The Power of Data Evidence & Scientific Thinking
EEric Singler: Hi, and welcome to a new episode of B.E. GOOD, brought to you by the BVA Nudge Unit, a global consultancy specializing in the application of behavioral science for successful behavior change. Every month, we get to speak with a leader in the field of behavioral science in order to get to know more about them, their work, and its application to emerging issues. My name is Eric Singler, founder of the BVA Nudge Unit. And with me is my colleague, Scott Young.
SScott Young: Hi Eric, thank you. And it's great to be joining you. I'm very honored to introduce our guests today. Kelly Peters is the founding partner and the CEO of B.E Works; a company that she founded with Dan Ariely and Nina Mazar back in 2010.
Kelly has extensive experience in behavioral science and she's led literally hundreds of experimental projects around the world involving challenges ranging from financial decision making to health and happiness. She's a frequent speaker about the value of behavioral insights and scientific thinking. She's been a visiting lecturer at Cornell, Harvard, and Boston University among others and she's on the faculty at the Rotman school of management at the University of Toronto. Welcome, Kelly. It's great to have you.
KKelly Peters: It's wonderful to be a part of this. Thank you so much.
E Kelly, let's start, and maybe we could come back to your background and early career. My first question is what initially interested you in behavioral science?
K What interested me first in behavioral science goes back to when I was a little girl, my parents got a VCR and it changed everything. There was literally this black box that had this mysterious effect on my family. It turns out my mother was really into old-time movies, James Dean, like these classics. And when we got this VCR, when I was a kid, everything changed. My house became a popular house because we had this big-screen TV that went with this VCR and my mom had these parties that were associated with watching these movies. My dad converted the garage into this giant movie room, and I got to enjoy some popularity because of this piece of technology and it was wonderful. Movies now became a thing for my family.
And it left this question in my mind about how technology - which I don't necessarily understand how the technology works - but how technology can impact and change behavior and change family dynamics and social dynamics. And that stayed with me. So when I went to university, I still wondered about technology and growing up through the 80s, I got to see the development of personal computers, video recording, and the development of communication technologies like the internet. I was really interested in exploring and taking an interdisciplinary approach to knowledge. And one of the things I was particularly interested in was the impact that technology would have on society. This led me to my first career, which started in the early 90s, looking at how we can build internet capabilities for companies and help launch those very first dot com. There was a time before everything dot com existed and I got to be a part of that world. I met a professor who on the side with his wife had a consulting company and they were looking for somebody who had been thinking about the internet that would help provide training and consulting and advisory services.
Through his connections, I got to meet very senior business executives who had had esteemed careers but weren't familiar with the internet. And I had the luxury of teaching them what I knew, but then also learning about how they were seeing the possibility of their industry being transformed. And it all came back to understanding behavior. That's been the thread that I've just naturally gravitated to. I'd love to say it was all preplanned, but I've always been interested in changing the nature of behavior.
The first part of my career was understanding the role that technology had in driving that, and now the second part is understanding the science and the mechanisms behind using choice architecture to drive it.
E Okay. Very clear. Was there a particular person or an idea in mind or idea of the project that sparked your interest in behavioral science?
K It's hard to pinpoint exactly what behavioral science is. I had a project that I worked on in the late 90s, which was to help build behavioral scoring models for credit risk decision making. As a lot had happened from when I first started exploring internet technologies, which was about providing the ability to do transactions, but by the late 90s, I was looking at projects like how do we use technology to do things like augment decision-makers in financial services? Historically, bankers would do the decisioning and evaluation of a person's character - for instance, in their willingness to repay a loan. Well with data, we were able to look at how can we observe that behavior and how can we build empirical models to evaluate that behavior, and how can we then bring those capabilities online so that we can do online adjudication and allow people to apply for their own mortgages and apply for their own credit cards.
So, we were doing very groundbreaking work back then, and there weren't the typical resources that you can look to when you're building something new. Often in business and in science, you have a whole community of peers you can look to, stand on the shoulders of giants, competitive landscape, those are kind of one and the same. But when you're in the full new paradigm of innovation capability, you don't have that much to look to and lean on.
