Welcome to the Behavioral Design Podcast.
I am Samuel Salzer and I'm here with my Co host Eileen
Holsworth. Hi, Ling.
Hey, Sam, great to chat. Yes, Sam, I have a question for
you. Are you ready?
I'm ready. I'm curious, what sports did you
play in your younger years? Oh, so I played mainly football
and thing is when we call floorball, actually, what do you
think floorball is? What do you think you do?
Why? Before that, I just need to
clarify. By football you mean soccer?
OK, OK. And then floorball.
I'm guessing floorball is where you sit on the floor and you
throw a ball back and forth. You could think you would have a
lot of like something to do with floor.
Mainly it's called floor ball because in Sweden we play ice
hockey and if you don't like to skate, you can still play kind
of a version of this with instead of a pocket of a ball,
and it's called floor ball because you're running on on a
floor and not skating on ice, so.
OK, but you still have the the hockey stick and you run around.
It's smacking the ball around, it's more of a plastic stick and
so on. So you could you can easily see
that this is a little bit less of a cooler sport than ice
hockey. But combined with these two
sports, I also will admit that my dad really wanted me to
become kind of someone following in his footsteps of doing
Aikido. So he has, I don't know, 4th,
5th black belt in in Aikido and has kind of been his his life
passion. And I very much failed to to
live up to that dream. So I think I got like did you
try and fail? I think I got like a yeah,
yellow or orange belt or something.
So I was a protege, but I never became, you know, much more than
that. Yeah, What a, what a
disappointment. Yes.
I'm I'm sure, I'm sure that you've excelled in other areas
though. But according to my dad,
probably not the most important one.
I never never really feel, but he always, he always says that
was so good. He was so good when he was you
know seven years old he was, he could have been so great.
Yeah, so that's that's my, that's my sport, sport
background. Well, I asked because our guest
today, Steph Habib, is a surprise.
I'm I'm sure that our guest did not know this is actually a four
time NCAA champion in volleyball.
So she actually did excel at her sport way back then.
Yes, very impressive. Super impressive.
Have you, have you actually
played volleyball in some capacity?
Have you tried that? The extent of my experience with
volleyball was in high school I tried out for the volleyball
team and I made it, not having any experience playing
volleyball. And so I I decided to learn how
to play volleyball. Once I had joined the team, I
discovered that I didn't really like, I didn't really like
diving onto the floor. It turns out that was not
really, not really my thing. Well, I do like that kind of
general strategy of kind of like pitching something before you,
you know, know how to do it and then, yeah.
Yeah. Like, like I didn't even watch
any videos. Or like, I just showed up and I
was like, yeah, I can hit balls. I did.
So I played. I actually played basketball and
was, you know, for for a high schooler, I think pretty good.
I was definitely very passionate about it.
And softball, I was kind of a sporty, A sporty kid.
But yeah, his volleyball was never, never really my strength.
Yeah, fair enough. Well, our, our guests as
mentioned has that strength, strength, but also behavioral
science. Do you want to introduce?
Yes. That's right.
Yeah. We're not here here today to
talk to her about volleyball. But, yeah, let me let me tell
you a little bit about her. She's really, I think, mostly
these days known for leading behavioral science at tandem
diabetes. So very impressive.
And also for having amazingly pink hair, which is which you'll
notice in in any photo that you see of her.
And actually, I don't know if I'm allowed to disclose this,
this top secret, but I learned from her that her this is
actually a pink conditioner. So it's not even You don't even
have to have pink hair every day.
You can just have pink hair when you want to have pink hair.
I don't even know how that works I I think.
I'm very uneducated in terms of. Oh, well, I wonder why that
could be. I mean, you do have some facial
hair. You could have a pink beard for
the days that you want. All right, so back to Steph.
She's been in the diabetes space for quite a while.
She's been in tandem for, I think, 6 years.
Before that. She had also worked in in
diabetes. She made some programs for
diabetes, as well as as a range of health behavior research and
strategy. So she's really.
Really been in this space for a while and yeah, knows her stuff.
Yeah, we had a really good discussion with her on so many
interesting topics. We obviously eve into the work
she's been doing at Tandem to design for diabetic patients and
supporting them working at intersection of behavioural
Science and Human Computer Interactions.
