Interview with Eshan Motwani

Behavioural Science is a rapidly expanding field and everyday new research is being developed in academia, tested and implemented by practitioners in financial organisations, development agencies, government ‘nudge’ units and more. This interview is part of a series interviewing prominent people in the field. And in today's interview the answers are provided by Eshan Motwani. Eshan is a Behavioral Economist at Google and a Board Member of the United Nations Population Fund's Global Tech Innovation Board. He has 14 years of experience in applying behavioural economics insights across technology and public policy. He has led projects in the US, Australia, New Zealand and across the APAC region including in Singapore where he was based for 4 years. Prior to his role at Google he was the Behavioral Economics Practice Lead for PwC Australia and New Zealand. Eshan is now based in Sydney, Australia. The views expressed in this interview are his own and are not representative of Google.

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Who or what got you into behavioural science?

I was studying Economics at University when I was first introduced to Nudge. I remember feeling that the book helped to explain a lot of my world-view in a much more articulate (and of course better researched way) than I could have. I looked for more and fortunately it was easy to find research by Cialdini, Mullainathan, Ariely and others so I was a little dismayed that I had only really begun to open this door pretty far into my Economics degree.

I started my career as a Public Policy consultant but it wasn’t until a few years later that I finally got to apply my interest in Behavioural Economics. It was largely a coincidence too. New employees at PwC Australia at the time were all randomly assigned a ‘Career Coach’ to help them navigate the organisation. My career coach just so happened to be Jason Collins (whom you’ve previously interviewed) who was looking to kickstart the Behavioural Economics Practice there. I asked (though I think he would say ‘demanded’) to be added to every pitch and project he was exploring, which gave me invaluable practical experience to finally apply the research insights I had been consuming for years.

Jason then left PwC a few years later and our team leaders fortunately agreed to let me take over running the Behavioural Economics practice. I feel incredibly lucky that they trusted me with this responsibility as I got to grow our team and lead projects in Australia and New Zealand for different companies and government departments.

What is the accomplishment you are proudest of as a behavioural scientist?

I’ve been very lucky to have worked in teams with incredibly talented people that I’ve been able to learn a lot from. Every accomplishment has been a joint one and one that I’m especially proud of currently is being part of a multidisciplinary team that is advising a UN Agency to improve reproductive and maternal health worldwide.

I am a Board Member of the United Nations Population Fund’s (UNFPA) Global Tech Innovation Board and that means I get to apply my expertise to hopefully make a positive impact on vulnerable populations in Sub-Saharan Africa. I recently had the opportunity to train Nigerian and Ghanaian community leaders on how to use Behavioural Economics insights to develop engaging, informative and actionable communication strategies to promote positive masculinity across their communities. We’ve seen from the research that positive masculinity can lead to improved power dynamics, financial independence and opportunities for women and reduced violence and sexual assault incidents. It’s been incredibly rewarding to work directly with community leaders who are passionate about fighting toxic masculinity and with global agencies like the UNFPA who seek out innovation to address important challenges.

Our training was selected and then presented in April 2024 at a UN wide event to announce the Secretary-General’s vision of modernising the UN with Behavioural Economics as one of five key pillars. It felt pretty incredible to contribute to this refresh and we’ve since been invited to run a similar program for UN Women and other UN Country offices in Asia and Africa.

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If you weren’t a behavioural scientist, what would you be doing?

This is your most challenging question! I really don’t know what I would be doing in an alternative timeline. Prior to Economics, I actually started my university education focusing on Commerce and Finance but switched degrees entirely after just one semester - if I hadn’t, then there’s a good chance that I’d either still be trying to earn my degree, or I would be solely responsible for some sort of financial crisis. But, I am an aspiring science fiction author so what I hope I’d be doing is writing interesting new stories!

How do you apply behavioural science in your personal life?

I make to-do-lists for essentially everything: chores, groceries, daily project tasks, supplies for a short drive with my kids and more. I initially started drafting short to-do lists because I felt uncomfortable or distracted while trying to mentally juggle all my various things to do unsuccessfully. It sounds simple and productive, but drafting lists has helped me to really transform my task prioritisation and opened up my capacity to be more present.

My lists have become a lot more sophisticated now (geo-tagging, sub-lists, colour-coding!) and it was many years after I first started this habit that I came across Bluma Zeigarnik’s research that helped to explain my appreciation with lists. Zeigarnik’s research found that we have a tendency to remember incomplete or interrupted tasks better than completed ones, but each of these types of tasks take up more of our mental capacity and make it difficult to focus. Further research found that making a plan or listing out the different tasks can provide mental relief, even if we don’t actually complete everything on our lists.

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With all your experience, what skills would you say are needed to be a behavioural scientist? Are there any recommendations you would make?

I think many of your previous interviewees have spoken about the importance of research, experimentation and technical skills. Those skills are critical so rather than repeating what others have already said I’m going to suggest two other skills that I believe are important for emerging Behavioural Economists. These include problem-solving skills and collaboration skills, both of which I believe are interwoven.