But one of the areas that did provide some utility was in the area of looking at the early studies of risk behavior. And those models in academia were useful to us in business in terms of being able to understand how we can build empirical models that let us look at people's behavior in a way that's predictive and let us build the credit scoring adjudication models that we needed in order to be able to augment the decision making of individual account managers. In later research we were looking at people that buy this type of product in the store are more likely to default on a credit card product. So, you can see interesting correlations between someone's preference for products and their likelihood to default.
One of the things that was published in a prior article was about "Tweety Pye" mudflaps for a truck. That product has a high correlation to the likelihood to default. And that's about how the information is much richer and much more sensitive to the number of factors so that the data gives us reliable guidance and it sometimes gives us unreliable guidance. But that starting point for me was back in the late 1990s when we needed insight on how we build empirical models for human behavior to help us predict risk.
E How did you connect and begin collaborating with someone I think was important for you, Dan Ariely?
K Dan and I met at an event that he had given in 2009. I had read 'Predictably Irrational'. I love that book so much. It's such a wonderful book and a reflection of Dan's character, his sense of humor, his caring, compassionate observation of his own behavior in the world, and others. I stood in the long line and this was still early on in his popular career - I stood in a long line with my copy of the book. It was a hardback. And I had read that book when I was in Florida on the beach. I had a little beach chair, and I love to put the beach chair right where the water comes up. You know, the waves that kind of tickle your feet and sitting there reading the book, looking at the ocean, just in heaven with this wonderful knowledge, this wonderful writing, this wonderful beach in my hometown. I had a felt tip marker, and I'm aggressive with books. And I apologize to you, successful authors, but I tend to be very vicious and I write all over books and I have this felt tip marker. So I was busy marking away in the book, and I didn't notice this big wave - just a kind of a rogue wave came up and just slapped me in my chair, and it hit the book. Like an actress with too much makeup on, this black mascara covered the pages. The book was soaking wet, filled with beach sand. That book dried, but that was the book that I presented to Dan to sign.
So, it was so lumpy and pulpy, and it still has grit and the mascara running down the pages basically. That's what I asked him to sign. And he started; he wrote, it was good to see a well-read book. And I invited him out for a beer.
It was one of those crazy days. It was a workday, and I was triple booked. I used to love to have meetings at the bar downstairs at the bank that I was in, and I used to call it "Meeting Room 1A". I had a meeting lined up with my team that I was in, and then I had two other friends at the bank who I love to talk to about strategy and the goings-on, and then I had invited Dan. Well, my two friends knew who Dan was because they had already read the book as well and were joining me in my efforts of helping Royal Bank of Canada get up to speed on behavioral economics. When I said, "I think this guy, Dan, may be joining us for a beer", they were like : "No way!" - And my other team, some of them had really understood what was going on with behavioral economics. So, when Dan joined, we ended up pushing all the tables together and having a great conversation about behavioral economics. Dan did this little trick with the -- he's got the stick and it's a puzzle. He sticks it through your buttonhole, and you must figure out how to undo this puzzle. That's where our friendship started, and we were friends for a little while.
E Great story. Scott, maybe we could start talking about 'BE Works'.
S We're curious about the birth and the vision behind the company because back in 2010 - my recollection at least - is things were starting to happen certainly in academia and perhaps in the public sector, but really it was very early days with respect to serving private sector companies and introducing them to behavioral science and behavioral economics. So, I was curious - the thinking behind it why you decided to make the jump and the vision behind it.
K For me, behavioral economics was a journey from studying risk and looking at how we can understand the behavior of risk and credit risk. And that evolved into my responsibility at the bank to understand other parts of the science of behavior. So, I was pushed by my mentors at the bank to continue thinking about human behavior, but not just on the credit side of the bank, but to also start to understand investing and savings behavior.
And again, there was this huge treasure trove of knowledge. And so ,I always felt so smart, being able to come to the table with these incredible insights, and they were more satisfying than what we learned from all of the research that we had done on our customers. I remember I'd worked with a colleague who had spent so much time and worked so hard on this massive survey of customers. I can't remember now how many she had in there, but it would have been a very impressive number. It would have been in the thousands with the survey, it was good. After all this work and effort that went into it, we had organized, I helped her put together this lunch and learn on the survey. And this was at a big bank with very smart people.