We also went over what the Steph calls the behavioural science
branding problem and you might be able to guess what it is, but
I think she has some interesting takes on that and we also gave
Steph a very interesting product to deep dive on.
Obviously this is some we've explored various deep dives and
we asked her to use people science to improve the
basketball game and you learn more about why we chose that in
this episode. So with without further ado,
let's jump in to. The episode,
I'm very happy to say. Welcome Steph to the Behavioral
Sign Podcast. How are you?
I am so good. It's very early where I am right
now. What's so special for me about
this is that the three of us are located in very different parts
of the world. And so I'm really happy we were
able to make this happen. Thank you for having me.
Yeah, it's so exciting and you know we like to really jump in
feet first. And I think the first question
that we should ask is something that I'm sure you have some
thoughts on, which is when looking at behavioral design in
the wild, is there one example of either really well done
applied by your science or really poorly done applied by
your science that you kind of think about as a go to example
of either a maybe some form of aspirational or inspirational or
a, you know, what do you call it, something to avoid,
something to learn from. Yeah.
Sure. Thanks for that question.
Well, I'll start with an example of good behavioral design.
And and I can't not do this because I have an insane bias as
a behavioral scientist who has been for the last six years
working at Tandem Diabetes Care, which is the company where I
work. We're headquartered here in San
Diego and we make diabetes technologies for people who take
insulin for their diabetes, so. But the reason I say that these
are excellent examples of behaviour design is because
these medical devices, even though they are regulated by the
FDA and other international regulatory bodies, we have still
managed to find a way to iterate quickly and enhance in an
ongoing fashion. The way people get to experience
these product is that it's automatically delivered through
some form of pump and that I'm sure changes things from I guess
from behaviour standpoint if we want to make it easy, right?
Right, so there are a few things that from a behaviour design
perspective, our technology systems do.
For somebody who needs to take insulin for their diabetes, the
1st is in using our system. You do not need a needle or a
syringe for any reason, right? The insulin pump to your point.
Automatically delivers the insulin to your body that it
needs. And so you don't have to inject
yourself, you don't have to administer a needle.
The second thing that is exciting about what our systems
do is their algorithm driven. And so the math behind how our
devices deliver insulin is fully automated.
That math is able to predict what will happen.
With your blood sugar looking 30 minutes into the future.
And it uses very beautifully complicated predictive math to
figure out automatically, without very little requirement
from the human, how much insulin, when to deliver the
insulin, the rate at which it needs to be delivering the
insulin. So it's completely automated
insulin delivery. So from a behavior design
perspective, first, no needles, let's be honest, Nobody wants to
give themselves an injection. Nobody wants to have to prick
their finger and check their blood sugars on a regular basis.
You don't need to do any of that with our system.
And secondly, you don't really have to do any math.
You don't have to figure out the amount of carbohydrate in your
food. There's so much that these
technology systems do to alleviate the burden that
somebody who's managing diabetes.
Has to experience on a day-to-day.
So to me that I feel like that automation is really kind of the
beauty of this use case and and like like it's really sort of
lends itself to lightening the disease burden and making it
easier for people to to manage their diabetes.
I'm wondering if if you think there's a a potential in other
areas of health to achieve a similar.
Effect. Without having this, you know
the device implanted and inside you.
Like how how can you have you thought about how you know if
there's a a metaphor or you know, a a real example of
achieving the same kind of thing in other other health domains?
So I think the healthcare industry, to your question, is
ripe for automation design. Absolutely.
And if any one of us, especially here in the United States,
Samuel, your experiences might be different since you.
Benefit from living in in the EU, but in the United States?
If any one of us who lives here thinks about what are the things
that pain us or create burden either managing our own health
or frankly navigating the healthcare system, I have no
doubt we could come up with a really ripe list off the top of
my head, one of the things that I've peripherally.
Thought about, touched on, studied, written about over the
course of my career is what in healthcare we call price
transparency. Because there's an economic
component of how we have to do healthcare in the United States,
and it's absolutely, incredibly impossible to know how to
navigate it, to know how to manage it, to even know what it
is, frankly. And so that burden is so
insanely real for all of us living in the United States.
On any given day, I don't know that I could tell you how much
of my money doing my Healthcare is going to cost.
And I would love for people who have passion in automation and
behavior design to spend as much or any energy on that.
Talk about alleviating burden for literally every single
person who lives in the United States.
