What is behavioral research?
What is behavioral research, and how is it different from other social sciences as well as business research? Which behaviors matter most to you? (5–10 minute read)
First, the Short Answer…
Behavioral research is an umbrella term used to describe research in the social and behavioral sciences in health policy, social work, and management that deals with human behavior in real-world settings. In management sciences, behavioral research includes but is not limited to negotiations, marketing, behavioral and experimental economics, strategy, and consumer behavior.
Behavioral researchers conduct studies to understand the ways in which individuals and groups make economic decisions, such as how individuals might fail to live up to their stated goals due to systematic shortcomings, which often stem from cognitive and behavioral biases. They analyze the factors underlying behavioral change, including risk factors in healthcare and causal mechanisms in economic transitions in the developing world and over the course of time on an individual level.
Which research approaches do behavioral researchers utilize?
Behavioral research bridges both quantitative and qualitative research to quantify human behavior, collect new data, and systematically compare treatment and control conditions on human behavior and choice. Behavioral experiments in labs (or “lab-in-the-field”) present a task in which one must participate and place money on one’s beliefs and preferences. Placing money one one’s beliefs simulates economic realities outside of the lab. What is unique to behavioral research is a view that behavior is what it is, with some behaviors easier to “capture” than are others. Datasets that have been created by companies to make sense of their operations can be expanded with new variables that were not before considered to be of value (thoughts, feelings, perceptions), including information on motivation and engagement over time, as HR departments have been increasingly deploying in “People Analytics.”
Do behavioral researchers conduct lab in the field with real people or in the lab?
Both. Behavioral research is conducted anywhere that can test a causal or correlational relationship between variables. In the field, where variability is more difficult to control, survey research may be combined with instruments, such as psychological scales, and quantitative outcomes. One common example is through randomized controlled trials (RCTs) (treatment + control) between similar groups, often in degrees or levels of treatment, leveraged to clearly identify causal mechanisms of change. Introduce a different change to the treatment and you will be highly confident it was the result of your action rather than random chance when participants can be randomized into groups.
For example: RCTs allow one to estimate how a small change in a variable of interest (how workers are paid, whether biweekly or monthly) has affected an economic or psychological outcome (how quickly the money is spent). This differs from the methods from some strands of management research, which have privileged exclusively either qualitative data (conducting interviews and administering surveys) or quantitative data (analyzing large datasets) to understand economic trends, outcomes, and forecasts. Behavioral research is more holistic in its approach to science. Because many changes in industry and economic relations are responsive to political economy (e.g., CEO statements), findings from interviews on worker behavior, managerial attention, and stock market perceptions are all equally valuable.
*What makes behavioral research fun is that this all also means behavioral researchers can design new changes and test them.
*It also implies that behavioral research is adaptive, and one can work with whatever database and research has been done previously, whether written notes, recorded interviews, or “big data.” You have an important behavior of interest? As they say, “we have a variable for that.”
How can we measure the “knowledge-behavior gap” between intention and action?
One answer is that incentives matter, and if you analyze the incentive structure, one can learn about motivation, cognition, and behavior. Behavioral research does not rest settled with the assumption inherent to economic sciences that there is a simple causal relationship between intention and action. Complexity economics has arisen as a source of inspiration to talk about unexpected economic trends from the unprecedent scale of economic power brought about by globalization and technological consolidation: social networks, corporate mergers, and even predictable pipelines in educational systems. Today it may be even more unlikely for people to behave how they want due to barriers placed in one’s way, so we can’t always be sure that data tells us exactly what is going on.
What if people know what they want and can articulate it well?
On the other hand, even if people know exactly what they want, people have difficulties carrying out both short and long-term plans with many barriers. They may do things they themselves do not expect. What is an ideal behavior at work may be impractical to carry out in many companies due to organizational cultures that are toxic, de-motivating, biased, or neutral.
Behavioral economics has documented how we often fail ourselves in startling and creative ways, making convenient tradeoffs between our competing priorities. Deeper research about attitudes and intentions in economic psychology is necessary to make sense of past and future economic behavior, not only financial data which hides motivations, compromises, and errors in judgment.
All in all, behavioral research does not start with assumptions like economic theory that economic data is indicative of intention. How people have behaved is not necessarily how they would have preferred to behave, all things considered. People are responding to new information, learning new skills, and forming new relationships, all of which change outcomes. But since people do not usually like to hear their beliefs are wrong (gasp!), behavioral research can achieve impressive outcomes by persuading and challenging corporate and organizational cultures that are harmful, biased against women or minorities, or have become complacent.
(The financial crisis is a salient example and a favorite among experts. What would have happened if we had more data on behaviors of mortgage brokers, financiers, salespersons, and others? Our predictions of uncertainty come from our data, so the more diverse our data (beliefs, preferences, behaviors, feelings, and even counterfactuals), the better off we will be. We have hardly any knowledge of counterfactual thinking, but many recognize that there are definitely alternative “worlds we may have wanted” just as there are things in life one may have wanted but have not gotten.)
What if my data is good enough for now?
Data expires faster than ever. New data needs to be collected to keep up with changes in how society is growing and attitudes are developing. When the data available do not speak for themselves, behavioral research adds explanatory richness and accounts for the spontaneous impulses and entrenched habits that policies, programs, companies, and organizations assume are constant. Preferences are not complete in themselves but are strongly affected by local incentives, behavioral and cognitive limitations, and environmental factors. Marketing sciences holds instead that preferences are constructed by our interaction and participation in processes, products, and discourse.
Who are behavioral researchers?
Behavioral researchers come from many disciplines with the shared goal of understanding how individuals make decisions over time to achieve short-run and long-run goals. The interdisciplinary field includes social psychologists, on the one end of the spectrum, and experimental economists on the other end, unified by the use of experimental methodologies to investigate the impact of motivations, incentives and perceived value on choice. These might be economic in nature or based in personal or social evaluations and emotions.
Where exactly do behavioral researchers work?
Behavioral researchers conduct research in any context in which decision-makers make trade-offs with limited information. Some are in academia, others are in industry. Many more are in government roles evaluating and testing policies. These also include applied contexts in field experiments at organizations and experimental studies in the lab where researchers test causal relationships and correlations between variables of interest, such as motivation on performance or product features on consumer choice. In either context, for example, one might pilot behavioral responses to recent legislation or company programs, run test trials on innovative products, or investigate which factors might facilitate or impede pro-social behavior or teamwork. To date, much research has been conducted on how individuals make choices under uncertainty, assess risks, and evaluate alternatives to make informed choices. We now know quite a lot about what makes for happy, productive, and cooperative teams and how best to make use of technology to increase engagement.
So, what is behavioral research?
The longer answer requires more reflection: Behavioral research is research designed to capture every behavior that matters for outcomes of interest… So what interests you? I often ask workshop attendees to think hard on the following questions: Which behaviors are integral to your daily life, your business, and your relationships? Which (if any) of these could change or be improved in some way? How will you know when they have changed? Well that’s what behavioral research is all about.
Please reach out to let me know which behaviors matter most to you.
© N. Maddix 2017