As she went through the presentation, basically the conclusion was there's really nothing new here. People say they want to save more, the bank fees are too high, that they want more convenience. It's like every bank ever, when you do any survey ever, we keep finding the same thing and there's nothing new there when we ask customers what they want.
Unfortunately, some of that guidance isn't very helpful for us and misdirects us because if we spend all our time trying to lower our fees and not actually help people with the things that they need around advice, around coaching, or on driving actual behavior, so it's not lower fees, it's helping people be successful with their money. If we just listened to them, we'll never actually get at what they need and what they truly value.
And maybe it's much more like a parent. There's what my daughter says she wants versus what she needs. And sometimes we need to play that role. And in the end, which one is more satisfying for them, from their point of view? And that's being set up for that kind of life success.
So, if we just listened to our customers, we won't always get the same guidance in the same way my teenage daughter won't volunteer what's best for her and tell me to do those things for her. So, the customer survey stuff didn't push the boundaries, but the scientific research by psychologists did bring forward so much more value. And so, some of Tom Gilovichs' work, for instance, "Why Smart People Make Dumb Money Mistakes"; What a delightful that is! I should be mandatory reading for everybody. It should be 'Oh, welcome to the world. You're 16, read this. You're 21, read it again. You're 30, read it again'. Because it's just so useful in terms of helping understand those biases. So, it was around 2008 where this field of behavioral economics really became known to me as behavioral economics. It was just this weird transition between risk theory and behavioral finance and psychology decision science. There's this other name which is behavioral economics. The one that really closed the deal for me, the next book that became the big thing for me was 'Nudge'. Choice architecture. Those two words, choice architecture; I was like, I get it now. The rest was great for the research and the insights and the why and how we act. Then Nudge is about how we apply strategies to intervene, so this idea of combining that into choice architecture was a big one for me. So, in 2009, I hired a new team called 'Ideas 42' to help me with a project at the bank, and I had the good fortune of working with Piyush Tantia, who was part of the founding team of Ideas 42, and with Sendhil Mullainathan and several other folks that are part of that Ideas 42 collective. They helped me bring in some of the rigor that I needed support on because we didn't have the internal capabilities for thinking about designing a field experiment. And so, building that behavioral economics team and projects became a foundation for me. RBC, I'm so lucky was a place that's very open to all kinds of innovation. So, when I wanted to start pushing and promoting behavioral economics, I was working in an environment that was very hungry for new insights that were open to- 'you want to run an experiment? Sure.' 'You want to run a randomized controlled trial in field, in branches that require this kind of support infrastructure? Bring it'.
I had support for the science of behavioral science. I had people, leaders that are very passionate about the behavioral insights, part of behavioral economics who are on-board with the new and novel approaches to strategy from behavioral economics. Nudge was the one that really helped me think of B.E as a three-legged stool. You've got the heuristics and biases, the decision science. That's why we are the way we are. Bounded rationality, bounded self-interest, cool. One leg of the stool. "Nudge, Persuasion" by Robert Cialdini, "Boost" by Pelle Hanson and the people worried about ethics and the spectrum (or system three) - when we think about augmentation with technology - that's our second leg. And our third leg is experimentation. All this needs to rest upon this foundation of rigorous experimentation.
So how do you use this three-legged stool? How do you drag this thing around and stand on it in a big corporation? I was at RBC building out this process, championing behavioral economics, getting the buy-in, driving that curiosity, and then I had a rudimentary framework.
I ended up meeting Nina Mazhar, and I met two other entrepreneurs and the five of us came together, we said, hey, there's a consulting business that could be born out of this; that's exclusively dedicated to behavioral economics. And so that's where B.E Works was born at my alma mater.
S You now have 10 years to look back, I suppose, in which you've been going to many different organizations, working with many different organizations. I was curious whether there are things that have really surprised you, either pleasantly or otherwise, about how organizations have applied behavioral science or how receptive they've been to some of the messages and ideas that you just spoke about. Are there notable success stories in some cases or factors that you see which make a difference, in terms of where things really work, and which organizations are less receptive?
K That's an important question.