Yeah, that's huge. All right.
I want to jump, I want to jump into our our product for today,
we we've chosen a product especially for you and we're
hoping you can use the, what you know of all all your chops from
your background and experiences to help us improve the
basketball game. Yeah, I was.
Really delighted when I heard you guys wanted me to talk about
basketball. I've actually never played
basketball myself. I grew up a volleyball player at
university. I played volleyball, which was
some of the most fun I've ever had in my life, and I know that
all my friends who have played and do play basketball will
share a similar sentiment. It's such a fun game.
My husband is an avid basketball player and fan, and I have
several friends who also were collegiate basketball players
who even played professionally for a while.
And one of my dearest friends from back home has worked for
the NBA for 25 years. And so I get to experience
basketball sort of through them Also in the past couple of
years, especially like I'm sure many of you here in the USI have
become an avid collegiate basketball fan.
I think that what the men and women who play university
basketball in the United States have done.
To create excitement and fandom for the sport.
Our March Madness tournament is some of the most enjoyable and
entertaining and exciting sport I've ever watched.
So I was excited when I was invited to talk about basketball
as a product because I feel like this year in my life and and I'm
47 years old. I have now become officially a a
collegiate basketball fan. I now pay attention.
I read the stories all the time. I watch it, even if it's not the
March Madness championship, you know, basketball tournament.
And so I think the invitation from you two is, you know, what
about the sport of basketball? Might you redesign or what parts
of the game are up for change? Yeah, including the, you know,
the viewer experience for example.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Thanks for that. Yeah.
So, so I did what I think any good behavioral scientist might
do. And since I first learned that
you all were interested in hearing from me about
basketball, my first reaction was like, I don't actually know
that much about basketball. And so I did what any good
behavioral scientist might do, and I went and spoke with people
who do know a lot about basketball.
So that I so that. Is some research?
Yes. I did a lot of research so that
I could learn from them. So as I mentioned, I the first
person I talked to was my husband who has been playing
and, you know, enjoying watching basketball his entire life.
And this might tickle you. It tickled me.
I was actually really surprised. I said to him, you know, if you
could change something about the game or if you could redesign
anything, what would it be? And he said, nothing.
The sport is perfect. And I said sounds like a very
hardcore fan. Really, there's nothing you
would change. I'm sure if you really thought
about it, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
So then of course, I talked with a couple of my friends who have
played or continue to play. And as I mentioned, I have this
one friend who works and has for the last 25 years worked for the
NBA. But through all of those
conversations and really just thinking about it, I have come
up with a couple of ideas. Again, being somebody who has
never played it and doesn't have first hand experience, which
again all of us who do behavioral design, you're always
working on things that maybe you don't know anything about or
that you haven't experienced. Constantly.
Right. So I want to start with women's
basketball and. I think something fascinating is
happening here in the United States, literally as we speak,
which is the introduction of what we call the nil, which is
the mechanism that enables collegiate athletes now to get
paid to earn money from sponsors and other types of
organizations. What that means here in 2023 is
a player like Caitlin Clark or Angel Reese.
The people I just mentioned have a greater earning potential as
collegiate athlete. Than they do as professional
athletes. And I think those economic
influences have significant direct impact on how not only
they and other players experience basketball, but
frankly how fans get to experience basketball.
I watched one of these women do an interview just recently,
maybe two months ago, right at the end of the tournament.
And everybody just assumed she was going to go pro, right?
She just won the national championship as a college
player. The next step is to go pro.
And she said I'm not going pro this year.
I'm going to earn about $1,000,000.
There is none of that type of money waiting for me as a
professional basketball player and that, that.
Is she Is she flunking her classes just to make?
More money. She still right?
Of course. She still has eligibility to
remain at the university and there are other reasons.
It's not just the money. She loves to play for her coach
at the university and she would like the opportunity to win
another championship and be back-to-back champions.
So I don't want to pretend it's only the money.
But I think when you think about how the sport is designed and
we're we're constantly thinking about micro and macro
influences, that's a very real influence for the decisions that
athletes are going to make. So that's one.
Speaking of women in sport, I think something that could be
interesting across the men's basketball game, and not just in
college but at the professional level, is to position more women
head coaches. And the reason I think that that
would be really interesting is because women do strategy and
tactics differently often than men do.
Neither is better nor worse, just different.
