debates in behavioral science

It's 2023 and two important events took place, this year. The first is an adversorial collaboration between a Nobel prize winner in Behaviour Economics Daniel Kahneman and Micheal Killingsworth that resulted in a research article published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). It found that happiness does increase as income increases, but chronically unhappy people do not become happier when income rises continuously unlike chronically happy people. Why is this important you ask? Its important because now we know that money can buy you happiness, however, if you are chronically unhappy and dont know how to experience the simple joys of life, no amount of income increase beyond a point, will result in an increase in your happiness. Can chronically unhappy people change then? They can if they engage in positive mood and outlook boosting behaviours in their personal and professional life, alongside focussing on making more money. Behaviour play a role in shaping happiness, hence modifying behaviours is in our hands.  

 

The second event was a rebuttal to a paper that questioned if the nudging of individual behaviour is being done at the cost of systemic changes within ecosystems governments and organisations. Event two has important ramifications for applied behaviour scientists. Essentially it challenged that applied behavior scientists were primarily addressing the easier problem which is developing ways to change individual behaviour, when the real problem were systems within organisations that are old, legacy and unwilling to change.  This was a charge without evidence according to many in the business of behaviour change. Organisational and systemic changes is critical to driving behaviour change. In the Indian context, its easy to blame individual behavior - think about queueing, driving, using public transport, data security behaviors and the like. But if there are systemic issues that dont make individual behavior stick then the system itself has to be nudged. Practitioners working across various domains are definitely not blind or deaf to this need - unlike what the original critique of nudging say.

 

​The beauty of these interactions is that the domain is robust with academicians, practitioners and other interested parties questioning, challenging and lifting the conversations around important application topics. For organisations that retain trained behavioral scientists, this should be music to their ears. It means behavioral science practitioners will constantly update their knowledge and apply the most relevant ideas to their behavioral problems. Here's to more robust conversations in this burgeoning domain.