It's just this incredibly powerful thing. It's sort of like, I've discovered fire, and everyone's like, wow. It's amazing. Having evidence, it's the smoking gun for strategy. It's so powerful.
And to be able to go to your colleagues in an organization saying we ran this rigorous experiment and we have this confidence behind this thing. And seeing the journey, all the heartache that it takes, sometimes to get an organization to that point, the level of process maturity that's required to do this stuff well, and to do it right, is very intense. There're so many temptations. Professor/Philosopher/Scientist Nancy Cartwright is someone whom I have the utmost respect for, and she is very demanding on understanding the limits of what we can infer from even our most rigorous test of causality. What works, where how do we know?
And when we bring organizations from the most basic levels of maybe testing to actually starting to build mature capabilities, it's a transformation. It's a transformation for the organization but it's also a transformation for the individual because once you see the world through a scientific lens, you're lit, you feel enlightened. You can't go back. You see the world differently; you ask questions differently.
Seeing that happen over the last 10 years has been profoundly rewarding. Seeing clients squeal almost with the delight of, I'm a scientist now. That's incredible. I feel like we're winning a little bit when we do that. And having that person finally do their marketing strategy better, that's cool. Better products, that's cool. But it changes everything around. Not only having a sense of purpose better for the customer, now we really have a way of understanding how to help serve our customers better but also, I think we've inoculated one more person against snake-oil salesmanship, be it in consulting, be it in the world when our political and policy decisions, need to be made based on evidence. I feel like we've inoculated one more good citizen with science every time we have a good project in the business world - or for our government services clients as well. So, that's the most exciting, and surprising and always rewarding thing.
E One of our commonalities is that we both focus largely on applying behavioral science in the private sector. What have you found to be key differences and challenges in working with private sector organizations, as opposed to governments or NGOs?
K The ability to do experiments in the governmental world is still very difficult. It's hard enough in the business world but it's even more difficult in the government world. I can't even say experiment. In some countries, you can't even say that word. There's just such a sensitivity to it. You can't even use the language, a manipulation. Oh, that sounds evil! That's the tip of the iceberg! It took me a little while to understand why the EAST framework was so damn simple, and the MINDSPACE framework was so damn simple. It pissed me off. I was like, why did these guys have this simple framework? I'm talking about David Halpern and the BIT team, and some of the great folks that were actually the engineers of this. And I finally understood when I had a chance to reread David's book recently, and that journey from MINDSPACE to EAST was articulated in there. I feel like grabbing the book right now! Of course, I marked a section, not using a felt tip marker anymore, though, where he talked about this because of the championing.
And the difficult job of the pedagogy of scientific thinking is really what so much of our generation needs to do in behavioral science. We're doing a lot of the heavy lifting of the teaching, the championing, teaching the frameworks, teaching them how; it's not just going in and solving the problem; and sure we do some projects like that where there isn't as much stakeholder engagement. It's not as rewarding as the ones where we're doing the teaching.
The difficulty though - in so far as there are differences - is in the ability to have the infrastructure required to build and sustain an experimentation culture because you need things like robust data science, you need measures that are reliable and valid, you need data that has integrity, you need technical, infrastructure and proces. There's lots of boring nuts and bolts that need to go underneath that, and it's harder in some environments than others because those things are complicated and expensive to build. But a lot can be done through that teaching phase, through simpler experiments, through simpler frameworks.
And so that's why I now understand that we have things like the EAST framework because there's so much transformation that happens with that simple framework that needs to be done.
We must accept it, but we're the generation that's championing the application of behavioral science. And I'm hoping that as more organization's have Chief Behavioral Officers, these kinds of certification, and these kinds of things that we're starting to talk about, means that we are not going into the organization, teaching what B.E is, finding a nice demonstration project, solving a thing, whether it's on our own or slowly and collaboratively - but instead, we get to now work with advanced internal capabilities doing advanced and more complex projects.
E Thanks. Where do you see as the biggest untapped opportunities in terms of applying behavioral science in the private sector?
K I think that there're so much to do.
E I agree.
K The largest amount of work that needs to still be done is at the awareness and education phase, and the building of the infrastructure around behavioral economics. We still have years of work to do collectively in industry, let alone with any client that's already been doing this for a few years. There is still so much work to do on that first wave.
