Behavioral Science In The Wild

Behavioral Science in the Wild helps practitioners understand how to use insights from the behavioral sciences to create change in the real world.

Behavioral Science in the Wild helps practitioners understand how to use insights from the behavioral sciences to create change in the real world.

Behavioral Science in the Wild helps managers understand how best to incorporate key research findings to solve their own behavior change challenges in the real world – from lab to field. Behavioral Science in the Wild helps managers to implement research findings on behavioral change in their own workplace operations and to apply them to business or policy problems. As the second book in the Behaviourally Informed Organizations series, Behavioral Science in the Wild takes a step back to address the "why" and "how" behind the origins of behavioral insights, and how best to translate and scale behavioral science from lab-based research findings. Governments, for-profit enterprises, and welfare organizations have increasingly started relying on findings from the behavioral sciences to develop more accessible and user-friendly products, processes, and experiences for their end-users. While there is a burgeoning science that helps us to understand why people act and make the decisions that they do, and how their actions can be influenced, we still lack a precise science and strategic insights into how some key theoretical findings can be successfully translated, scaled, and applied in the field. Nina Mažar and Dilip Soman are joined by leading figures from both the academic and applied behavioral sciences to develop a nuanced framework for how managers can best translate results from pilot studies into their own organizations and behavior change challenges using behavioral science.

Every organization is fundamentally in the business of behavior change, whether it be a government trying to get a business to comply with environmental regulations, a business persuading its customers to be loyal to its products, or a financial institution encouraging a client to start saving for retirement. Behavior change is critical to organizational success, but despite its centrality to organizations, we do not have a good understanding of how organizations can successfully employ insights from behavioral science in their operations. To address this gap, this book develops an overarching framework for using behavioral science. It shows how behavioral insights (BI) can be embedded in organizations to achieve better outcomes, improve the efficiency of processes, and maximize stakeholder engagement. This edited volume provides an enterprise-wide strategic perspective on how governments, businesses, and other organizations have embedded BI into their operations. Contributions by academics and practitioners from the Behaviourally Informed Organizations partnership highlight pragmatic frameworks and prescriptive outcomes via illustrative case studies. Featuring a foreword by Cass R. Sunstein, this book investigates key findings from BI, with an eye toward how it can be used to solve problems and seize opportunities in diverse organizations.

Edwin Hutchins combines his background as an anthropologist and an open ocean racing sailor and navigator in this account of how anthropological methods can be combined with cognitive theory to produce a new reading of cognitive science. His theoretical insights are grounded in an extended analysis of ship navigation—its computational basis, its historical roots, its social organization, and the details of its implementation in actual practice aboard large ships. The result is an unusual interdisciplinary approach to cognition in culturally constituted activities outside the laboratory—"in the wild." Hutchins examines a set of phenomena that have fallen in the cracks between the established disciplines of psychology and anthropology, bringing to light a new set of relationships between culture and cognition. The standard view is that culture affects the cognition of individuals. Hutchins argues instead that cultural activity systems have cognitive properties of their own that are different from the cognitive properties of the individuals who participate in them. Each action for bringing a large naval vessel into port, for example, is informed by culture: the navigation team can be seen as a cognitive and computational system. Introducing Navy life and work on the bridge, Hutchins makes a clear distinction between the cognitive properties of an individual and the cognitive properties of a system. In striking contrast to the usual laboratory tasks of research in cognitive science, he applies the principal metaphor of cognitive science—cognition as computation (adopting David Marr's paradigm)—to the navigation task. After comparing modern Western navigation with the method practiced in Micronesia, Hutchins explores the computational and cognitive properties of systems that are larger than an individual. He then turns to an analysis of learning or change in the organization of cognitive systems at several scales. Hutchins's conclusion illustrates the costs of ignoring the cultural nature of cognition, pointing to the ways in which contemporary cognitive science can be transformed by new meanings and interpretations. A Bradford Book

Multimodal Behavioral Analysis in the Wild: Advances and Challenges presents the state-of- the-art in behavioral signal processing using different data modalities, with a special focus on identifying the strengths and limitations of current technologies. The book focuses on audio and video modalities, while also emphasizing emerging modalities, such as accelerometer or proximity data. It covers tasks at different levels of complexity, from low level (speaker detection, sensorimotor links, source separation), through middle level (conversational group detection, addresser and addressee identification), and high level (personality and emotion recognition), providing insights on how to exploit inter-level and intra-level links. This is a valuable resource on the state-of-the- art and future research challenges of multi-modal behavioral analysis in the wild. It is suitable for researchers and graduate students in the fields of computer vision, audio processing, pattern recognition, machine learning and social signal processing. Gives a comprehensive collection of information on the state-of-the-art, limitations, and challenges associated with extracting behavioral cues from real-world scenarios Presents numerous applications on how different behavioral cues have been successfully extracted from different data sources Provides a wide variety of methodologies used to extract behavioral cues from multi-modal data

Most organizations spend much of their effort on the start of the value creation process: namely, creating a strategy, developing new products or services, and analyzing the market. They pay a lot less attention to the end: the crucial “last mile” where consumers come to their website, store, or sales representatives and make a choice. In The Last Mile, Dilip Soman shows how to use insights from behavioral science in order to close that gap. Beginning with an introduction to the last mile problem and the concept of choice architecture, the book takes a deep dive into the psychology of choice, money, and time. It explains how to construct behavioral experiments and understand the data on preferences that they provide. Finally, it provides a range of practical tools with which to overcome common last mile difficulties. The Last Mile helps lay readers not only to understand behavioral science, but to apply its lessons to their own organizations’ last mile problems, whether they work in business, government, or the nonprofit sector. Appealing to anyone who was fascinated by Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge, or Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow but was not sure how those insights could be practically applied, The Last Mile is full of solid, concrete advice on how to put the lessons of behavioral science to work.

As applied behavioral science has become more widespread, a need has emerged for guidance on how to build and integrate behavioral science functions within an organization. This book draws on the collective wisdom of applied behavioral scientists with deep experience within their respective practice areas to provide practical guidance on building a behavioral science function that has a meaningful impact for your organization.