Behavioural Innovations Society: Junior Behavioural Scientist Panel

On 6 October 2021, the Behavioural Innovations Society hosted three junior behavioural scientists for a panel discussion over Zoom.

The panellists were all early-career behavioural scientists making their way in the professional sphere.

• Zsófia Belovai fell in love with behavioural science after hearing a lecture on the subject while she was studying psychology as an undergraduate in Cambridge. From there, she applied to study an MSc in Behavioural Science at LSE, where she graduated in 2020. She then became an intern, and then a full-time behavioural scientist with MoreThanNow. Currently, she works as a Senior Behavioural Science Associate. Her duties cover all aspects of the client journey, such as writing proposals, conducting literature reviews, data analysis, and project management. Zsofia specialises in diversity and inclusion, and some of her previous works include a project exploring bias in recruitment using LinkedIn.
• Merle van den Akker has just completed her PhD in Behavioural Science at the Warwick Business School. She is just about to take up a position in the behavioural advisory unit of an Australian bank. She studies the effect payment methods have on personal finance management. She also blogs about behavioural science and personal finance on Money on the Mind (www.moneyonthemind.org), as well as co-hosting the Questioning Behaviour Podcast. Unsurprisingly, she is interested in how people interact with money and overall financial decision-making.
• Pauline Schwartz did her interdisciplinary undergrad at the University of Amsterdam in Politics, Psychology, Law and Economics, wanting to get a broad understanding of human behaviour and how it is represented in and affecting our society and institutions. She then completed the MSc in Behaviour Change at UCL and after a fellow student introduced her to MindGym, she interned at the company for 6 months. Upon completion of her internship, MindGym offered her a full-time position as a Solutions Designer and she has been with them for two years now.

The moderators, Ekaterina Stoilova and Nancy Xia opened the panel by polling the audience on their background, academic level, and familiarity with behavioural science. The audience consisted mostly of psychology students, both undergraduate and graduate, looking to further develop their knowledge of behavioural science and the pathways it opens. There were a small but significant number of audience members from other backgrounds, including geoscience, sports education and cybersecurity

The panellists then gave a more detailed personal introduction.

Zsofia graduated in 2020 from the LSE Behavioural Science Masters after a “traditional” background in psychology at Cambridge. She discovered behavioural science in third year, and decided that there was “no going back.”

She is now a senior associate in the behavioural science practice at MoreThanNow, a consulting firm that designs experiments to influence behaviour at the workplace, typically for large organisations. She is currently working on two projects. One requires the analysis of 103K observations over 250 variables, so she emphasised the importance of statistics and data science skills for behavioural scientists. The other is for a global pharma company that is looking to improve psychological safety in manager/associate relationships. She is helping to design a randomised controlled trial for communications strategies, to see which ones produce the greatest impact on measures of psychological safety in engagement surveys. She feels she is pioneering an entirely new professional discipline.

Pauline is a Solutions Designer at Mindgym, a learning and development company that helps organisations think feel and behave differently in the workspace. Her work touches a range of domains, including performance management, diversity and inclusion, ethics and respect, and large-scale internal transformations, for example, culture change. She designs and develops learning interventions based on behavioural science, including workshops, coaching and nudges. She is excited about the positive impact of her work; after all, work is a big part of our daily lives, and hence a significant contributor to our well-being. Her aim is to make the workplace experience as good as it can be in key dimensions.

Her main project currently is with a global organisation, which is undertaking a significant cultural transformation that will extend over at least three years. The transformation has three priorities, one of which is that employees take more ownership of decisions, and act more accountably. Pauline is working very closely with clients to understand concrete blockers for ownership and define target behaviours. Based on this understanding, she is helping to develop new learning interventions, engagement campaigns, and an online campaign hub. The campaign targets both managers and change champions as force multipliers.

Merle was educated in Liberal Arts at University College Maastricht, where she majored in economic psychology. She went on to do her MSc in Behavioural and Economic science, following that up with the PhD in behavioural science. She reinforced the need for behavioural scientists to master data science tools, especially R and Python.

She had a number of pithy observations on the PhD experience:

• “It is not an education.” PhD students are being trained to become independent researchers, with an emphasis on “independent.” There is very little structure, and you are expected to find your own way. The only target — the thesis — is years away.
• The most important variable in choosing a PhD is “the match between your working style and that of your supervisor.” The topic of your PhD, the status of the university and the status of your supervisor are all important, but do not impact your day-to-day experience over what is likely to be a very long period of time. Mismatched working styles add tension and increase the risk of miscommunication and misunderstanding.

Ekaterina and Nancy opened the floor for questions.

“What do you find most interesting in behavioural science?”

Merle felt that the most interesting topic in behavioural science is how people interact with money. This is a relatively young field with some amazing discoveries, some of which are robust and some which warrant further study.

Zsofia in turn felt that intersectionality was the most interesting topic, in particular how behavioural science can contribute to fighting racism and exclusion at the workplace and beyond. More broadly, she finds the balancing act between “nudges” and paternalism fascinating, with the power of scientific influencing counterbalanced by leaving opt-out options.

Pauline finds the interdisciplinary nature of behavioural science its most appealing aspect. Understanding why people behave as they do, and working systematically through ways to intervene is not obvious and necessarily cross-disciplinary. Interventions can go wrong in many ways and it’s often not straightforward to rectify them.

“What kind of jobs can I get in the field of behavioural sciences?”

Merle felt that behavioural science was quite a broad church. Specific job options would depend on the title and content of degrees taken, extra-curricular activities, and self-marketing.

Separately, she observed that not all behavioural science jobs had obviously relevant labels. For example, user experience is a particular focus of many firms just now, and there are opportunities for behavioural scientists in this field as well.

