Not Just Nudges (TDL Welcome Party #1)
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Applied behavioral science is a hot topic nowadays. It’s easy to forget that just over a decade ago, it was still a relatively unknown field (except amongst academics and Nerds™️). Nudging — making small modifications to somebody's choice environment to encourage behavior change — wasn’t even popularized until 2008. In other words, one of the foundational concepts of applied behavioral science is the same age as Breaking Bad. When Flo-Rida first serenaded shawty in the apple bottom jeans (jeans) and boots with the fur (with the fur), this discipline was still in its infancy.
Fast-forward to today, and there are more than 300 nudge units around the world, plus countless others using behavioral science in their work. As the field evolves, innovators are now going beyond nudges and cognitive bias cheat sheets to embrace a more holistic view of how people make decisions.
This involves as much art as it does science: the best organizations doing applied behavioral work today are combining the rigor of big data and machine learning with the humanistic lens of user-centered design. The result is a new vanguard of products and interventions that are more personalized, more empathetic, and more effective than ever at sparking behavior change.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing a little bit about what that looks like in practice, so that you can get to know us and our work a little better. Today, we’re focusing on some of the ways that behavioral science is currently evolving. And to give you a sense of what TDL is all about, here’s a picture of the office dog, Watson.
Until next time,
Katie and the Nerds™️ the Team @ TDL
📧 Does your team need a nudge to give behavioral science a try? Share this newsletter with them!
Nudge units are popping up everywhere. Whether small or large, public or private, organizations of all stripes are integrating applied behavioral insights into their work. Beyond the growth of dedicated behavioral insights teams, many professionals are also finding ways to supercharge their roles with a behavioral component — think behavioral product managers and behavioral UX designers.
But nudges aren’t the end of the story. As behavioral scientist and author Dilip Soman explained on our podcast, there’s a temptation to think about applying behavioral insights as “shopping at the nudge store”: grabbing a ready-made, evidence-based solution off the shelf and putting it into practice. But no study can account for all of the diverse factors that influence our decision-making at any given moment, meaning these premade fixes don’t scale.
Nudge units have huge potential for insurance, where research suggests that up to 30% of claim revenue is lost to “soft” fraud (i.e. “smalltime cheating by normally honest people.”). One of North America’s biggest P&C insurers was interested in launching a new behavioral science team to augment their work — but from hiring the right talent, to deciding how the new team will mesh with other departments’ day-to-day work, this process is more complex than it sounds.
TDL stepped in as the architects of the firm’s nudge unit. Drawing on the expertise of our Advisors — some of whom have spent more than a decade building nudge units inside institutions like the White House and Google — we oversaw the team’s creation from start to finish, and guided them through their first pilot project. By the time we stepped back, we’d launched a fully functional unit and boosted the organization’s revenue by millions. Read the full case study here.
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