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 Laurel Newman. Laurel is a behavioral scientist at Edward Jones, where she applies motivation research to improve the effectiveness of compensation, incentive, recognition, and reward design. She has a Ph.D. in Social and Personality Psychology from Washington University in St. Louis, and spent the first 12 years of her career as professor and Chair of the Dept of Behavioral Sciences at a small Liberal Arts University. She is the author of several articles and chapters, and co-editor of the book, "building behavioral science in an organization" with Zarak Khan. She has created and delivered an enterprise-wide curriculum on behavioral science, has designed, conducted, and published experiments with various organizations, and is co-founder of the employee engagement company Whistle, which uses behavioral science and technology to help employees whistle while they work.
How did you get into behavioral science?
I have a PhD in social psychology. I've always been interested in how the context or environment shapes people’s behavior. At the time I was in school, there really wasn't a field of behavioral science, so social psychology was the field that was closest to that.
After my PhD, I was a professor for about 12 years. I loved teaching, and it was amazing to be paid to learn about new research and areas of psych like lifespan development and positive psych. But after about 12 years of teaching, I felt like I needed a change and wanted to apply psychology to real world problems. My first applied job was still very academic in nature – reading research and using it to improve products & services in the employee motivation space. It was a perfect bridge job.
What is your proudest achievement? Professional achievement? Probably finishing my PhD, becoming a professor, and then dept. chair. I was also able to publish some of my work, which is always rewarding and exciting. A couple of years ago I helped co-found a startup called Whistle (for “Whistle while you work”). We use fintech in new ways to drive employee engagement and shape behavior change. If it continues to grow as we expect, that will be another huge accomplishment – both to be a female co-founder of a business like this, and to have a positive impact on thousands or millions of employees.
What do you still want to achieve?
I'm really interested in applying behavioral science to parenting. Learning behavioral science has been hugely helpful for me as a parent. As odd as it sounds, it’s helped me to have really close, happy relationships with my kids while still holding them to high expectations. I would love to find a way to share this with other parents by writing a book or running some workshops or something.
So is this also the main way that you apply behavioral science to your own life?
Yeah - people tend to think about behavioral science as manipulating people; getting them to do things against their will. But in my experience as a parent, usually my goals and my kids’ goals are aligned. There may just be hidden barriers or conflicting timelines or something like that. BeSci has given me a framework for being on the same team as my kids, against those barriers.
When applying it to myself, I’ve tried to find ways to reduce errors made by system 2 thinking. Like making weighted spreadsheets when I'm trying to make a big decision to help me see whether the choice I want to make really is the best choice.
How do you see behavioral science develop for, say, the next decade? What are you excited about? What are you worried about? And what are the challenges we still need to overcome to get there?
The thing I'm most worried about? There's been a heavy emphasis in the field on nudges and biases, which rarely solve big business problems. One of the things I'd like to see is a framing of behavioral science as a broader set of tools and a knowledge base that can help solve problems in the business or in medicine or wherever it’s being applied. Starting by understanding the causes of the problem vs. just diving into an intervention and testing it. How do we pause to really understand the causes of this problem? How do we design interventions that will effectively address those causes? How do we test whether they work? So starting at the beginning versus what often happens with new behavioral scientists: starting at the end with a solution in their hand and saying, “I just read about this nudge or this intervention at Google – where could we use it here?”
Two things I'm really optimistic about: First, I think behavioral science will play a larger role in HR because there's so much overlap there. Behavioral science could help by applying secondary research to make employee experiences better, and by working with the data to test how different ideas work in terms of improving employee retention, satisfaction, productivity, whatever. Second, there’s a lot of promise in the embedded model. At Edward Jones, we have a small team of behavioral scientists who meet regularly, but we are each embedded in one business area so we can really be experts in that. I think that is the future of our field. Having people who are on an outside team and float around, I just don't think it can have the same impact.
What would you argue is your main motivation for the second point? When you are embedded in one area you just get to know much more about it. You can develop better interventions and understand the role they plan in the larger ecosystem of things that might impact your key behavior. You know what has been tried in the past and worked or blew up. You can see behavioral roots of business problems. Also, you have more influence as an ingroup member. If I feel strongly that we need to make a change within my embedded function, I can explain why, and there's a good chance that they'll hear me and agree because they know me well, they know that I understand the situation, and they trust me. If you sit outside the team, all of this is less likely to be the case.