And I think instituting more women as head coaches in charge
of either men's professional basketball teams or men's
collegiate basketball teams could make the game very
interesting. Not just for viewers, but for
the people playing it. So those are the two like big
things that I would get really excited to see what could
happen. Interesting.
And what is the I'm actually, you know very much a non
follower of basketball including collegiate.
But, but what is the, you know, reason or difference in coaching
style or I guess in many contexts?
I assume that you know, diversity in general is is
really good. Like it provides often times
different perspectives and new ways of thinking, new ways of
doing things and so on. So it seems to be really
reasonable that perspective. Is there something particular
that you expect to come out of this type of order?
Yes. I actually expect the
performance of the athletes and the teams to elevate, right?
So if we talk about why I think this matters.
And I don't want to pretend I don't know anything about this.
I actually did my master's degree in sport and performance
psychology, and my master's thesis was on men's and women's
attitudes towards male versus female coaches.
So I have studied this across my career and when I was doing my
do it, when I was yeah, when I was doing my master's degree to
pay for my degree, I had a job and my job was as the assistant.
Coach to the men's volleyball team.
So I've also lived this myself a little bit.
And I think the opportunities to diversify the head coaching
staff by instituting more women in those positions stands to
elevate their performance of not only the athletes but the Games
in general. Because when you introduce
either new ways of thinking or when you can figure out how to
decrease inhibition or if you can find new ways to socialize,
how the athletes earn from, learn from each other.
These are just a few things off the top of my head.
You actually see collective performance increased.
Now, somebody like Steph Curry or LeBron James, some people
might say, I don't know, that their performance can get much
better, right? Like, these are superhuman
basketball players and I would like to offer.
I actually think they could get even better as basketball
players. Awesome.
Let's say that you could design an experiment around this topic
of the the gender of top coaches and the coaching staff.
What? How how would you approach that
and and what would you be most interested in testing if you had
all the resources in the world and you could do anything right?
The experiment would probably look something like spending
about a month's time across the calendar, just like one month,
and rotating coaches across teams, right?
So the teams remain intact, but we position different coaches in
charge of different teams across time to see if we notice any
difference. I don't think it would require
an entire basketball season, which is like six or seven
months long. We don't need to do it across an
entire season. I think that for both the
coaches and the players, if we could spend just a few few weeks
changing out the coaches, we would see some very interesting
things and certainly the self-reports would be incredibly
rich. That's awesome.
Yeah. I wonder how much the effect
would be just like the players preferences versus their actual
performance. And you know, which one would
win out or if they would both improve.
Maybe one more than the other. Yeah, yeah.
Or it becomes, we had a discussion recently on the
podcast with Paul Bloom talking about how parenting is maybe,
you know, not as I guess impactful as maybe we want to
believe sometimes. And maybe that could be a kind
of a a another result from that kind of, you know, research
where you kind of like, well, actually coaches.
Coaches don't matter as much as you think.
Yeah, absolutely. We can learn that too.
All right. So.
One topic that'll be really interesting to hear your
thoughts on is I guess I I see it as AS2 sided the same coin
when it comes to really getting applied Barel science to be
successful. And I guess one part of it is
kind of call it the scaling problem, like how do we scale
bare science and business, but part of that is also kind of the
branding problem like how do we brand Barel science in business
so. I don't know where we'll start.
We can start in many sure. But but from your perspective,
you know, how do you think about that challenge?
I love this question. There is no doubt that
behavioral science as a field has a major brand problem, major
and that's OK, right. It's just as long as we all kind
of recognize that. And the way I would challenge
any one of us to really understand that is if you were
to go to any person in business and say I'm a behavioral
scientist or, hey, you know, what do you think a behavioral
scientist does? You would get so many different
answers to that question. There would be no coherence
whatsoever, right. And a brand is intact when
people are using the same words and phrases to describe
something, right. So our brand is not intact,
right. So let's just start there.
I would like to share the story of how I ended up working full
time at this company that I'm currently at Tandem Diabetes
Care and I think it will share my perspective on, on what
you're asking Samuel as a behavioral scientist and
somebody specializing in research and and behavior
design, the majority of my experience in diabetes prior to
coming to this company was in pre diabetes and type 2
diabetes. And that's because pre diabetes
and type 2 diabetes have the opportunity to be reversed.
