Written by Alejandra Fabián Flores, Co-op Student with the BC Public Service
Photo by Noah Buscher on Unsplash
I am of the generation born at the gate of the climate crisis. Many of my teachers prophesied doom. I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that by the time I was a teenager, I wanted to save the world. Especially when I realized that human societies are not immutable.
Although all human nervous systems are alike, each person’s brain operates as a unique personal universe. Each person’s ‘cosmovision’ includes their identity, societal expectations, decision-making patterns (heuristics), and behaviour patterns (habits). Although relatively firm in adulthood, an individual’s values, preferences, and choices are never fixed; on the contrary, character is malleable. Humans are open systems, influenced by experiences. So, if humans can change, societies can too.
The possibility of societal change means that humanity is not fated to consume itself via the climate apocalypse. Human systems can change for the better. And if we can figure out how to change ourselves, we will save ourselves.
At first, I thought that to change the world all I needed to do was explain my worldview. Education, I was certain, was going to be the silver bullet. If only people knew what I knew, if I could manage to describe the scale of our existential problems properly, if they truly understood everything that was wrong…then everyone would behave differently, and the world would be saved.
Over time, however, I came to notice contradictions within myself—even on occasions where I knew what the “right choice” was, I often caught myself going astray. How could this be? I knew that buying clothes containing plastic materials was bad for the environment, yet I purchased them. I complained about oil and mining corporations polluting the world, yet directly benefited from their exploitations. I was “educated” and yet, I voraciously consumed just like everybody else. Why?
Many of our decisions are driven by unconscious factors that we do not control—our frenzied external circumstances interact with our disruptive internal states. We are also highly influenced by the context around us with our external environment impacting our decision-making processes. This is why disseminating facts and information was never enough. To make a bigger difference in some of the largest societal challenges, I needed to understand the invisible strings that pull humans in myriad directions.
When I had the opportunity to attend university, I enrolled in the Gustavson School of Business at the University of Victoria (UVIC). Businesses have been harnessing elements of social psychology to tap into undercurrents of human motivation for centuries, often to convince us to buy their products. Perhaps I could use their techniques to help myself make better choices.
To graduate with a Bachelor of Commerce degree from UVIC, students are required to complete at least three co-op work terms. A co-op work term is like a paid internship and often an excellent opportunity to get professional experience. I figured that government played a vital role in regulating profit-seeking systems and in setting better choice paths. One sound policy decision inevitably has a butterfly effect, so government is uniquely placed to improve decision-making systems on a truly societal scale. This motivated me to become a public servant, and in my last co-op term, I landed a job with B.C.’s Ministry of Agriculture and Food.
It was in the second week of my co-op when I first encountered the field of behavioural insights. I attended a meeting where University of British Columbia (UBC) students, who I later found out were enrolled in the Advanced Professional Certificate in Behavioural Insights, were presenting opportunities to utilize behavioural insights to support the agriculture and food sector.
During the meeting, I could not believe what I was hearing. Behavioural insights had everything I had always been interested in. The UBC students were applying insights from the behavioural sciences to support the industry in making decisions that may benefit their business. They also designed a rigorous evaluation to verify whether the applied insights worked as intended. I was absolutely delighted. To explore the topic further, I signed up for an online webinar called Behavioural Insights Basics. The webinar, given by Carl Jensen and Mikayla Ford from the BC Behavioural Insights Group (BC BIG), blew my mind. There were mentors, professional opportunities, and for the first time in my life, a path forward ahead of me…a career. My curiosity only increased.
Right after the webinar, I emailed Carl on a whim to ask if he would have a one-on-one conversation with me. Honestly, I thought that he would be too busy. After all, I was just a co-op student, and he was BC BIG’s Project Director. To my surprise, he kindly agreed to meet me the following week.
