Cigarette smoking, like other forms of drug dependence, is characterized by rapid loss of subjective value for delayed outcomes, particularly for the drug of dependence. –Behavioural pharmacologist Warren K. Bickel, et al. Hyperbolic Discounting 101 Hyperbolic discounting is our inclination to choose immediate rewards over rewards that come later in the future, even when these immediate rewards are […]
Artificial Intelligence has long held the promise of improving predictions in healthcare solutions, a promise which is now becoming a reality in many settings, first and foremost the US, where in the past years many commercial algorithms have received FDA regulatory approval for broad clinical use. Indeed, the application of Machine Learning, a type of AI which allows software […]
In 1951 Eric Dodds, an Irish philologist and anthropologist, published “The Greeks and the Irrational”, a famous book in which he presented two antithetical concepts applied to the study of the Ancient Greece: the “shame culture” and the “guilt culture”. Dodds focused his inquiry on the earliest stages of the Greek culture, analyzing the Homeric world, […]
From choosing your classes in high school, to doing an internship or choosing your degree and college and eventually choosing your job, the career choice process takes time and reflection. As with any decision-making process, we must acknowledge that there are several cognitive biases surrounding it. But is there really a personal decision more important […]
The growing impact of climate change in today’s society is favoring the spread in awareness on the effects of excessive energy consumption, making energy conservation a pressing topic in the public debate. Exploiting behavioral science, Behavioral Energy Efficiency programs help consumers make more informed and conscious choices on energy optimization issues, motivating them to generate […]
“The reason why I’m so passionate about behavioral science and why I got into this area in the first place is because it represents a massive opportunity for us to have a positive impact on the world”.
Defaults are simple, affordable, and cost-efficient solutions which can be introduced in order to elicit the desired behaviour by individuals. They are one of the most intuitive mechanisms implemented in choice architecture, and their use can be applied to a range of different choice-making settings, as they simply leverage on the assumption that individuals are disproportionately more likely to stick to the option presented to them rather than actively switching to an alternative. The […]
One of the most frequent sentences among people that have to deal with a certain situation is “I’ll do it tomorrow”. Students often use this excuse to avoid engagement in studying in the present, even when they are not busy and when the task doesn’t require so much effort and time to be completed. However, […]
For the second interview of the initiative “Meet the Experts” we talked with Paulius Yamin, a behavioural scientist with a background in cultural and anthropological studies who researches the possibility of achieving behavioural change by intervening on social norms. He is currently the Managing Director of the Center for Social Norms and Behavioural Dynamics at the […]
Narrative Fallacy in a nutshell. As human beings, we love stories so much that we let our preference for a good story cloud the ability to make rational decisions. However, stories may negatively govern the way we think, that is we may be drawn towards a less desirable outcome simply because it has a better […]
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