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:

1. linking linear behaviour change with our understanding of complex systems;
2. developing a good basis for selecting behaviours to change; and
3. 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.

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

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

It’s been little over a year since we started this blog, with the hope of attracting a couple of hundred readers. Instead, we’ve had over 70,000 hits with over 35,000 visitors from 155 countries. The top 10 countries for visitors included:

1. United States
2. United Kingdom
3. Canada
4. Germany
5. The Netherlands
6. Australia
7. India
8. Singapore
9. Sweden
10. Switzerland

So much, so predictable! But who does JDM research in Honduras, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Vanuatu, Sudan, Rwanda, Ghana, Nicaragua, Bermuda, Bhutan, Barbados or Bolivia? If that’s you, get in touch – we’d love to speak to you and hear about JDM research in your country. This year, we’ll address one of the issues highlighted by professor Dan Ariely in his interview and start to look at what impact culture might have on decision making science through a series of interviews focusing on the challenges (and opportunities!) cross-cultural psychology might pose for JDM.

In case you missed them the first time, the top 10 posts from the year are:

1. Research Heroes: Richard Thaler
2. In The Wild: Rory Sutherland
3. Outside The Matrix: Paul Litvak
4. The Seven Sins of Consumer Psychology
5. Research Heroes: George Loewenstein
6. Viewpoint: The role of revealed research preferences
7. Outside The Matrix: Jolie Martin
8. In The Wild: Kelly Peters
9. Research Heroes: Colin Camerer
10. Research Heroes: Gerd Gigerenzer 

We’ve been incredibly lucky in being able to interview some amazing people in our field, and we can’t thank them enough for giving their time to answer our questions. On behalf of all the people who have thanked us for running the blog, please know that your contribution is widely appreciated and makes a big difference to young researchers around the world.

The original aim of the blog was to give young researchers a voice. We’ve taken some steps in that direction by growing the team with sub-editors Caroline Roux, Shereen Chaudry and Leigh Caldwell as well as our dedicated contributor Troy Campbell. In 2014, we’ll start to feature young researchers more regularly through a new interview series. We’ll also widen our net for career advice to include researchers who have are making waves early on in their career and shaping the field as they go.

We’d also welcome submissions from readers: if you’re a young researcher and have just published an awesome paper you want to tell the world about, get in touch. Since subtle hints and words of encouragement have so far fallen on deaf ears, let us put this bluntly: blatant self-promotion is OK, and strongly encouraged. One of the main goals of this blog is to give young scholars a platform to share and discuss their work, but we cannot achieve this goal without your contribution!

Finally, one of the emerging trends in our field is the rising popularity of field studies and applying the science both in the policy and commercial worlds with many of our Research Heroes highlighting the need to connect our work with the outside world. However, such work is extremely challenging and we have much to learn from the pioneers, so in 2014 we’ll also be speaking to those who have made early inroads into taking decision making science out of the lab and into the Real World.

As always, we welcome your feedback and contribution – please don’t hesitate to get in touch and let us know what you think!

We hope that you’ll enjoy the next year with us.

Elina & Neda

As one of the last posts this year, we’re featuring our 28th Research Hero: professor Shlomo Benartzi from UCLA Anderson School of Management, a leading authority on behavioral finance with a special interest in household finance and participant behavior in retirement savings plans. His most significant research contribution is the co-development of Save More Tomorrow (with Richard Thaler), a behavioral prescription designed to help employees increase their savings rates gradually over time. Professor Benartzi has also supplemented his academic research with both policy work and practical experience through advising government agencies in the U.S. and abroad as well as helping to craft numerous legislative efforts and pension reforms.  In addition, he has also worked with many financial institutions as an academic advisor. His latest initiative is Digitai.org where he’s exploring new digital interventions that will help consumers, businesses and policymakers leverage behavioral research. 

I wish someone had told me at the beginning of my career… that you should only do research you are really passionate about. Research often requires years and years of sustained effort, so unless you have a passion for these ideas, then you will almost certainly give up. (It’s like a marriage in that sense.) There’s also something magical that happens when you are passionate about the research. Not only is the work more fun, but it somehow gets published. Don’t ask me how it happens.

I most admire academically… I’m going to cheat and give you three names. The first person is Danny Kahneman. Not only is he super brilliant, but he’s also very insightful about questions outside his area of expertise. He never gives in to pressure, and always does what he thinks is right academically. Richard Thaler I admire for the diversity of his research program, and also his ability to see the big picture. John Payne is incredibly humble, yet an unusually deep thinker.

The project that I’m most proud of is… Save More Tomorrow, a little idea Thaler and I came up with that led more than 4 million people to double their savings rate. We weren’t particularly brilliant, but we were persistent and with a bit of luck we made a big difference.

The one project that I should never had done… I’m still trying to forget that.

The most amazing or memorable experience when I was doing research… I was salsa dancing at the boathouse in Santa Monica and chatted with my friend Brian Tarbox who worked in the finance industry. I told him about my idea for Save More Tomorrow; I didn’t even think he was listening. Several years later I hear from him again and he hands over an excel spreadsheet with all the data. He said I have some good news: I tried out the Save More Tomorrow idea and it works. Your program quadrupled the savings rate of these low-income people.