I should mention, philosophically, at BE Works we made a very intentional commitment to focus on experimentation, philosophy of science, method, infrastructure in this first wave of our company, and in the first generation of projects that we do with our clients.
Even though talking about the nudge or the biases and the behavioral insights part was always super sexy, that's the sexy part. People want quirkiness. Humans are weird. People want that stuff -but the real transformation comes in the application of scientific thinking as a way of doing things in the world.
We're at a point where we're able to start going back to the behavioral insights' questions because with our clients: yes, we know experiments. We've got it. Randomized controlled test, multifactoral, and all that, we've got that. We've got reliable valid measures that have taken us a couple of years to develop. Those infrastructures are now in place.
Now we get to go back and look at what are the most interesting questions about human behavior? How fundamentally do people think about risk in this context? How does trust genuinely matter in terms of helping drive marketing? What is the role of social media in informing decision making? It's almost like we can go back to the most interesting questions about human behavior and explore those because now that thinking is mature enough to understand that if we say we want to increase trust, we need to recognize that we need to have an operational definition that's measurable. Now we can test the strategies against that, and we know what we're seeing, we know what we're observing. To me, the next biggest wave after that in BE is this kind of, awareness. Here's how it works. Here's what we need to build. And now on top of that infrastructure, let's get on with the job of the cool questions and bringing all that together.
E What advice would you give to businesses and practitioners within organizations to help them infuse behavioral science thinking and learning within their organization?
K We're at an interesting crossroads. It reminds me of the same exact experience that we had in the mid-nineties when companies were trying to build "everything dot com". They had no idea who to hire. I don't know if you remember the "Webmaster"? That was a title, that was a role, but people didn't know Webmaster from Database Administrator to Designer, all these terms, all these roles.
They come with different skills and capabilities that people can deliver. It's no different than building a house. An electrician does this, and a plumber does that. They're very different things. You wouldn't expect an electrician to understand the pipes, and you wouldn't expect the plumber to understand the wires. So, they're very different kinds of roles. In the mid-nineties when we did this with the internet, I was part of a nonprofit industry association that wanted to create certified rules. Here's the list of skills and capabilities, here are the tests you take, this is an apprentice to master level; now we can put you over here, put that role over there, and then we can help people know, do you need a plumber, or do you need an electrician? We don't have that right now in our field. And there are some different organizations that are trying to pull together that kind of work? BSP is involved in supporting an initiative doing that. There are a couple of other efforts as well that are underway. And it's incredibly important because there's tremendous appeal in these quirks of human behavior and profiting on the application of that. But the thing is, anyone can read the popular books and talk about social proof: "I know all about social proof now".
They're employing these things without, first, a deeper understanding of what we already know about them that goes past the popular press. They are implementing them without the humility of recognizing that they are very sensitive, it is very nuanced. We don't have silver bullets and cannonballs in our tool-set -the real power is in the rigor of experimentation.
The real power that we have to offer is in introducing systematic thinking around the process of strategy formulation. That's the biggest thing that we have. It's not the: "Oh, look at this interesting bias, look at this interesting nudge". It's not that part.
And so, organizations need to understand that we are still very much in this heavy lifting phase to build that infrastructure and capability. And that's why at BE Works, I only consider hiring people that have successfully completed our higher metrics platform. So, it's a multistep process that lets us evaluate the skills and capabilities and collaborative nature of individuals who can make it to the hiring. And that's meant, to date, we've only hired PhDs who have generally also accumulated significant postdoc experience, running labs, published papers. And so, we're hiring these very thoughtful mavericks escaping from academia to do science in the real world.
But how on earth would a businessperson with no training in science, they haven't been going through these books, understand the difference between a guy who has wonderful stories about the quirks of human behavior, ready to allegedly run these research experiments - versus hiring an interdisciplinary team of senior scientist doing the same project.
That lack of understanding of the necessary skills -we see that every day. How do you know how to hire a good electrician? We still haven't figured that out. We've had electricity for over a hundred years in our homes. And it's not just hiring in general, it's how to hire a behavioral scientist. You can't hire one person and expect one person to be able to do championing, teaching, opportunity spotting, designing an experiment and running it; even the initial framing right now is misguided.
