Highlights from our first ‘Behaviourally Speaking’ meetup

Published in

Behavioural Design

6 min readMay 21, 2018

We recently hosted the first ‘Behaviourally Speaking’, a Cape Town based meetup series for behavioural science researchers, practitioners and enthusiasts based in South Africa.

The meetup series aims to achieve the following:

Create a comfortable physical space that fosters connections between attendees.
Improve attendees’ understanding of behavioural science and its applications in real world settings.

Our goal is to tackle a particular theme within applied behavioural science every month, and get relevant researchers and practitioners to share their thoughts.

Some of the themes that we hope to cover include:

Closing the gap between academic researchers and public/private sector practitioners.
Ethical considerations and guidelines for applying behavioural tactics and techniques.
Behavioural science capacity building within organisations and governments.
Behavioural design methodologies and how to integrate the necessary processes and infrastructure.
Agile experimentation versus rigorous RCTs, and the use of different impact evaluation tools.
Research translation strategies that make behavioural science more accessible to practitioners.
Replicability, working conditions, and cultural sensitivities relating to the impact of nudges and other behaviourally-informed interventions.
Intersections with neighbouring fields (for e.g. evolutionary psychology, or neuroscience) and how to accommodate the different layers of complexity that drive human behaviour.

Besides the initial set of themes, we also encouraged attendees to suggest their own ones.

The theme for our first meetup:

Closing the gap between academic researchers and public/private sector practitioners.

For our first meetup, we decided to explore the gap between behavioural scientists and economists who conduct research within academia, and practitioners who apply learnings within the public and private sector.

The aim was to understand the differences in incentive structures, social norms, and personal aspirations, as well as identify potential opportunities for collaboration.

This is a complicated topic and one requires many more events geared towards collaboration and exploration. That being said, it was made clear on the evening that, although collaboration between researchers and practitioners will bear fruit for both sides, the differences in views of success and incentive structures mean that more work is needed to reach any kind of symbiosis.

Working in trenches with academics, a practitioner’s perspective:

In finding solutions to any problem, the starting point should always be a thorough diagnosis of the root causes. This is exactly what our first speaker of the evening, Wanita Isaacs, offered.

Wanita is currently the head of investor education and behaviour at Allan Gray, and soon to be carrying out this role for the London-based Orbis investments as well.

Speaking as a behavioural practitioner, she shared learnings from her past collaboration experiences with academic researchers. Wanita emphasised that, although the experimental rigor was highly valuable, she found that the procedures were not representative of clients’ actual experiences or decision-making in the real world. She shared that the complexity of tasks and language used in experiments were the main causes of this disconnect. The highlighting of these issues laid the groundwork for a clear and constructive takeout that should be considered in any researcher-practitioner collaboration.

Key takeout for behavioural researchers and practitioners:

Practitioners can offer value in ensuring that the design of procedural or experimental tasks are representative of the decision-making environments that the target population experiences on a day-to-day basis.

Wearing both hats

The second speaker of the evening was Megan McLaren, a researcher at the University of Cape Town (UCT), who actively applies learnings from behavioural science to environmental challenges, such as Cape Town’s recent water crisis.

Megan is a great example of an individual working to bridge the gap between practitioners and researchers. Her approach is driven by real world outcomes such as the positive changes in citizen behaviour, yet her thinking and methodologies are based on a technical understanding of research procedures and the existing behavioural science literature. The Drop Drop application is a good example of this merger. The project aims to solve the water monitoring challenges faced by many institutions and citizens by creating a digital dashboard that provides feedback from water usage tracking hardware. This dashboard also forms the foundation for a set of behavioural interventions, such as usage goal setting, social benchmarking, and reminders.

Key takeout for behavioural researchers and practitioners:

We should be careful not to fall into the trap of representativeness when it comes to thinking about ‘academic researchers’. It is becoming more and more common for researchers to wear the practitioner’s hat, and wear it well.

Potential collaborations, a researcher’s perspective:

The evening’s speakers also included Olivia Rusch, a research associate at the Research Unit for Behavioural Economics and Neuroeconomics (RUBEN), which exists within the economics department at UCT.

Olivia spoke briefly about the incredible work at RUBEN and some of its upcoming initiatives. She then went on to share her perspective on some of the differences between researchers and practitioners as well as identify potential challenges. Olivia mentioned key differences such as time constraints, the value of evaluation, incentive structures, and remuneration.

She also proposed several models for collaboration and remuneration. The full payment model involved the researcher taking on a purely consultational role. The partial payment model focused on data access and publication as additional incentives for researchers to collaborate. The final model involved post-graduate students, supervised by academic researchers, working with organisations as part of their thesis work.

Key takeout for behavioural researchers and practitioners:

There are clear models for collaboration between behavioural researchers and practitioners. The challenge is reaching a place where both parties have a clear sense and acceptance of the expectations. The goal here should be time-efficient projects that provide access to the necessary data and still hold the experimental rigor required for significant results and causal inferences to be made.

The limitations of conventional consumer research:

Our final speaker of the night was Dr David Rosenstein, a psychiatrist and the co-founder of Neural Sense, a neuromarketing research company. David spoke accessibly about the limitations of self-reporting and emotional factors that drive human decision-making. David pointed out that many decisions are made with little-to-no detection at the conscious level of the decision-maker.

David is another great example of an established researcher who is more than capable of wearing the practitioner hat. He doesn’t stop with pointing out the challenges with self-reporting. The mission of his company Neural Sense is to use cutting-edge sensory technology to get around this, providing companies with a powerful set of tools for understanding their customers experiences and decisions accurately.

Key takeout for behavioural researchers and practitioners:

The instruments and measures used by researchers and practitioners to evaluate the impact of interventions and understand the underlying causal mechanisms are important. Both parties should be cognizant of the roles that bias and noise play in research and spend more time trying to understand these.

In closing

We ended the meetup with a lively panel discussion, where the evening’s speakers were invited to take part in a question and answer session with the audience. Insightful questions were asked, problems were raised, and solutions were offered, which made for an interesting and thoroughly enjoyable end to a successful first evening of Behaviourally Speaking.