We can reverse the trajectory of diabetes for somebody who either
is pre diabetic or has type 2 diabetes.
And so that's ripe for interventions.
That's a really opportunistic way to work for somebody who
specializes in, you know, behavior change and intervention
design. I learned about this company
through my family At the time. I had a niece who was diagnosed
with type one diabetes when she was three years old.
Now, if you live with type one diabetes, that means you need
regular injections of insulin all day, every day.
You essentially do not have any pancreatic function.
And so that's why you need insulin, right, as medicine.
And the the amount of insulin that you dose and the rate at
which you dose it and other metabolic activities like eating
or exercising or sleeping, all of these things come into play.
And if not used or if mishandled, if the insulin is
mishandled, the scary thing is you could die, right?
I mean, so we are literally talking about life and death.
And so I was really excited that a company like this would give
me a chance to spend more time practicing human computer
interaction more so than you know, programmatic intervention
design. And so I found out this was back
in 2017. I found out that this company
was looking to hire more human factors and UX researchers which
of course is a part of our skill set as behavioural scientists.
So at the time I was a freelancer and I called, called
the company and I said, hey, I saw that you are looking to hire
some human factors researchers. And I'd like to tell you a
little bit about myself. And I spoke with one of the
women who does our talent acquisition and we talked for
about 15 minutes and she said it sounds like you're a little bit
more than what we really need right now.
But what was serendipitous was a couple weeks from then was going
to be the American Diabetes Association conference here in
San Diego, where I was living at the time and where where this
company is located. And I was going to attend the
American Diabetes Association conference as part of my work
anyway. So she said to me, she said,
since you're going to go to that conference, do me a favor, go to
the booth, the tandem diabetes care booth at the conference.
Walk over there, Look for the tallest, baldest man standing at
the booth. That is Brian.
He's our Chief Commercial Officer.
Just go talk to him. So I did.
I went to the conference. I went to the booth.
I found the tallest, baldest man.
He's 6 foot 8, so he's properly tall.
And I walked right up to him and I said hi, My name is Steph and
I would love to tell you why tandem diabetes care could use a
behavioral scientist. And he said, I don't know what
that is. It sounds expensive.
Why don't you sit down and tell me your story?
So I did. And he said, yeah, that sounds
like quite a lot and I don't know that we need that much
right now, but let's stay in touch.
And what ended up happening over the next week or two and why I
eventually got a phone call from him is because both the Human
Factors team that was working here at the time and the people
who were who were doing market research for the company left
for other jobs. And so there was sort of this
operational gap where both the market research needs of the
company and the UX research and human factors research of the
company, those things were not being tended to.
So he called me and he said hey, can you do human factors
research? I said sure, hey, can you do
market research? Absolutely.
Great. I need you to come in and work
with us for a while. And that's how I first started
working here at the company. And the reason that that story I
think matters is because as much as we all want to get hired full
time right out of the gate for a really exciting full time
behavioral sciences job, pure behavioral sciences job,
sometimes what we need to do first and foremost is meet the
immediate needs of the business. And at that time when I had the
opportunity to come work here, what the company was asking for
overtly what they said they needed was we need somebody to
run human factors research and do those studies and we need
somebody to do our market research because we're trying to
make some, you know, strategic and product decisions.
And so even though that is only a slice of what I or any of us
do, right, it mattered to the company.
And so I came in and I did it. And during those couple of
months I had the most fun. The people who work at this
company are just what I like to call filet mignon people.
They're the best of the best. I fell in love with them.
I fell, Hopefully you're a carnivore if you're a
vegetarian. That might not be a very nice
analogy, just a company with an amazing mission.
It's a mission, a mission driven company to change the life of
people who live with diabetes. And so a couple months later,
Brian, the Chief Commercial Officer who who is my boss, we
started talking and he said what do you think about working here
full time? And I said, can I build out a
behavioral sciences team? And he said, Yep, just come work
here. So over the last six years, I've
been working on building up and scaling A behavioral sciences
unit inside of tandem diabetes care.
And over the course of that entire six years, I have always
worked hard to find that balance between meeting the immediate
needs of the business and identifying and filling what I
call opportunity gaps to apply behavioral sciences to show the
value of behavioral sciences to the company and to the
leadership and. Can I actually rewind a little
bit to that time you met Brian I believe at the conference,
Brian, sorry, when you met Brian at the conference and.