She recommended Behiring as a job-seeking resource.

She stressed that “behavioural science is not the same as behavioural economics,” noting that the latter was typically characterised by “proving neo-classical economics wrong,” rather than as a behavioural discipline. Behavioural science as a discipline encompasses many other fields of study, such as psychology, marketing, economics, management and so forth.

Drawing on a recent presentation on job opportunities in behavioural science, Zsofia noted that there are two main streams: public sector or private sector. Many areas of the UK Civil Service recruit behavioural scientists, including DEFRA, the Home Office, the CMA, and the MoJ. In the private sector, financial services seem to be very active. With either client type, behavioural scientists can be internal to a firm, or external, as a consultant.

She recommended rehearsing how specific aspects of behavioural science would apply in specific contexts, as it’s likely that’ll be asked in the interview.

Pauline pointed to four main areas: advising government on policy; researching in academia; workplace consultancies; and the not-for-profit sector, for example, circular fashion. Sometimes a job title might be explicit regarding its behavioural science content; sometimes it’s more implicit.

“What would be your advice for finding internships? What was your personal experience with finding internships during undergrad?”

Pauline didn’t do internships during her undergraduate studies (these are less common in the Netherlands). However, she started at MindGym as an intern, as she felt it would be a good transition into working life, especially as it meant getting more initial support. She, therefore, felt that it was important not to rule out internships as part of the full-time job search process.

Separately, she emphasised the need to make as many connections in the field as possible. This entails many messages to many companies, many of which receive no response. However, the few responses that do arrive, even if they are not positive, are rich sources of connections and insight if mined appropriately through coffee chats.

She felt that students should have their CV, along with reasons and motivations for a role, ready at all times.

Zsofia accepted an internship at Diageo’s Budapest HR team after her 2nd year as an undergraduate. After her third year, a Hungarian fintech company reached out looking for an intern. She worked for them for a year during her master’s degree. Halfway through this degree, MoreThanNow advertised for an associate job, which she applied for successfully. This turned into full time role when she finished her degree.

Given her experience, she emphasised the need to look beyond behavioural science, narrowly defined. She noted the high likelihood and emotional impact of rejections but highlighted the character building and skin thickening qualities of rejections and ghosting.

Merle echoed Pauline’s point about the paucity of internships in the Netherlands. She emphasised the importance of networking with students who are further ahead in their course of study. In particular, she felt that “there’s nothing weird in asking someone a couple of years ahead of you to mentor you.” Indeed she felt that it was more than normal, as behavioural science in Europe is a small field and after a while, everyone knows everyone anyway. Fellow behavioural scientists are often more than happy to sit down, have a coffee and chat.

She noted that some firms, for example, Ogilvy (marketing), Cowry (consulting), and Kantar (public policy), all have internship programs.

“Given field is new and not fully understood by many companies/public bodies, how have you highlighted the value add to new clients/organisations?”

Zsofia felt that is the most challenging part of the job. In practice, clients are better off working experimentally, where they know they’ll be able to measure an effect than employing a generalist consultant and never knowing whether the intervention worked or not.

In concrete terms, she recommended communicating the technical elements of a behavioural science approach in a way that’s understandable.

Pauline’s approach relies heavily on case studies from prior clients and scientific research, especially if they bring out some of the nuance around designing interventions and measuring their impact — it’s never as simple as it looks. She mentioned the intervention of fining parents for picking up their children late from school, which had the effect of increasing late pickups as the decision had been transposed from the moral domain to the financial one.

“Would you recommend doing a PhD if don’t want to stay in academia?”

For Merle, it simply wouldn’t have been able to get the Australian visa required for her new role without a PhD — the PhD gave her the edge she needed, but this is often not the case. It’s important to ensure that the (type of) organisations you’d want to work for value research, and have a history of hiring PhDs. If not, the PhD might not offer you the edge you’re looking for.

Zsofia pointed out that most junior full-time positions at her firm required a masters, but not a PhD. She felt that if one does not plan to pursue an academic career, work experience can be worthier of one’s time than a PhD.

Pauline felt that students should continue to a PhD only if they really enjoyed the PhD process. She thought about it for a long time. At her firm, most colleagues have a Masters. She also stressed that research is only part of the skill set needed in professional settings. For example, interacting with clients was a key skill.

Is there a lot of overlap between behavioural science and mental health research?

Merle felt that from an academic perspective there was a growing overlap that was proceeding slowly, alongside the happiness/wellbeing movement.

Zsofia’s view was that it “was not the closest association, yet. She felt that there was nevertheless an opportunity to integrate behavioural science approaches and frameworks into the investigation of wellbeing and happiness, in particular regarding the impact of technology.

Pauline was aligned. In her view, there was only a minor overlap thus far.

What’s your favourite behavioural science tool/framework?

Zsofia felt that the MINDSPACE framework worked well.

Pauline favoured COM-B. Especially after applying it day to day she has come to appreciate it, in part because of its simplicity. She would like to fuse COM-B and MINDSPACE.

Merle advocated COM-B.

If you could go back a couple of years, would you have done anything differently?

Pauline would not have done much differently overall. She felt that the choices made got her to a job that she loves. That said, more research on the details of Masters’ programs would have been time well spent.

Merle felt that she decided to do a PhD without having bottomed out the implications, in particular time and money. She wouldn’t change the journey because she likes the destination.

Zsofia wouldn’t change anything: “everything has led me to where I am today.” That said, she advises students “not have two part-time jobs next to your master’s degree [as she did] … because you won’t be able to get out of your degree what you need.”

Nancy and Ekaterina thanked the panellists for their time and insight and the audience for their interest and questions.