Regarding problem-solving skills, Behavioural Economists benefit from being able to draw on interdisciplinary insights when thinking about a problem and breaking it down into its component parts. We are naturally encouraged to think about the wider context of a specific challenge rather than treating it in isolation. We question existing assumptions about behavioural patterns rather than accepting them as facts. We can then draw from a range of instruments in our toolkit to figure out just how much we understand the challenge itself. These are just a few things we are trained to consider before we start thinking about ‘solutions’.

This ties in with the other skill that I mentioned - collaboration skills. We often rely on the expertise of our partners and stakeholders who, like us, are similarly looking for ways to address the challenge under consideration. There can be cases however where we need to approach individuals and teams who are unaware of the extent of a challenge. In those situations it is our job to educate them with the hope that they can provide their expertise, for example by sharing (relevant) historical data, walking us through any past efforts to address the same/similar challenges and their own ideas on how to approach the challenge.

Collaboration doesn’t have to stop at the ‘discovery’ stage of a problem. My favourite projects have been those where I’ve got to partner with experts from discovery through to ideation, design, launch and analysis. In several of those projects I’ve found that our role as Behavioural Economists can be particularly effective when I’ve understood that not all of a problem’s components can or should be addressed using Behavioural Economics and that our partner’s skill sets would be much more appropriate in those cases. I have no problems in identifying my own limitations or that of the Behavioural Economics toolkit available in a situation. My hope however is that good problem solving and collaboration skills can mean that we can use our interdisciplinary knowledge to help teams with navigating how to comprehensively address their challenges.

How do you think behavioural science will develop (in the next 10 years)?

I think that there could be two significant trends that will happen in the field in the next 10 years. The first has already begun in my opinion - I think more Behavioural Economics Teams will branch out and start to include individuals with skills much more diverse than a traditional Behavioural Economics background. These teams will feature UX Designers, Data Scientists, Programmers, Policy Experts, Growth Marketers and other relevant professions so that they can all contribute to understanding and then designing comprehensive perspectives on a problem.

Behavioural Economists may be able to leverage inter-disciplinary insights, but this isn’t the same as being able to apply dedicated experts’ attention towards analysing a problem. Being able to readily partner with these experts in an ‘in-house’ capacity could become invaluable as the nature of behavioural challenges across industries becomes increasingly complex.

This ties into my second predicted trend. Human reliance and interaction with AI is likely going to increase exponentially. Our field has already made inroads across some industries that are going to be impacted by AI, but I wonder if there will be major events that we look back to as pivotal moments for the field. This could be breakthroughs in the application of AI+BE in providing real-time personalised healthcare, improved agricultural resource management or perhaps in being able to tackle the risks borne from misinformation. Every sector is currently on a journey of how to harness AI to improve outcomes, so it is my hope that Behavioural Economics can play a pivotal role in helping governments and companies to responsibly achieve better outcomes too.

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What are the greatest challenges being faced by behavioural science, right now?

I’m worried that our field’s earned trust is going to be eroded by increasingly common and sophisticated dark patterns. It’s not hard to find manipulative choice architecture, especially online. We see them in common user pathways, like when you’re trying to unsubscribe or cancel an online subscription and that pathway is designed to be intentionally difficult. Dark patterns leverage Behavioural Economics insights to be more effective and exploitative so it’s easy to see how the two can be confused. Regulators in the EU and the US have made many types of online dark patterns illegal through GDPR and the FTC Act respectively, but this obviously only addresses a pocket of online activity globally.

Public sentiment isn’t static and trust needs to be continued to be earned in my opinion and there could be a risk that irresponsible Behavioural Economics applications could have a bearing on how the field is regarded (and ultimately used) in the future.

What advice would you give to young behavioural scientists or those looking to progress into the field?

Something that resonated with me early in my Behavioural Economics career was the famous Einstein quote: “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” I keep this guidance in mind at the start of every new project and I believe that my work has been better because of it.

In practice this has meant that I dedicate a lot of time to asking questions when I’m examining a challenge, a sample of which includes: What are the component parts? What evidence is available (and what evidence is lacking)? Who else is the problem solving for? Is the challenge just symptomatic of something larger that I should be thinking about instead? What other skills and whom else should I be partnering with to better understand and then design for this challenge?

I’ve found that asking these types of questions early in the process has helped me to deliver more meaningful and comprehensive project work.

Which other behavioural scientists would you love to read an interview by?

Melaina Vinski is the Behavioural Economics & Gen AI Lead at IBM and I think she would have some fascinating insights about the future of our field. Melaina and I led the PwC Global Behavioural Economics Community of Practice together some years ago. She was leading BE at PwC Canada and I was leading the BE Practice at PwC Australia and I still remember her valuable input into some of my project work!

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Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions Eshan!

As I said before, this interview is part of a larger series which can also be found here on the blog. Make sure you don't miss any of those, nor any of the upcoming interviews!

Keep your eye on Money on the Mind!