You kind of sat him down to say like, This is why, you know you
need behavioral science. Was there something you said
there that you would have changed through this experience?
Like what I'm just interested to hear a little bit of because we
all face that, like trying to always sell behavioral science
and do so persuasively. And it seems like, you know
really what one of the major takeaways is, is what you're
saying is that we need to speak the language of the business of
the. What, what they need like they
needed micro research, they needed some other things and and
so speaking to that, was there something that you learn from
from that experience or like would you change the way you
were spoken to him the first time if you did it again now?
Right. So I think the only way I can
answer that question because my memory is terrible and we're
talking, you know, over six years now.
But the way I would answer that question is I would have in that
conversation faster used the words that he was using instead
of the words that I wanted to use to talk about my expertise
and the value that I could bring to the company.
And I think all of us need to decide for ourselves, as
professionals, how do you feel if somebody says, oh, you do
market research, or how do you feel if somebody says, oh, you
do customer insights, right. The vernacular that industry
uses tends to represent a part of what we do, but it's not the
whole package, right? And this is where I say we have
a brand problem. What words and phrases might the
field of behavioral sciences use that become as commonplace and
as well understood as market research, as human factors
research, as customer insights? And I think that's the
opportunity facing us right now, yeah.
That that's really interesting and and I see, I see this.
On the one hand you you feel the need to teach other people about
what you do and like you know convert them to you know to the
good side and you know here's how we need to do experiments in
order to learn and iterate and and really help help meet our
users where they are and so on. But then on the other hand, you
need people to to easily understand what you're saying.
And so having that more common language might might be
beneficial, but I think that that actually presents a a new
challenge for the branding problem.
If we're taking the words that other people, you know, human
factors and market research and so on that other people are
familiar with and kind of blending into those roles, how
then do we differentiate ourselves, right, Like like so
one of the tag lines that you'll hear me and every person on my
team use to describe what we do at Tandem diabetes Care is we
like to say we advocate for the humans using our machines.
And so that works inside of tandem because at the end of the
day we make medical device systems and in its purest form
that is human computer interaction, which is most of
our society today, Let's just be honest, right?
But the constant campaign to pursue human first versus
technology first, design and development, This is why we have
just simplified it and said we're here to advocate for the
humans. And every time I'm in a meeting
sitting right next to our head engineer, I feel like we've done
our job right. And so that's a very practical
lesson that I would share with anybody is when you're in your
work meetings, when you're doing your work, who are you
collaborating with? If, as a behavioral scientist
you're sitting with and collaborating with an engineer
or a business strategist or a product owner or a UX designer,
you're winning, right? Because you are there to
advocate for the humans that are ultimately going to use whatever
it is they're building and making.
I don't know if that's helpful. But sometimes the way that I
find calm in my brain when I get really overwhelmed by the
branding problem we face is to just find the simplest words and
phrases to speak about what we do.
Yeah. No, I think that's great.
All right. Now we have a fun surprise for
you. We're we're going to, I know
we're going to jump into our speed rounds and I'll, I'll tell
you a little bit about how it goes.
This is a little game that we've created called Would it
replicate? And we're going to share some
hypothetical research findings. These are, you know, just random
things. Not that random things that Sam
and I have made-up. And ask you to tell us whether
or not you think it would replicate, and you know it.
It's sort of meant to be a just a fun thought experiment to give
us a sentence or two about your thoughts around around that
particular finding. Let's do it first.
One, consumers with greater trust in AI have better
healthcare outcomes than skeptics.
False or no, it it had, it would not replicate because there are
so many people out there who don't even consciously realize
know about care about AI or automation, OK.
What about behavioral scientists who were former athletes are
more likely to use competition as a motivational strategy in
their intervention? Yes, that would replicate
because at the end of the day, all humans are biased and
whether we realize it or not, we're probably doing those types
of things in our work. Awesome customer churn can
primarily be attributed to users failing to form habits with the
service. Whoa, that's a hard one.
I want to say yes because I believe in the power of
behavior, design and habits. But I'm going to say no because
the service or product was too shitty.
It wasn't good enough. Right, OK.
This is an easy one, or we'll see.
Applied practitioners with a PhD performs better at predicting
behavioral outcomes than practitioners without one.
All else being equal, no, absolutely not.
