Action Design Radio

In our latest episode, Aline Holzwarth joins Erik and Zarak to discuss the intersection of healthcare, behavioral science, and technology. Aline is a Principal at Duke University's Center for Advanced Hindsight, where she's worked alongside Dan Ariely for the past 10 years. She is also the Head of Behavioral Science at Pattern Health, a digital health platform designed to help people live happier and healthier lives.

Topics include the healthcare industry's tendency to take an information-based approach, a common mistake that assumes by simply giving people information (Smoking = Bad) that they will find the motivation on their own to implement healthy behavior change. Behavioral science can help bridge that gap by designing products and services that get people from information to action. And in a world where the smartphone is increasingly omnipresent, digital interventions have huge potential for real-world impact.

Shanta Ricks takes over the podcast as a special guest host for this episode to share her research on the psychology of Black hair. While receiving her masters in psychology from North Carolina Central University, Shanta focused her thesis on researching the role of hair on Black American self-esteem and how factors such as racial identity and racial socialization impacts this relationship. Shanta is a behavioral scientist at Duke University’s Center for Advanced Hindsight, where her research explores what factors play a role in racial health and financial inequity.

It is our pleasure to welcome back Linnea Gandhi to the podcast! Linnea manages the boutique consulting firm BehavioralSight; develops and teaches applied behavioral science courses at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business; is pursuing her Ph.D. at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania; and lately has been keeping busy with helping to edit and organize the newly published book, “Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment,” written by renowned behavioral economists Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein. She also loves her puppies, and your puppies too.

In today’s episode, Erik and Zarak explore with Linnea the differences between bias and noise, as well as the difficulty in designing behavioral interventions that are easy, relatable, and impactful. A lack of psychological safety in corporate culture makes it difficult to even find error and failure in companies, let alone try to improve them. The reason is because professionals (and people in general) are programmed to provide solutions. We’re rewarded for fixing things, or making them better – not so much for pointing out glaring errors that no one has noticed if we don’t have a ready-made answer for how to solve them.

How to address this gap, you ask? Well, you might start with a “noise audit.” Tune in and find out how to get started! Or sign up for her new online class on the subject at https://www.behavioralsight.com/online-learning.

In this week’s episode, our hosts sit down with Linnea Gandhi, managing partner of the boutique consulting firm BehavioralSight and Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Linnea, Erik, and Zarak discuss the importance of following the scientific method. This process applies to all settings, including the corporate world where the demand is always for results – and getting them today (or yesterday, if possible). Avoiding gut reactions, intuition, and emotional responses – and instead replacing them with statistics, data, and algorithms – will lead to more optimal decision-making.

But how do we apply this process, especially in situations where important decisions are at stake? Linnea’s focus is on getting executives across industries to realize that we are all more capable of creating algorithms than we may think – even when it comes to decisions such as whether to merger with or acquire another company, or whether to lay off a significant amount of their workforce.

Linnea argues that research and psychological literature are not useful to most people unless you can apply it somewhere practical. So she urges us to make our brains work more like an algorithm by removing intuition from the equation as much as possible. Reduce the “noise” as much as you can and isolate the data. Then, translate your behavioral science improvements to the language of the stakeholders. That is what will truly grab attention.

And never forget to be painfully aware of your own confirmation bias.