Carl was even warmer in video than in his e-mails. During our conversation, he explained how BC BIG works and how behavioural insights is applied in the public service. I could barely contain my excitement, so I asked him how someone like me, a passionate beginner with no concrete BI experience, could get involved in this field. Carl highly recommended the Advanced Professional Certificate program. He had taken it himself, and it was the very same program that the UBC students that I had encountered in my meeting were involved in.
As I processed all this information, I thought that perhaps more projects to support the agriculture and food sector would benefit from a behavioural insights approach. I wanted to apply these principles and become familiar with intervention design and measurement processes. It was then that Carl put me in touch with one of BC BIG’s Methods Specialists, Lindsay Miles-Pickup. Lindsay had previously worked in the Ministry of Agriculture and Food, just like me. I connected with her just one week later, and meeting Lindsay was like meeting myself in the future; we had everything in common.
Lindsay had been drawn to economics and social sciences classes in university for the same reasons I had been drawn to business school. She loves interdisciplinary approaches to solving societal problems, and was happy to discuss how she applied sociology, anthropology, economics, and psychology to her everyday work. Like Carl, she recommended the Advanced Professional Certificate program, which she had taken prior to becoming a BI Methods Specialist. Since she was still closely connected to the Ministry of Agriculture and Food, she provided me with information on how I might get involved with initiatives using behavioural insights to support the needs of the sector.
My conversation with Lindsay left me inspired. I was set on becoming a BI Methods Specialist and I was encouraged to research potential post-secondary paths. Perhaps getting a Master’s—or even a PhD—could secure me a future in this field. To help me answer these questions, Carl connected me with Kirstin Appelt, the Research Director for UBC's Decision Insights for Business & Society (UBC-DIBS). I could not believe that all these high-level experts were willing to take time from their busy schedules to have a conversation with me. Everyone I met from BI was remarkably kind and exceptionally helpful.
Kirstin is a brilliant and extremely interesting human being; after a long conversation on mutual interests, she patiently explained to me the different paths to get into the professional field of BI. She began by clarifying that, because BI is such a new field, there was no set route. I could get on-the-job experience, which could be useful, but would leave me with inevitable blind spots. I could also enrol in “boot camps”, which would give me only an introductory level of understanding. Many master’s degrees would be coursework-driven with a lack of applied experiments and projects. Lastly, a PhD could become a five-plus-year commitment; the training would be rigorous, and though I could run my own research projects, most end up with a psychology or marketing PhD, not a behavioural insights PhD.
If I was truly interested in making BI my career, she suggested that enrolling in the Advanced Professional Certificate would give me the firm foundation I needed. It would train me to become a behavioural insights specialist like Lindsay and Carl.
I finally knew what I wanted to do with my career. My diverse interests had always torn me in all directions, often paralyzing me with indecision. Now, there was a clear path in front of me. When I told my supervisor and the rest of my team, I got endless support to pursue my new-found interest. I immediately got involved with both BI projects going on in my Ministry. In fact, I became the de facto contact for the UBC students and I was able to collaborate with them on their final BI project. In a way, my BI career began by being on “the other side” of the Advanced Professional Certificate, which one day I hope to complete. The BC BIG team also kindly invited me to participate in a post-secondary student competition that had been challenged to use behavioural insights to support the agriculture and food sector. I was present when the team assessed the students’ proposed solutions. Christine Kormos, one of BC BIG’s Senior Behavioural Scientists, kindly encouraged me to contribute to the evaluation.
The most valuable lesson that I have learned during my co-op so far is that expressing interest and enthusiasm in what you want to do, as well as asking how to get involved, will oftentimes lead to mentorship and opportunities. I am honoured to be able to share my journey, from first encountering behavioural insights as a concept to keenly participating in BI projects.
Behavioral insights is a step forward for my teenage dream of saving the world, because it is a collection of applicable, evidence-based, and interdisciplinary methods to make it easy for humans to choose the right thing. BI considers social context, the environmental situation, and the subconscious processes present whenever humans make decisions. What is easy, attractive, socially acceptable, and opportune will often add up to become irresistible. I hope to build a career in BI and apply it to helping humanity avoid the climate disaster.