Do you have like a personal frustration with the field? Probably my biggest frustration is what we discussed earlier, where people start with the intervention without really stopping to ask what the problem is. I use this analogy a lot: if you're not feeling well and you call your doctor, your doctor doesn't just say, “Take some Pepto Bismol”. They ask you what exactly is wrong, when it started, what the symptoms are. There are thousands of different medicines or interventions that the doctor could draw on. But what we often do in business is we say, “let's try this” because the business either doesn’t have the expertise to do the behavioral diagnosis or doesn’t want to take the time. If we can’t help that, so be it. But I think it’s our responsibility to try.
What do you think makes for a really good behavioral scientist? What is the skill set that you need to have?
You obviously have to have a thorough knowledge of behavioral science concepts, behavior models, experimental design and non-experimental design. In my career, companies have rarely wanted to run true experiments. It’s more likely that you’re applying secondary research that has solved a similar problem in a similar context, and you're analyzing how it's working as best you can. So understanding statistical inference can be as important as understanding experimental design. Second, being able to influence which projects you take on so you can have the greatest impact. You are there to serve the business; the business is not there to give you an environment for testing. If more people read the company newsletter, or show up for meetings right on time vs 3 minutes late, or submit time cards on time - is this a significant win for the business? You want to work “closest to the sun.” So if you’re in the pharmaceutical business, how do you get people to choose your drug or to take it each day as instructed? Being able to prioritize and get yourself close to the things that really impact the business is key. And then last, I would say just communication and informal influence. When we interviewed colleagues for our book “Building Behavioral Science in an Organization” one of the biggest challenges they mentioned was that they would do all this work to design an intervention and it just wouldn't get implemented because it wasn't their call to actually push the button. So being able to influence that pushing of the button is critical. That gets back at the benefits of the embedded model.
For someone with little to no experience in behavioral science, how would you recommend for them to get into the field?
It’s important to get a research-based degree. There you can learn a body of research in the area that you're interested in, so that you can apply other people's findings appropriately. And you learn how to conduct primary research both experimentally and non-experimentally because often experiments are just not feasible. These are things that other stakeholders will not have: They're not going to know the literature; they're not going to know as much as you about research design and inference.
Do you think there's a world in which you wouldn't have been a behavioral scientist and then what would you have been?
If I left academia in this other world, I would have probably tried to invent a company or role that joins up my passions in a new way. For a while I thought about trying to be a corporate mediator. I don’t know if that’s a real role, but a lot of companies could benefit from someone internal who can take disagreements between teams or individuals, diffuse them, and give them an objective, constructive path forward. It’s about making sure both sides feel adequately heard and an unbiased solution is offered so people can move on without harboring resentment.
Who else has inspired you in behavioral science? Most influential for my career, I would say, is B. J. Fogg. His motivation, ability, prompt model informed how I approach behavior design.
Sarah Newcomb really inspired me to care about finance from an emotional perspective. Her book Loaded introduced me to the psychological experiences people have around financial behaviors, which was huge for me at that time. I’ve learned a lot from Charlotte Blank and Zarak Khan about leadership: how to get buy in from stakeholders; the importance of hiring amazing people even if it takes a while, being flexible to the business but also speaking up when you need to. My style is to do the best work I can and let it speak for itself. But there is a lot that goes on outside of your work that influences your ability to have impact. Charlotte and Zarak are both great at balancing both sides of it.
And Drew Carter, who is CEO of Whistle. He has an MBA from Wharton, was a software developer, then a partner at a data science consulting firm, and has become an expert in technology, AI, and now behavioral science. He was president of an IRR (incentives, recognition, rewards) company and saw from the inside that the whole points-based recognition model was sort of designed to be unfalsifiable and a little predatory to clients. So he created a company that does it better and for a lower cost. We use BeSci at Whistle in a bunch of ways – platform design and Ux, program design, reward strategy, communications… but he could care less if behavioral science is or is not the right tool for the job – it’s all about solving the problem using all the tools that are out there. Few people have the depth and breadth of expertise to do that.
Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions Laurel!
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!
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My first job application dordle was still mostly academic in nature; it included reading research and using it to enhance employee motivation-related goods and services. Perfect bridge work was done.