CDC. When it’s time to run a more controlled study, there is great access to high fidelity simulators at some of the top government and academic labs.

At Aptima, psychology plays a large part in much of our work. We provide services such as training, organizational analysis, and system design, by employing practitioners from industrial/organizational, cognitive, and neural disciplines across our portfolio. Most of my work is rooted in cognitive science, looking at perception, attention, and decision making as a mechanism for behavior and resultant task performance. It’s critical to understand how people process information. Empirical findings continue to demonstrate the magnitude of the influence of environments and decision architectures on the human operator in all domains. Many operators confront stressful situations, data overload, and conflicting objectives, so having a grasp of these psychological aspects help us design more accommodative systems and better training programs to prepare them. But of course, we don’t always get it exactly right…

Why you decide to go into industry instead of continuing in academia? I was in industry before I went to graduate school – I worked for five years after college, and thought I would just go back for an MS and return to the workforce. Plans changed when I realized how much I enjoyed being back in school and doing applied research (at NASA Ames). I found Aptima during this time and was tempted to leave, but I decided to continue school.

One might ask why I didn’t change my target over the next few years. First, I was committed to completing the PhD program. Second, I continued to be enamored with the academic environment. It is a great opportunity to interact with bright colleagues and an energetic student population with the benefits of a flexible schedule. I was even able to coach lacrosse in grad school and that may have been an option if I had chosen to work on campus long term.

However, I really enjoy the diversity a consulting role provides, interacting with customers in a wide range of domains and problems. I believed industry would provide me more of those experiences and greater opportunity to travel to see different types of operations. I was also very fortunate to find advisors that supported my path away from academia.

How did you first become interested in decision making psychology? Psychologists run such clever experiments. That’s probably what hooked me. The experimental designs and results from people like Milgram, Festinger, Tversky & Kahneman, Loftus, and Ariely are not just fascinating, they’re also actionable. Designers of systems, policies, and organizational structures can leverage these finding to make things better.

I view so much of behavior as a result of decision making – whether it be implicit or explicit, automatic or deliberate, intuition or reason mechanisms as the driving force. Even at the perceptual and instantaneous level, these reactions I still see as decision making. In the heart of the NFL playoffs now, the analysts always talk about quarterback decision making. These are trained, perceptually-driven, goal-directed actions that are dictated by the environment, expectations and training. Similarly, coaches are making decisions on fourth down and general managers are making draft decisions. For all of these decision types, there is a great deal in the scientific literature that could improve these decision processes (if any NFL owners are reading this I can make myself available for a consulting gig!)

What type of research do you find most interesting, useful or exciting? In my opinion, the most valid research emerges when we have the opportunity to marshal a diversity of research techniques that includes observations in naturalistic settings, high fidelity simulations, and tightly controlled and focused research settings. Converging evidence from these perspectives offers the best opportunity to build a strong case for your findings. However, rarely can we pull all of that off in a single project. There usually are not enough resources to cover the problem space to this degree (the government labs seem to more often have the time and funding for such investigations). It’s pretty impressive how realistic well-crafted simulations can feel to participants. We have been able to make senior physicians and air traffic controllers break into a sweat even though no human lives were ever at risk.

One of my most exhilarating days of “research” involved observing the training procedures for landing U2 aircraft. The U2 has a long nose making it difficult for pilots to see the ground. The training method involves other pilots on the ground guiding the aircraft down by calling out the number of feet the jet is above the ground just prior to touching down (“15ft…10ft…8ft…etc.). These callouts come from fellow pilots in zippy little sports cars waiting for the U2 to pass overhead and then chase it down the runway at over 100mph. I was fortunate enough to ride shotgun in one of two chase cars that followed down the runway, in formation, close enough to make accurate distance calls between the landing gear and the runway.