The one story I always wanted to tell but never had a chance… what I’d really love to do is follow-up with those people in Brian’s spreadsheet. The company insisted on being anonymous, and Brian passed away, but I’d love to know how those individuals are doing now. Are they still saving more? Have they managed to retire with dignity?

A research project I wish I had done… I had this hunch that automatic enrolment in a retirement savings plan would get a lot more people to start saving, but that it might also lead to a decrease in aggregate savings, since the default saving rate is typically very low, often around 3 percent. I wanted to test out my hunch, but Brigitte Madrian tested it out first and did a superb job.

If I wasn’t doing this, I would be… an unhappy architect. I love good architecture, but if it was my profession then it would no longer be a fun hobby. I would have to pay the bills and deal with clients.

The biggest challenge for our field in the next 10 years… is increasing our impact. How do we take these proven behavioral insights and scale them up? How do we solve big societal problems around health care or retirement savings or education? In my future work, I’m going to explore how we can use the digital revolution to accelerate the pace of change. With digitai.org, I want to test out new digital interventions that will help consumers, businesses and policymakers leverage all of this new research. I think that smartphone in your pocket represents a tremendous opportunity to help people think better and make better choices, but we have to get it right.

My advice for young researchers at the start of their career is… not to listen to me! Every young researcher needs to tailor their journey to their particular set of skills, interests and weaknesses. Find your own passion. Don’t follow mine.

Departmental website | Digitai.org

Greetings from Toronto and the annual conference for the Society for Judgment and Decision Making! With the help of the InDecision team, we’ll be covering the best bits of the conference for you if you couldn’t make it (and even if you are here, we’ll have something for you, too). With dozens of great sessions on offer this weekend, choice overload is pretty much guaranteed. But fear not: we’ve scoured the program and selected the best ones to help you make the most of the conference. Here’s where you’ll find the InDecision team this weekend…

Caroline’s picks

Research and Academia (Session #7) Questionable research practices. Misunderstanding or misuse of statistics. Lack of reproducibility. Many academic fields are currently going through several research-related crises and controversies. Different solutions are being proposed to improve the ways we conduct research, but I sometimes find it hard to keep up with all the suggested improvements for our different research practices. That is why I am always looking forward to conference sessions that can help me stay up to date with the most recent developments. The four papers presented in the session cover important issues, such as the replicabilitiy and reliability of behavioral research findings, and, most importantly, provide interesting solutions that I am really looking forward to learning more about. How to find it: Sunday, November 17, 2:45-4:15 pm, Civic South

The Relationship Between Altruism and Personal Benefits (Session #4) The existence of altruism, or whether humans can ever transcend self-interest, is an age-old question that is constantly being debated across different fields. It is a debate that I find quite interesting, so I am always drawn to conference sessions that provide new ideas, or revisit old ones, on the topic. I find this session particularly interesting because it explores the interplay between altruism and personal benefit and provides interesting findings about how perceived self-interested motives or outcomes can taint the judgment of seemingly altruistic behavior, among others. I am really looking forward to learning more about how this impacts people’s judgment and performance of altruistic or prosocial behavior, and whether there are any ways to overcome these effects. How to find it: Saturday, November 16, 3:15-4:45 pm, Simcoe/Dufferin

Elina’s picks

Applying Behavioral Economics in the Field: Nudging Customers to Pay their Credit Card Dues The fact that this session is talking about a large-scale field experiment makes this session unmissable for me to two reasons. The primary reason is that for me field experiments represent an exciting new phase for the field itself: after years spent in the lab it’s time to migrate to the outside world to see how our ideas perform in reality. It’s risky because we can’t control everything so the level of noise is likely to be high, and we have to find partners for it which brings its own complications. This bridge between academia and practice is one that I feel we need to cross to ensure the relevance of our work to the outside world, which ultimately defines the value of our work through funding. On a personal level I’m also interested in hearing about the practical challenges of running such studies as it’s close to my own research interests both as a PhD student and practitioner so I’m hoping to get some great ideas and inspiration from this talk. How to find it: Saturday 16^th November, 3.15-4.45pm, Session #4 Track Ι: Choice Architecture 2 – Willow East

The Impact of Comparison Frames and Category Width On Strength of Preferences This session is definitely one I’ll be listening to with my practitioner hat on: understanding the strength of consumers’ preferences is at the heart of my work as a market research consultant. We know already that how options are presented to people changes how they perceive them, but when it comes to a real-life client scenario, it’s absolutely crucial to understand the nuances of how consumers make these comparisons to help advise our clients to emphasise the right attributes of a product. This might seem manipulative or even sinister, but just think for a moment about a product you really like: what if the “wrong” communication would have meant you’d never discovered that product? How to find it: Monday 18^th November, 9.45-11.15am, Session #8 Track 2: Consumer Decision Making – Civic South

