Behavioral Science for Data Scientists
“Beyond Data Science”
On 21st July 2020 Data Science Milan has organized a webMeetup hosting Stephen Wendel to talk about Behavioural Science.
Grasp your free copy of the workbook: “Designing for Behavior Change” here.
“Behavioral Science for Data Scientists”, by Stephen Wendel, Head of Behavioral Science at Morningstar
Behavioural Science is a fascinating field and it’s rapidly growing. Data Science has been grown very quickly for about 15–20 years, meanwhile Behavioural Science started about 10 years ago.
Stephen has started the talk introducing what is Behavioural Science.
Behavioural scientists know all about the human brain. They are specialized in cognitive psychology. How do people perceive? How do they reach a decision? This kind of knowledge is important if you want to have an impact on your customer’ decisions. If you don’t know what moves your customers, you cannot change them actions.
People often face a gap, between their intentions and their actions, behavioural science try to understand how people decide and act. It’s an understanding of how people actually behave in their daily lives that most of statistical models aren’t very good to predict. It’s a deeper understanding of the psychological barriers that stop people from taking an action or sometimes make them to take bad actions like smoking or over drinking. It’s a set of tools to potentially help people do better.
…and what about difference with Data Science?
Data science generally seeks to understand and extract knowledge from large amount of data and predict future trends with machine learning. For instance, it lets us forecast what products are most likely to be sold and which customers are most likely to buy. If you not only want to understand potential outcomes, but if you want to completely change outcomes, and more specifically, you want to change the way in which people behave, behavioural science tells us how to make a fundamental change in human behaviour that will affect the long-term outcome of a process.
How Data Science and Behavioural Science can collaborate?
Looking at the data differently: behavioural science helps you ask a different set of questions of what might be driving a change in your client’s behaviour. For instance, a series of questions to understand the reasons why a product is not purchased by potential customers: they don’t like it or there is a gap between action and intention such that a different marketing campaign or the presentation of the product in a different way can fill the gap.
Looking for different data: behavioural science helps to transforms data gathered in a social signal. Adding other data points not already collected at the reference groups, you can look for what relationships people have with each other and look at the prior level experience, because descriptive norms herding behaviour are particularly prevalent when somebody is new to something, compared when somebody has taken an action many times.
Recording&Slides:
References:
https://www.behavioraltechnology.co/
Written by Claudio G. Giancaterino