Do you see any challenges to the wider adoption of decision making psychology in your field? There are always challenges; one constantly in need of solutions is that of establishing useful, collectible measures. Part of this requirement stems from the responsibility of presenting a strong return on investment (ROI) argument. In research and development, technology often grabs attention and funding. It is compelling when a company makes a battery that is small and has longer life – that’s justified spending. It’s more difficult to convince a sponsor that you have improved the decision making process for a group of analysts. The bright side is the military is responsive to decision making research. There are specific programs (and funding) in place for efforts such as training small unit leaders and building decision support elements for tasks including weapons deployment, intelligence analysis, and air traffic management.

How do you see the relationship between academic researchers and practitioners? I think the classic model is that academia is doing the ”basic science” and practitioners are applying that science, to real world problems. I believe it is much more that. We have great partnerships with universities on many active projects, and they are involved in the full range of project activities. They are more than just a place to run first year psych students through a basic experiment. They are great thought partners and often the first to have produced or read about a new study. Many academics have security clearances, and many are consulting on the side. This makes it easy to engage them on a few levels beyond traditional roles. I also believe that practitioners can help develop new problems of interest for academics to investigate. We really enjoy our interactions with academia.

What advice would you give to young researchers who might be interested in a career in your field? Don’t be afraid to shape your own future. Figure out what you really like to do. Find companies and people that are doing that type of work and engage them. Don’t be frustrated by the fact that your keyword search returns 0 matching job titles. This is a growing field, and most people don’t know much about it. Tell them about it. Show them how you can be useful. If you can help them understand or even predict (with some accuracy) the decisions that will be made by their clients, staff, or management, you can be useful to them. Show that you can help them design choice architectures in their favor, impacting their bottom line, or contribute to community improvements-it will be hard to ignore you.

In my job search, I looked for companies, not job titles or employment ads. Go to conferences and interact with as many people. They won’t all help you, but many are willing. Build your network. There is so much going on out there, so many roles that we don’t even know about. Get yourself out there so you can stumble upon it.

Paul’s profile on Aptima website (incl. publications)

:InDecision:

inside decision-making science

Author Archives: Elina Halonen

Outside The Matrix: Tiina Likki

Tell us about your work: how does decision making psychology fit in it?

Why you decided to go into industry instead of continuing in academia?

What do you enjoy the most in your current role?

Do you see any challenges to the wider adoption of decision making psychology in your field?

How do you see the relationship between academic researchers and practitioners?

What advice would you give to young researchers who might be interested in a career in your field?

Viewpoint: Three steps forward – a research agenda for behavioural change

Behaviour in complex systems

Choosing a behaviour

What is a behaviour?

Replication

Research Heroes: Dilip Soman

I wish someone had told me at the beginning of my career…

I most admire academically…

The best research project I have worked on during my career…

The worst research project I have worked on during my career…

The most amazing or memorable experience when I was doing research…

The one story I always wanted to tell but never had a chance…

A research project I wish I had done…

If I wasn’t doing this, I would be…

The biggest challenge for our field in the next 10 years…

My advice for young researchers at the start of their career is…

InDecision: rebooted

Outside the Matrix: Lizzy Leigh

In The Wild: Nathalie Spencer

Star Track: Marcel Zeelenberg

Outside the Matrix: Dan Lockton

Viewpoint: Why I’m Leaving Academia

Outside The Matrix: Paul Picciano

Tell us about your work: how does decision making psychology fit in it?

Why you decided to go into industry instead of continuing in academia?

What do you enjoy the most in your current role?

Do you see any challenges to the wider adoption of decision making psychology in your field?

How do you see the relationship between academic researchers and practitioners?

What advice would you give to young researchers who might be interested in a career in your field?

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Behaviour in complex systems

Choosing a behaviour

What is a behaviour?

Replication

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I wish someone had told me at the beginning of my career…

I most admire academically…

The best research project I have worked on during my career…

The worst research project I have worked on during my career…

The most amazing or memorable experience when I was doing research…

The one story I always wanted to tell but never had a chance…

A research project I wish I had done…

If I wasn’t doing this, I would be…

The biggest challenge for our field in the next 10 years…

My advice for young researchers at the start of their career is…

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