Interview with Zarak Khan

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 Zarak Khan.

Zarak is a behavioral scientist with experience generating and applying insights to organizational strategy, innovation infrastructure, product design, and public policy. He has specific expertise in building behavioral science capabilities within organizations. He supports initiatives across industry, academia, and philanthropy. He leads a behavioral science team within a large US investment firm, supporting everything from firm strategy to tactical intervention design. He is also a Senior Behavioral Researcher at Duke University and a Behavioral Science Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches an applied behavioral science consulting course to graduate students. Furthermore, Zarak is an editor and co-author of the books Building Behavioral Science in an Organization and Behavioral Science for Development. These books serve as practitioners’ guides to creating a behavioral science team and applying behavioral science to international development. He serves as the board chair of Bescy (formerly Action Design Network), a non-profit community of over twenty thousand practitioners and researchers interested in exploring the use of behavioral science and psychology in the design and development of products and policies that help people take action to improve their lives.

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 How did you get into behavioral science?

When I graduated from college, I did this program in the US  called AmeriCorps. I was leading a project of about 10 other volunteers that were placed around the state of North Carolina, focusing on improving financial wellbeing for low income households. We did that through a couple different methods, usually focused around asset building in some way. We would also help people fill out their taxes. The US has a weird tax system where you have to kind of estimate what you're supposed to pay and low income folks often will get a tax refund. There's plenty of stats in the US around emergency savings and how many low income households don't have any, so we thought that this is a pretty good opportunity to get people to save for an emergency fund.

We had these sites set up all around the state. Helping people fill out their tax information for free, and then when they got the check, asking them whether they wanted to put any of that into savings. And for the most part, people said “thanks, but no, thanks”. It was a really high effort, manual yet ineffective initiative.

Right around the same time, I learned about this project in partnership with TurboTax (tax filing software) where people were given an estimate in advance. Turbotax would say something like: “Hey, it looks like you're going to receive $X as a refund. If you do receive $X, to what extent do you want to save?” And this did work. The people who pre-committed to saving agreed to save more frequently and then saved higher amounts. I became curious as to whether there actually was a discipline around this or whether this was just one person's clever idea? So that was my first introduction to behavioral science.

I was also deciding right then what I wanted to do for grad school. When I finished up AmeriCorps, the next thing I wanted to do was learn more about program evaluation. As I didn't think I did a really good job of evaluating the impact of this - I did the best that I could, but I knew enough to know there's a better way of doing this and I knew I wanted to learn more about behavioral science. And so I ended up going to Duke for grad school in their public policy master's program.

From there I did a couple things related to behavioral science: I worked for a management consulting firm in DC, where I led an internal behavioral science working group. I also came across this group called Action Design Network (now Bescy). They were forming as a nonprofit and Steve Wendel, who founded the group, had invited me to join in a more formal way to help out. So I was their first secretary for a couple of years. And then eventually I led the Washington DC chapter, and then was president of Action Design for a few years. Through that I met the then Chief Behavioral Officer of a company called Maritz, Charlotte Blank; they were looking for somebody who had a management consulting background but with expertise in behavioral science as well, so I was a good fit for what they were looking for and I spent three years there.

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What is the achievement you're proudest of so far? And what is it that you still want to achieve?

In AmeriCorps the focus of the work that I was doing was on capacity building. You’re not necessarily doing direct service, but you're building the capacity of an organization to serve more people. I think that's the mentality that I bring to a lot of the work that I do. And so I'm always proudest of opportunities or initiatives where I have increased the capacity of an organization or built a program that is more durable and helps people. Most recently I’ve gotten a great sense of satisfaction from teaching in the UPenn Masters of Behavioral and Decision Sciences program, and supporting students in their journey as behavioural scientists. I love to see people advance in their careers.

I'm always excited about the future. I feel like there's a ton of opportunity to have a positive impact. One project that I'm particularly excited about right now is we just had this book published in December (Behavioral Science for Development) and as the time and attention for that has ramped down, the project that has taken its place is this research project focused on better understanding how people navigate life changing decisions. It’s not about nudging or habits, it’s about the things that consume a lot of our brain power and emotions with opportunities for us to minimize the regrets that people have in their lives. So that’s a project that I'm particularly excited about right now.

Lots of optimism! Now tell me your biggest personal frustration with behavioural science!    

I wish it were better or easier to find well curated research. I come across a lot of academic papers through Twitter. I follow a lot of academics there, but I hate being on Twitter. And it just feels like there should be a better mechanism for staying up to date. There are AI tools that ostensibly should be good at this, and they’re okay for doing things like literature reviews, but it doesn't have that sense of just discovery of interesting insights.                         

Continuing with your optimism, do you foresee any real challenges for the field?

I'll share a little quote that I like first, from an author named Jeanette Winterson:

“Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love, only this: neglect. Not to see you when you stand before me. Not to think of you in the little things. Not to make the road wide for you, the table spread for you. To choose you out of habit, not desire. To pass the flower seller without a thought.”

So behavioral science requires paying attention to things, right? Paying attention to things is really important. It's important for relationships. It's important for doing good work. It's really core to being a good behavioral scientist.  But we live in a world and we confront new technologies and ways of working that make it harder and harder all the time to pay attention to things. So I think that is both a challenge and an opportunity for the field. Because I think that it will benefit from that lens of behavioral science.

