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Different Dinners: Unlocking Behavioural Insights for a Sustainable Food Future

In 2022, Auckland Council undertook an innovative research project utilising behavioural insights, which was designed to support Auckland households to make more sustainable and climate friendly food choices, i.e., to eat less meat. This ‘Different Dinners’ project is part of a broader programme of work looking at how Auckland Council can respond to its commitments to address climate change. The results were positive and demonstrate that Aucklanders are both willing to and did make changes to their diets. All interventions tested resulted in increased climate-friendly food choices.

How to Not Get Nudged

Nudging and manipulation in modern society, driven by advancements in technology and behavioral sciences, are pervasive. However, there are ways for individuals to resist and develop immunity to these persuasion tactics. By being forewarned, recognizing manipulation attempts, and undergoing debiasing interventions, individuals can better protect themselves. Additionally, they can avoid vulnerable moments, utilize avoidant resistance, and listen to their intuition. While escaping all influences is impossible, individuals can still choose their influencers and free their minds from undue manipulation.

The ChatGPT Effect: How Will Our Skillset Evolve in the Age of AI?

In the digital age, technology has made life more convenient but has also led to the outsourcing of essential skills. The rise of ChatGPT, an AI language model, which offers multiple incredible abilities including enhanced writing abilities, raises the concern that it may diminish our ability to express ourselves properly and complete a task all by ourselves. Like the "Google Effect", we risk relying on AI to the point of losing our writing prowess and cognitive skills. To harness the benefits without sacrificing other skills, we must strike a balance between utilizing AI tools and nurturing our own abilities.

Make or Break: The Behavioral Science of Innovation

Successful innovation requires far more than a market gap, a visionary, funding, and new technology. Innovation is a behavioral process from start to finish. It relies on the decision-making processes and behaviors of both producers and consumers, as well as the surrounding support system. Behavioral science, the science of how we make decisions, has invaluable practical insights for innovation on all fronts.

Why Do We Pay Too Much for Information?

Should we postpone a decision to collect more information or decide based on the information already available? This is a typical dilemma not only in business life. Psychologists have found that most people tend to wait too long and spend too much on information collection. Why is that the case? Our study gives a surprising answer.

Tell Me Why! Explanations for Ambiguity in Health Decision Making Affect Treatment Choice

Medical treatment decisions are often rife with ambiguity. Exact probabilities for things like side effects or treatment success rates are frequently unknown. But why is this important? Because decision making research has shown that ambiguity can systematically alter the choices people make. We investigated how providing different explanations for the ambiguity in a treatment decision context affected willingness to adopt a treatment with an ambiguously described success rate. When the explanations involved elements that the person was knowledgeable about or could control, people were more interested in an ambiguous treatment.

When Red Means “Go”: Color and Cultural Reactance in Risk Preferences

Color can affect judgment and decision making, and its effects may vary across cultures. Research reported in this article shows that cross-cultural color effects on risk preferences are influenced by personal associations of color-gain/loss. Our research finds a cultural reactance effect, a phenomenon in which people who hold culturally incongruent (vs. cultural mainstream) color associations show a stronger risk preference.

Anchors Aweigh! How Early Perceptual Information Biases Subsequent Judgments

Anchoring and adjustment, a ubiquitous heuristic process in judgment and decision making, has been vastly demonstrated in the numerical domain. With the help of four studies, we demonstrate the anchoring and adjustment bias in perceptual domains. Additionally, we outline a process of perceptual anchoring and provide a way for a potential resolution to the disagreement among different process accounts for the anchoring phenomenon.

By |2022-02-17T05:30:57+00:00March 9th, 2021|Categories: Behavioral Theory & Insights|Tags: , , , , |

Sports in the Service of Economics

An increasing number of academic studies have used sports data to investigate economic behavior. Sports data are not only readily available, they also provide an excellent laboratory to study human behavior in real competitive environments. In this article, I will present several examples of my own work that have used sports data to explain fundamental economic theories, as well as articles that showed divergences of economic decision making from neo-classical theories.

Why We Know so Little About Culture and Decision-Making

There is a lot of evidence on the variation of human experience and that economic, social and linguistic environments strongly shape people’s behaviour, motivations and preferences. Despite this, these topics have not received a lot of attention in decision making psychology. In this article, I shed some light on the background of why this is the case.

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