So, we're still at a stage where it's hard to hire the skills that we need. It's like it's in the early days, so it does make it more difficult to know who to hire.
E One key topic is the question of the ethical way to apply behavioral science, especially in the private sector. What is your point of view to help practitioners make ethical use of behavioral insights?
K To answer that question about the ethical application of behavioral science, the question has been answered by, first, the advertising sector. Those questions about what is misleading advertising, misrepresentative advertising, unfair advertising, targeting minors advertising; there's been self-regulation and industry regulation, as well as regulatory intervention as a consequence in the advertising world. So, there's already much to learn from there.
The other place has been the work that our legal teams have done in corporate social responsibility. We've learned so much about fairness in hiring and compensation and best practices for commerce and trade. We've learned a lot about what's right and what's wrong. So we've got a lot to look at there. The place I think specifically in our world has been coming from is from philosophers, not from behavioral scientists. They want to say scientists don't think about ethics. Of course, they think about ethics! But someone who really has spent a lot of time thinking about this has been Pelle Hanson and the work that they've done in "Boost". And I think that they go too hard against understanding the power and need of persuasion or so-called "system one" tactics or interventions. Because not everybody wants a decision aid for everything. Just point me in the right point or what is recommended by authority or what is appropriate for somebody in my peer group; that's all I need. I don't need the whole decision made to boost my reasoning faculties in this instance. I'm cool with the persuasion. But he's done a great job of carving out a new path for what I have conveniently obeyed at a cost, but for me, there's a bin of "system two" interventions and "boost" sits proudly there.
Then, the question is when is it okay to use persuasion? And when do you not want to rely on persuasion and grab somebody by both shoulders, set them down, and say we need to take the time to go through this thing? When is it right, and what are the criteria that we should use? Well - it depends obviously. It would depend on things like how consequential is the trade-off to the individual? Who is the beneficiary of that choice? Is the beneficiary the company, or does the company have their interests aligned to the customer or the customer making the best choice for them?
If we know that the interests are already aligned and we really want to make that customer make the best decision, but we recognize that they don't have the time, the energy, the effort to engage in that full process, then it's okay to use these other tactics.
Again, it's like with my daughter. It's like, well: "Because I said so". And there are times where that is a good response. It's the best response. It's because I said so. And then there're other times where it is: '"let's sit down". We need to talk.'. We need to talk about the risks, the consequences, the experience, the facts etc. And let's have a whole education about a particular choice. And that's great, but I can't do that with every single decision that confronts my daughter. So sometimes I just need to say: "Because I said so".
S Kelly, you may be aware a behavioral scientist recently asked the behavioral science community to write short excerpts about their vision of the future of behavioral science and behavioral economics. And I was curious about your vision of the future of the field. Where do you see things heading, both perhaps for yourself and BE Works - and more generally?
K Yes. It was a great piece that they did. I love the 'imagining the next decade'. As I think about and reflect on imagining the next decade of behavioral science, there was a piece that was published in the Behavioral Scientist journal that Evan Nesterak puts together. I think it was a wonderful set of essays that they compiled, and I had the pleasure of being a part of that.
I talked about complexity, just as I've talked about on this call. We're able to go beyond where we've been in terms of top-level experiments, to getting more and more ambitious in terms of the level of data that's available, the reliability validity of those measures. We can run cross channel experiments. It's the complexity of it all. I wrote this essay: "BE is not as simple as ABC". And in it, I talk about how we need to get much more advanced in the real world. In the research phase of our projects, we need to get much more robust in playing with exploratory research and developing exploratory hypotheses and to go much further with the types of interventions that we're doing. For instance, just to kind of keep a theme going here, we need much more multifaceted research on the role of social in influencing our decisions and having much more patience with being much deeper with a particular set of questions.
For instance, if I was a CPG company, I would want to know each one that there is to possibly know about the way other people influence our perception of a brand and our behavior with that company, and its suite of products or services.