A more practical challenge is that we still need to do a lot of nurturing of both the supply and demand side of behavioral science. How can we get more organizations around the world wanting to use behavioral science and make it easy? How do you understand where it fits into your organization? What skill sets do you look for? How does it integrate with the things that you already have? And with what      you're trying to accomplish? And then for the supply side: how do we prepare people with the skills to meet those demands or to fulfil those requests? So I think there's a lot of work still to be done there.

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Then tell me what exactly is the skill set of a good behavioral scientist? When I hire, I typically look for three or four core things:

1.  The first is expertise in behavioral science or a behavioral science. I'll take a pretty expansive view of the adjacent fields. So expertise in behavioral science meaning, you need to know more than just a framework. Things like COM-B are great tools, right? But the expectation of the people we work with is that a behavioral scientist has a depth of knowledge that goes beyond the first step of diagnosis.

2. You have to be consultative and entrepreneurial in your approach. Very rarely does a partner or stakeholder come to you and say: “Hey, I'm trying to optimize my marketing campaign and I think I need to use more social proofing in the subject lines of my emails. Can you help me with that?” Way more often people will say something like: “Hey, you do behavior stuff - no one's buying our product. I don't really know what to do. We think it's a good product.” You have to see that as an opportunity and be able to go through a discovery process to find out where you can apply behavioral science to a problem that somebody else cares about.

3. The third is evaluation. You have to be able to understand impact in some way. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're always running RCTs, but you have to be able to say what the impact of an idea was. So broadly, you're helping with strategy work. You're producing insights that inform design or policy or program or experience. And you're doing some kind of evaluation to understand what was the impact of it.

4. The fourth is a bit different. I'm a fan of embedding a behavioral scientist in a functional area. And so you have to have domain expertise in whatever that area is. Context matters and you need to understand the context you yourself are operating in.

So how do you see the field develop in general, say in 10 years or so?

In general, people are pretty interested in and understand the value of psychology, right? Understanding why people do the things they do. That doesn't seem like something that's going be a fad. So even in times of big change or a crisis or something like that, I have found that behavioral science is often called upon pretty quickly.

To some extent, it's become a little bit less siloed. A lot of the early behavioral science teams were standalone teams, almost like a separate research and innovation group. I think that the trend is moving towards establishing capabilities where the behavioral scientists are      directly integrating their expertise into a department, part of government, part of a company, or nonprofit, alongside the other skill sets that are focused towards the same goal. I feel pretty confident that that trend will continue.

So how do you recommend someone gets into behavioral science then?

This is a question that I get very frequently from students or from recent graduates. I feel like an old man when I started answering it, because I start with something that I know is annoying to hear and not helpful, but I think is useful context, which is: “it is a lot better than it used to be!”

When I was choosing a master's program, there really wasn't a masters in behavioral science. Even in the policy program, I cobbled together a specialized behavioral science focus. Now there’s courses that are focused specifically on behavioral science in policy, economics and MBA programs, as well as full-on behavioral science programs like the MBDS program at UPenn and the behavioral science masters at LSE.    

So my advice is a bit dependent on where you’re at in your career. If you’re early in your career or you want to do a drastic pivot, attending one of these academic programs can give you the skills and credentials to execute that. If you’re later in your career and you’re already in a role that is adjacent to behavioral science, you may only need some more tailored training and opportunities to practice. The last element that I’ve found helpful no matter what is finding a way to engage with the behavioral science community. I’ve done that through volunteering with Bescy, and there are many other great opportunities to meet other people with similar goals. 

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If you hadn't found behavioral science, what do you think you would have been?

I did really enjoy studying history. The stuff that I focused on was always more  cultural, like literature and music and things like that. So I was probably halfway between a literature degree and a history degree. I also really love travelling and take every opportunity I can to visit new places. So my best guess would be some sort of history teacher, researcher, or like a travel writer or something like that.

How much of behavioral science do you apply to your own life?

We talked about how I do a bunch of different things, and I'm always very excited about the things that I'm doing. And because I do, there are way, way, way more things that I have to say no to, right? So how do you decide what to do and what not to do? 

I often apply the lens of intrinsic motivation: does this project or initiative or role etc., does this help increase some sense of mastery? Does this give me greater autonomy in my life? Am I going to enjoy the people that I'm working with? So I apply that lens very regularly to decisions that I make. Less so of the nudge-y type stuff.

I'm also a big fan of “Happy Money”, by Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton, which basically gives guidance on how to spend money to increase your happiness. And I also apply some of the lessons that Ashley Willans has written about in her book “Time Smart”, like buying time back. That's one that I apply pretty regularly in order to focus on the other projects I’m excited about.

Last, who has inspired you in behavioral science? I.e. who do you want me to interview next?

Hmm...Some  folks that I really admire and have enjoyed working with and kind of getting mentorship from. One is Linnea Gandhi. There’s also Mariel Beasley. We were classmates at Duke and then I ended up working for her. And then Kristen Berman, who is also part of that crew. Kristen and Mariel were both co-founders of the Common Cents Lab at Duke. Because I apply the lens of social connection when deciding on projects, this probably also applies to almost anyone I work with in industry and academia as well. So I mentioned Charlotte Blank. I’ve loved working with her. Steve Wendel is also great.

Really all of the current leadership of Bescy -- our board and executive leadership team. They’re all very smart, dedicated, and accomplished behavioral scientists who are volunteering their time and expertise to advance the field and build more support for applied behavioral scientists.

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

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!