That would not replicate. I think education is powerful,
but there's a lot of ways to get an education.
You don't need a PhD. How about?
People with unconventional hair colors, like pink, perform
better at creative tasks. These are just mildly.
Directed behaviors. This is a big yes.
We could replicate that all day long.
In fact, I heard one of our executives here at Tandem the
other day say something like I need more pink in my life.
And she was talking about me and my team.
So we are, we are on her mind for doing things over and over
and over. Yeah, that's amazing.
OK. Companies with the Chief
Behavioral Officer perform better.
As measured by stock price performance.
I don't care, yes. But I don't care if it's called
Chief Behavioral Officer or Chief Experience Officer or
Chief Whatever. I'm here to make sure that we
advocate for the humans as strongly as we advocate for
everything else. So yes, it would replicate.
But I don't care about the title, and I don't think anybody
else should care about the title either.
Yeah. And you wrote in 2017 a article
on why digital health meet chief payroll officers.
Yep. And so it sounds like your your
stance remains the same. Like if we need these roles.
Yes, yes, yes. And I don't care what we call
it, All right? Last one.
You're gonna like this. Volleyball players are more
likely to spike their drinks. Their own drinks or their own
drinks or somebody else's drinks?
You interpret it as you will. Volleyball players are
absolutely that would replicate in the real world.
Volleyball players are absolutely more likely to spike
their own drinks. Their own drinks, yes.
I I feel like I got associates spike with blah blah blah What
is a spike? What?
What does that mean? So in the sport of volleyball,
when you spike the ball, it's when you hit it very hard to the
other side of the net to try to offensively score a point.
Right. Sam, have you heard of
volleyball? I'm surprised by volleyball.
In Sweden, you know we. We have limited access to any
type of sand. Or no, the Philippines.
We don't call it smashing the ball, but maybe that's just same
thing. Smashing.
Spiking. Yeah, Yep.
OK. But different.
Different than serving the ball. So that's very important.
Since we're talking about drinks.
Spiking and smashing the ball is very different than serving the
ball, right. Just like.
I love that you extended the metaphor.
I did not see that coming. Amazing.
Should we jump to our last question?
Wrap it up? I think it's time.
Yeah, Awesome. Yeah, please, Steph, what is
your most controversial opinion in behavioral science?
I mean, we've been. Talking about this already, and
I'm not the only one that says this, but my goodness do we have
a big brand problem and. You know, because enough of us
are saying that I don't think it's controversial anymore.
It is controversial for the implications of our field of
practice. And so, just to stick with
whether or not it could be controversial, I would like to
invite all of us to really think critically about would it help
or hurt our field. If we were OK with being what I
call title agnostic, right. So this goes back to what we
were just talking about. Do companies perform better in
the stock market with a Chief Behavioral Officer?
I feel very strongly, yes. But I don't think that person
needs to be titled Chief Behavioral Officer.
That doesn't help the brand though.
That's the problem. So it's a, it's a, it's a it's a
conundrum. It really is, it's a it's a heck
of APAR opportunity. You know, I'm, I'm 47, almost
48. So I've been doing this for a
very long time and I want very much for the field of behavioral
sciences to be recognized for what it is, how important it is,
how instrumental it is. And at the same time, I think.
We could as a field, you know, lock arms with customer
experience, user experience design, a couple of other social
science fields and it would work really well.
So that's where I'm. That's where I constantly have
that dialogue around like the purest in me about behavioral
science versus well, if we blend, I think it could work
just as well. Yeah.
If then there's the risk of does it just disappear.
Right. Do do people.
Right the absolutely I'm afraid of.
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
That's that's a real thing. You know, if if behavioral
sciences all of a sudden, just like, aren't we all talking
about that at one point, do people even do it right anymore?
Right. Yeah.
Well, Steph, this was lovely. Thank you so much for joining
us. It it's been a blast.
I had so much fun. I feel like I could talk to you
guys for hours. Thank you so much.
Time to wrap. Up another episode of the
Behavioral Design Podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show.
Oh, and I am an AI. Yeah, welcome to Uncanny Valley.
Sam and Elaine told me. This is going to be an awesome
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design. Our fantastic show music is
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And thanks to the team at Orange Wall Media for the production of
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E-mail podcast@habitweekly.com We'd love to hear from you.
Thanks again for listening. See you next time.