With most of its attention captured by the global fervor around 'big data', the banking industry has failed to give behavioral science the attention it deserves. I argue that, considering today’s challenges to fully take advantage of big data, implementing insights from behavioral science is a more cost-effective approach to improve customer experience in banking.
It’s almost impossible to rationally plan old age, given that decisions in this domain are complex, jointly made and emotional. I argue that behavioral economics can help us understand some of our common decision-making barriers, such as dealing with decision avoidance, reframing old age positively, and designing interventions to better forecast our needs in old age.
As the enthusiasm for applied behavioural science spreads across the globe, it is time to think how well "irrationality" travels. This is the start of an article series exploring the impact of factors such as cultural context on decision making - and how our understanding of the human mind is based on a thin slice of humanity.
Using cognitive mechanisms (commitment, loss aversion, social norms and suchlike), I hacked myself to boost my motivation for exercise and healthy habits, get in shape and lose 15 kilos (33 pounds)… all in a record six months.
Many of us say we care about our privacy, but often disclose personal information. This asymmetry is called the “privacy paradox”. This phenomenon is only a paradox, however, if we assume people are rational or engage in rational disclosure decision-making. Taking into account our cognitive biases and the way online platforms are designed, it comes as no surprise that our disclosure behavior doesn’t always match our privacy preferences.
Consumers regularly track their expenses and assign them to categories like food, entertainment, and clothing, which is popularly known as mental accounting. Our research shows that consumption biases that result from mental accounting are not prevalent in Easterners due to their holistic thinking style, whereas Westerners exhibit such biases due to their analytic thinking style.
Human behavior is remarkably complicated. And yet, just as Newton's laws of motion distill three fundamental truths about the physical world, the three laws of human behavior describe three fundamental truths of human behavior: People tend to stick to the status quo unless the forces of friction or fuel push us them off their path; behavior is a function of the person and their environment; every decision includes tradeoffs and the potential for unintended consequences.
How much information do you need to make up your mind? Our research in various domains of decision making shows that we make decisions more quickly and based on less information than we think. This has important implications in an age in which information is plentiful.
Nudges have become popular policy instruments, for good reasons. However, recent studies show they might sometimes backfire or cause undesired distributional effects – differing impacts across people. Such studies highlight the importance of careful policy analysis that examines both the average and distributional impacts of nudges.
Researchers have long maintained the importance of individual differences in motivational orientations for understanding personality and behavior. Recent findings suggest that strengthening and integrating four different motives in particular may make us better decision makers and more effective at achieving our goals.