So that complexity is not just with experimentation and cross channel experimentation, but it's much more complexity, rigor, depth patience, with wanting to know everything that there is to know about each of these facets of human behavior. So, I'm hoping that what we're able to do - as this teaching phase is done, this championing phase is done, this infrastructure phase is done - now we can continue to move with the hiring phase and getting the right champions and cheerleaders embedded in the organization so that we can really build out internal capabilities. So the companies have their own internal labs. We're finally getting clients asking us: "Hey, how do we build B.E Works inside?" And that's where we're going to get to that much greater level of complexity and advanced human knowledge.
E I think we should wrap up. Kelly, maybe you can share with us any project or challenge that is in your mind.
K A big one on my mind is how we manage COVID-19.
E Okay. That's a good one
K There're so many different research avenues and things about human behavior that we're learning from COVID-19. We've got a project on helping reduce food waste. It was a project that started with Unilever before the pandemic. Oh boy, everything's changing. People are stockpiling. They're not eating out. Everything's changing. We developed a collaboration about 'Why don't we study people's behavior during a pandemic?" And in particular, let's see what new habits are forming. What are the good ones or the bad ones? And then let's recalibrate to see the good behaviors: what can we keep? With the bad behaviors, what do we need to deal with? We're finding some new things around people doing a much better job of cooking for themselves, for their family. People have gotten bored with their own cooking, and so people are learning how to cook new things. These are wonderful things in our lifestyle. We see that people are doing a much better job of inventory management in their kitchen. That's cool. People are cleaning out the old spices and getting much more strategic about the kitchen and taking care of themselves and their families. We see much better intentionality when people shop. We see some complexity now around people changing their shopping behavior based not on old factors, like convenience or availability of goods.
Shopping behaviors have been complex and multifaceted before. You would go to your Whole Foods store, for instance, for certain products that you wanted, and you would go to your mainstream grocery store for other products that you want. You go to your big bulk discount store for other products that you wanted in bulk. And so, people have these multifaceted channel relationships in the past that made modeling complex. But now we have a new dimension which is how people feel about safety, and which of these environments do they feel safer in? That has required a whole other level of commerce planning that hadn't been in the mix before.
So, there's that side of what we're doing right now, and those are amazing projects learning about human behavior with our clients. But the other thing that I'm personally interested in understanding more of is: I'm an American and I'm a Canadian. I spent half my life in the US. I'm a classic American mutt. My father comes from Italian immigrants: kiss the land Ellis Island off the boat Italian, and my mother's side is Hatfield; Hillbillies, Appalachian, mountains, the whole nine yards. As someone who spent the first half in the United States, it's made me sensitive to the difference in perception around freedom versus unity. The United States just had the 4th of July, which is a celebration of independence, and Canada just had its Canada day on July 1st, which is a commemoration of the unification of independent provinces that came together to form Canada. So, in the US, we have this celebration of freedom and autonomy, and in Canada, the celebration of coming together in unity. The response socially has been very different to COVID-19, not by everyone, but en masse.
I'm very curious about this issue of people perceiving that adherence to public health guidelines is a violation of one's freedom, and not recognizing that it's life liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, not life freedom and the pursuit of happiness.
There's a difference between freedom and liberty. Freedom is about individual autonomy. Liberty is about the responsible use of one's freedom. So, it's not to impose upon anyone else. And so, I'm very interested in understanding where that threshold is to help people protect and celebrate their freedom but in a way, that's recognizing that the United States was built on the principle of Liberty, and there's unification in there, and that's been lost. And I want to understand that psychology better in a way that can help people embrace that freedom that is respectful of other people's freedom as well -including the right to their life.
E Great topic. Kelly, is there anything you would like to leave our listeners with, perhaps where they can find out more about you and your work?
K Please look at BE Works on the different social media channels. We just launched our own podcast. Ours is very basic, from a technology perspective compared to what you guys have built.
Ours is the BE Works conversation series, and I've had a chance to have conversations with people like Dan Ariely, Nina Mazar and David Lewis my partners, of course. But we've also talked to Paul Bloom and Dave Rent, and we've got a whole host of other amazing guests. So, I'd love for people to check that out.
The topic there has been COVID-19 predominantly and understanding their point of view from their research background. What can we learn about COVID-19 and everything from our beliefs and our biases to our behavior, are things that we're exploring there.
We're on LinkedIn and we're on Twitter. I'm on Twitter as well. And then we've got beworks.com that points to some of these resources