Data that tracks what users and customers do is behavioral data. But behavioral science is much more about why humans do things and what sorts of techniques can be employed to nudge them to do something specific. On this episode, behavioral scientist Dr. Lindsay Juarez from Irrational Labs joined us for a conversation on the topic. Nudge vs. sludge, getting uncomfortably specific about the behavior of interest, and even a prompting of our guest to recreate and explain a classic Seinfeld bit!

Items of Interest Mentioned in the Show

• (Paper) The extreme illusion of understanding by Lau, Geipel, and Keysar


• (Book) Make Work Fair by Iris Bohnet and Siri Chilazi


• (Article) UX or PX? Why naming matters by Darren Yeo


• (Newsletter) Can’t Get Much Higher


• (Video) Page Fights Example Video


• (Book) Choiceology


• (Podcast) Choiceology


• Night Guy (though the best version of this joke is Netflix)


• (Paper) Proximity of snacks to beverages increases food consumption in the workplace: A field study by Novemsky, Chance and Baskin

Photo by Richard Stachmann on Unsplash

Episode Transcript

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0:00:05 .8 Announcer: Welcome to The Analytics Power Hour. Analytics topics covered conversationally and sometimes with explicit language.

0:00:15 .1 Tim Wilson: Hi everyone. Welcome to The Analytics Power Hour. This is episode number 271. I’m Tim Wilson from facts & feelings, and you’re listening to me because you made a decision to smash that play button in your podcast app. Why did you do that? You could have scrolled through Instagram, checked Bluesky, popped into your favorite media site and checked the latest news. Or perished the thought, put your phone down and gone outside. Maybe even touched some grass. Really, though, I’m glad you’re here. I’m pretty sure you’re not listening. Because we ran a perfectly targeted Google Ad, or because we built a predictive model that told us exactly what content to create and when to publish it, that, as a result, enabled us to manipulatively induce you to listen. Nope. You’re a human, and humans make decisions for lots of reasons. At best, we might have nudged you a little bit. Which brings me to a trivia question for one of my co hosts for this episode, Moe Kiss. How are things going at Canva?

0:01:14 .3 Moe Kiss: Pretty great.

0:01:15 .6 Tim Wilson: Awesome. So, on that topic of nudging, can you name anyone who won a Nobel Prize for their work on that very subject?

0:01:24 .5 Moe Kiss: Well, it’s possible. It might have to do with one of my favorite books about nudging, and one of the authors was Richard Thaler.

0:01:31 .6 Tim Wilson: Ding, ding, ding. You are correct. That’s right. And he is not our guest today, but Val Kroll, my colleague at facts & feelings. Can you name the psychologist that Richard Thaler met at Stanford in 1977 and went on to collaborate with quite a bit? Well tip. He personally responded to an email from Moe several years before he passed away.

0:01:54 .3 Val Kroll: Ooh, that would be Daniel Kahneman.

0:01:58 .4 Tim Wilson: That is correct. The greatest guest we never quite got. So Thaler Kahneman and Amos Tversky and others blazed some real trails when it came to behavioral science. And that’s the topic of today’s show. Luckily, I’m going to use that word again. We were able to nudge our guest to agree to hop on the mic. This may be the first time where the nature of the episode itself will allow us to ask her to dissect why she made that choice. Lindsay Juarez is a behavioral scientist and a director at Irrational Labs, which is a behavioral product design company founded by Kristen Berman and Dan Ariely in 2013. Lindsay uses behavioral insights to design and test interventions in the financial and health domains. Before she joined Irrational Labs, she was a senior behavioral researcher at the center for Advanced Hindsight. Love that name at Duke University. Prior to that she worked for the Federal Government Accountability Office and at NYU on a series of multi site school interventions to reduce the racial academic achievement gap. She has a BA in Psychology from Reed College and an MA and a PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Virginia. And today she is our guest. Welcome to the show, Lindsay.

0:03:14 .5 Lindsay Juarez: Thank you for having me. I let myself be nudged. I was very excited to come.

0:03:21 .2 Tim Wilson: By nudging. I think Val and I were twisting her arm at Experimentation island and she was like, okay, I’ll be there. So maybe a good place to start is to actually define what behavioral science is like in layperson’s terms. Can you maybe take a swing at that Lindsay?

0:03:41 .8 Lindsay Juarez: Yes. So I would say behavioral science is using insights from psychology, from behavioral economics, from neuroscience and some other social sciences to understand and then predict, maybe even change human behavior. And so if you think about the way you take actions or you make decisions, there are times when you are just systematically not doing what you want to do, or maybe you don’t do what you want to do. And it can be systematic. And so using an understanding of behavioral science, you can say, oh, let’s anticipate the problems that you’re going to have in exercising every day or eating healthy and then what can you do to ideally change it around so help you achieve your goals.

0:04:31 .1 Moe Kiss: And this is like hands down one of my favorite topics. I feel like people have often heard of behavioral science, but maybe don’t have like a super clear understanding. But there always seems to be like a couple of examples in the industry that people are like, oh, that study. What is your favorite like that study?

0:04:50 .6 Lindsay Juarez: Good question. It’s probably a while ago, I mean, Google is always doing a lot of behavioral science, but they were doing it in-house and looking at healthy snacks because famously, right, they have snacks everywhere and they don’t want people to get too indulgent. And they were basically looking at how can we ensure that snacks or that coffee breaks don’t have too many treats coming with them. And they had basically a corner kitchen and people who happened to have an office on the left side versus the right side would come in and the coffee station was closer or farther to their snack bar. It was like an L-shaped kitchen. And basically what they find is when people have the misfortune to have an office on the side that then is like the coffee and the snack station are I think it’s 12 feet apart versus 21 feet. I might be getting my math wrong, but basically if you are just steps closer to the treats, more of your coffee breaks involve, I’ll