Leigh’s picks

Are risk and delay psychologically equivalent? Testing a common process account of risky and inter-temporal choice Research that unifies previously disparate effects is always interesting to me – because my instinct as a mathematician is to work towards ever more general and simpler (and therefore more powerful) models. If inter-temporal choice can be explained by the same process as probabilistic decisions, it takes us one step closer to understanding decisions in a coherent way. And this does seem a logical step: some accounts explain hyperbolic discounting as a rational response to the riskiness of a delayed reward – maybe if I hold off on eating the marshmallow and wait to get two of them, some unknown event will intervene and I won’t get any! However, it seems that these researchers have found evidence to counter this unification. I’ll be intrigued to hear what alternatives they put forward. How to find it: Saturday 16^th November, 8.30-10am, Session #1 Track 2: Risk 1 – Essex

Partitioning option menus to nudge single-item choice This talk is interesting for me both for my consulting work with some commercial clients, and also because it feels like it could help understand how we compose small intermediate steps into larger decisions. Many complex decisions have various parts, and forcing people to unpack those individual steps (for instance by listing individual options separately rather than allowing people to integrate them into one bigger choice) may reveal some of the internal processes that are not directly observable. Classical decision theory (as used in rational economic modelling) assumes that separate choices can simply be added up to come to an overall totality of decisions, but the results of this paper seem to provide more confirmation that this doesn’t work. Seeing the differences between low-level and high-level choices may help us figure out a better way to put individual decisions together in a model and predict social behaviour. How to find it: Saturday 16^th November, 10.30am-12pm, Session #2 Track 1 Choice Architecture 1 – Willow East

Shereen’s picks

As a behavioral decision researcher, I am interested in finding behavioral solutions to policy-relevant problems. Indeed, I learned at APPAM this past weekend that there is a lot of room for behavioral research in the policy arena. With that in mind when looking at the SJDM program, I am focusing on talks that (1) investigate the practical elements that influence choice, or (2) identify either a behavioral problem or behavioral solution in a policy-relevant domain. For now, the talks in choice architecture (both of them) and financial decision-making are on the top of my list.

The first session on choice architecture addresses abstract but broadly relevant topics in choice architecture. These talks seem key to understanding basic concepts in this area such as defaults and choice sets. The second session on choice architecture delves into more area-specific interventions on choice and their effectiveness. These choice architecture talks have more direct relevance for policy, marketing, or other applications. With the recent formation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in 2011, it is clear that policy-makers are concerned about the way people make financial decisions. The talks in the financial decision-making session speak directly to this concern with a series of experiments that either identify the obstacles people face in considering their finances and/or provide some way to mitigate these problems.

How to find them: Choice Architecture I – (Saturday, Nov 16, Track I, Session #2, 10:30am-11:50am); Choice Architecture II –  (Saturday, Nov 16, Track I, Session #4, 3:15pm-4:35pm); Financial Decision Making – (Saturday, Nov 16, Track III, Session #5, 5:15pm – 6:35pm)

Troy’s picks

Cruel nature: Harmfulness as an overlooked dimension in judgments of moral standing “Cruel Nature” promises to be a great talk and not just because of its slick title. The talk will tackle an already controversial topic (the basis of morality) and throw an additional wrench into the puzzle (people respond to animals with moral emotions). The talk will be big in scope, have a good literature review, and will to lend itself to fiery conversation (or at least that’s how the talk played out when it was presented in multi-school Moral Research Lab). Piazza and colleagues propose that “harmful intent cannot be reducible to agency.” They use scenario studies featuring non human subjects like sharks to test and show this. This talk will ultimately try to critique the Agency-Patient model of morality, a model that is already a very new critique of also still relatively new Moral Foundations model of morality. With sharks, controversy and morality, even if you disagree with the speakers’ claims (and probably many people will), you’re guaranteed to have a good time. How to find it: Saturday 16th November, 1.30-3pm, Session #3 Track Ι: Morality and Ethics 1 – Willow East

Selfish or selfless? On the signal value of emotion in altruistic behavior This talk promises to be fascinating as it shows that the general populace holds a view of morality that widely differs from the view of morality most academics hold. Us ‘rational’ academics tend to think about morality like a math equation, where people sacrifice for others and don’t get any benefits – e.g. gifts or feeling a positive “helpers’ high” emotion. However, Barasch and colleagues show this is not the case. People actually think feeling a “helpers’ high” is a authentic signal of concern for others and are suspicious of the unemotional helper (e.g. the person many academics praise). The researchers do however show a boundary of this attribution which can help us understand where people in general see the line between selfish and selflessness in helping. How to find it: Saturday 16th November, 3:15-4:45 pm, Session #4 Track 3.

[N.B. Please check all session and presentation times in the official program before attending as typos may have slipped in!]

Final notes…

• We’re covering the conference here (with a delay) as well as on Twitter both through @InDecision_Blog and our individual contributors: @RouxCaroline, @infomagpie, @leighblue and @troyhcampbell – conference hashtag is #sjdm2013
• Don’t miss the Graduate Student Social Event on Saturday 16th from 6.45-8.45pm at the Willow Centre!
• The InDecision dinner (featuring talks with three practitioners) on Saturday 16th still has 4 places left – please email elina@theirrationalagency.com asap if you want to join!
• If you have any feedback on the blog or would like to get involved, please come speak to us – we’d love to hear from you!