Living a Behavioural Analysis
Phew.
Does anyone else feel like they aged by 10 years in the past month? If the indicators are anything to go by, it seems like we are in this for the long run. A little more aging is in store for us. As a behavioral science practitioner, I am having a fascinating out-of-body experience of watching myself exhibit all the behaviors I have always talked about in my workshops and meetings.
One of my favorite frameworks to teach and share is the BASIC toolkit [2]. Developed by the OECD to help apply behavioral science insights to public policy analysis, it draws on a taxonomy of ABCD — Attention, Belief, Choice and Determination — to help understand behavior through small-scale experimentation. As one of the most prevalent and useful behavioral frameworks for beginners and experts alike, BASIC is a mainstay of my teaching curriculum — and yet, though my meetings are for the time cancelled, I have never felt more connected to the material than I do now.
It seems a common belief these days is that we will all come out of this crisis changed. For me, perhaps the biggest change has been taking material I typically teach to others and applying it to a new subject altogether: myself.
So, let me present to you my real life, experience-based ABCD analysis of my behavior.
References
- Ariely, D. (2008). Predictably irrational. New York, NY: Harper Audio.
- Hansen, P. G. (2018). BASIC: Behavioural Insights Toolkit and Ethical Guidelines for Policy Makers.
- Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1977). Intuitive prediction: Biases and corrective procedures. Decisions and Designs Inc Mclean Va.
- O’Donoghue, T., & Rabin, M. (1999). Doing it now or later. American Economic Review, 89(1), 103-124.
- Peters, E., Lipkus, I. & Diefenbach, M. A. The Functions of Affect in Health Communications and in the Construction of Health Preferences. J. Commun. 56, S140–S162 (2006).
- Sweller, J. (1994). Cognitive load theory, learning difficulty, and instructional design. Learning and instruction, 4(4), 295-312.
- Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1989). Rational choice and the framing of decisions. In Multiple criteria decision making and risk analysis using microcomputers (pp. 81-126). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
- Van Bavel, J. J., Boggio, P., Capraro, V., Cichocka, A., Cikara, M., Crockett, M., … & Ellemers, N. (2020). Using social and behavioral science to support COVID-19 pandemic response.
- Wason, Peter C. (1960), “On the failure to eliminate hypotheses in a conceptual task”, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12 (3): 129–40, ISSN 1747-0226
About the Author
Preeti Kotamarthi
Preeti Kotamarthi is the Behavioral Science Lead at Grab, the leading ride-hailing and mobile payments app in South East Asia. She has set up the behavioral practice at the company, helping product and design teams understand customer behavior and build better products. She completed her Masters in Behavioral Science from the London School of Economics and her MBA in Marketing from FMS Delhi. With more than 6 years of experience in the consumer products space, she has worked in a range of functions, from strategy and marketing to consulting for startups, including co-founding a startup in the rural space in India. Her main interest lies in popularizing behavioral design and making it a part of the product conceptualization process.
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