← The Brainy Business | Understanding the Psychology of Why People Buy | Behavioral Economics
The Brainy Business | Understanding the Psychology of Why People Buy | Behavioral Economics
464. Rethinking Failure: Behavioral Insights with Madeline Quinlan
00:46:42
In this episode of The Brainy Business podcast, Melina Palmer engages in an insightful conversation with Madeline Quinlan, a behavioral scientist and co-founder of Salient, a consultancy bridging the gap between academic insights and practical...
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- [00:00]
Melina Palmer
Welcome to episode 464 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. Today's episode is a conversation with Madeline Quinlan. Ready? Let's get started.
- [00:16]
You are listening to the Brainy Business podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now, here's your host, Melina Palmer.
- [00:32]
Hello. Hello, everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. Have you ever tried something and had it turn out completely different than you expected? Our inclination might be to call that a flop, but as my guest Maddie Quindlen shares in today's conversation, just because something didn't happen the way you wanted it to or expected doesn't mean that it's bad. As we learn from understanding human behavior, those moments are actually a good opportunity to dig in a little bit further, ask some questions. Try to understand what piece of context that you were missing when you set your expectation might be influencing the outcome. You got what's good about it. What can you learn and change for your next round? While you listen to this episode today, which originally aired back in May of 2021, I encourage you to think about a time you had an expectation and the result was nothing like you thought. Ideally, you can be thinking about something that you initially thought was bad, so you can see if there's an opportunity for a reframe as you look forward to whatever your next trial might be. Don't forget, links for my top related past episodes and books are waiting for you in the show. Notes for this episode, which are found within the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 464 all right, let's jump right in. Maddie Quindlen, welcome to the Brainy Business podcast.
- [02:03]
Maddie Quinlan
Thank you so much. It's nice to be. Nice to be back.
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Yeah, I know we don't have a ton of repeat guests. I know you do a lot of stuff. I talked a little bit about it in the intro. But just tell for the audience who you are, what you do, that sort of stuff.
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Sure, yeah. So I'm a behavioral scientist. I have been working exclusively in this field for the last three or so. Prior to that, I worked in a lot of different finance areas. I worked in fintech. I was a pretty heavily finance focused person and since transitioning have really opened up into all of the different applications of behavioral science. So it blew my mind when I really got into the field about all of the different Applications for these insights. And. Yeah, so it's been a really exciting journey to. To get here.
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Yeah, absolutely. So in the journey to get there, I. I know, I don't know that we've really talked about this, but my background, I worked in financial institutions for a long time as well, and so we have some tie in there. But how did you. I make the leap in that way to say, you know what, I'm going to go ahead and study behavioral science and I believe you made a pretty big move essentially.
- [03:32]
I did, I did, yes. So my background, as I said, I did my undergrad in finance and I knew that that was sort of the field that I was going to go into, but I did also do a degree in psychology at the same time. And at the time it was really just out of personal interest. I really found it fascina and I ended up getting a lot of head tilts from people when I was doing job interviews out of university with this sort of, why would you do finance and psychology? Those things seem very much at odds with each other. And so I still kind of figured that finance focus would be my career path. I went sort of headfirst into things like stock option pricing and financial technology. I worked in sort of commodities trading and risk management for a clearinghouse. And along the way I was doing my cfa, which is my Chartered Financial Analyst certification. And there's this one tiny book in the last level of CFA that talks about behavioral finance. And I read this and it felt like my world's collided because finally I was seeing this crossover between, you know, why do people behave the way that they do? Why do they make the financial decisions that they do? And then what are the implications for the markets at large from a finance perspective? So I felt very, very excited to have discovered this. It was a little bit of an aha and a little bit of a see, guys, I told you this is important. And so then what that inspired me to do was to go and do my master's because what I figured is that I don't know what I don't know. And I think it's important that I go back to university and get a bit bigger perspective on how to apply this insight. So, so I ended up leaving my job in finance and flying across the ocean to land in London to go to London School of Economics and take their master's in behavioral science. So that was kind of a. It was an all in leap for me, but it felt so right. And, you know, as I would come to look back in retrospect and of course hindsight bias applies, but it was the best. It was the best decision. The best decision that I made.
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Yeah, absolutely. And so funny in that when I tell my story of how I got into behavioral economics is I always start with, you know, there was this moment I remember exactly, like where I was sitting in class in my undergrad and I was reading. It was one section of one book. Had this tiny little thing about buying psychology and why people do the things they do. And I had this epiphany of, this is amazing. And I'm going to go, when I go get a master's, it's going to be in this and it's going to be awesome. And I spent 10 years calling universities that all said, like, that's not a thing. We don't have that program. You can create your own if you want. Just like, well, no thanks. If I know what I need to learn, I don't need to pay you to create my own curriculum. So. Nah. But, you know, then spent, you know, 10 years working in the credit union I was at and other stuff before I happened to be at a presentation where some people for the center for Advanced Hindsight were talking about behavioral economics and then jumped all in and did my master's, same as you, I guess, except I didn't make a move for mine. I was able to find an online program and I really lucked out with that. But so a little bit different, but similar in a lot of ways. So you find yourself all in here, move from Canada to London and you start working with the London School of Economics and working on your master's. And I know you made some important connections there that turned into bunch of the stuff with Gabs. Right. Kind of many seeds planted. Yeah.
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I think the most kind of fantastic thing about that program or the way that, you know, I was able to kind of move, move over and immerse myself really fully. There is. Is the connections that, that I made in that network. So, you know, not only just the amazing faculty that they have and the other professors and classmates and colleagues that would become lifelong friends and connections, I'm certain. But I also met my business partner through this program. So we were in the same graduating class. We founded Salient as we were in the middle of doing our dissertations, which I don't know whether or not I would recommend starting up a consultancy in the middle of doing your dissertation research for your master's thesis. But it did all work out. It was just an extraordinarily busy period. Period of life. But you know, we had both been. We, you know, originally there were the three of us founding members, and we had all kind of been at this crossroads in our careers as we were kind of coming out of what we had been doing before and moving more in this direction and feeling it really resonate. So we just, we thought, you know, why don't we just start something ourselves? You know, we obviously care about this. This is something that we can build. And it seemed like such a whoosh is how I describe it in the uptake of behavioral science in practice. And that there really was this gap between academic insight and practical application of these insights. You know, so there's, there's lots of studies, there's tons of research, but there was, it was less obvious to me that this was being fully and readily adopted in especially the private sector, because I think policymaking and government was a little bit more of a first mover in applying some behavioral science insights in their work. But the private sector, I think only more recently has really started to gain traction and gain acceleration in that uptake. So bridging that gap between the academic and the practical just seemed like such a resonant place to go. And so that was really the ethos for Salient from the beginning.
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Yeah. Yet again, the kindred spirits. And I'm sure that as the audience is listening, like, oh, no, no wonder that Maddie and Molina became fast friends, because all of what you're saying is exactly why I, you know, started with the brainy business in the podcast and everything. The same problems I saw when I was in school and things that seem so obvious to me of how this ties in with brand strategy and communication and marketing, messaging and pricing for businesses and global goals and things was just. Nobody was doing anything publicly. There was nothing being talked about anywhere across the field that I could find. And so said, well, I guess, I guess I'll do that. Here we are.
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Yeah, it's interesting. And you kind of alluded to, you know, finding the people and the connections that you do through doing this. And what I found was that if you're really pursuing something that rings true for you or something that you're incredibly passionate about, and it really embodies who you are and everything that you are kind of becomes what you do. And in doing that, you end up starting to attract other people that have the same perspective or like minds or the same kind of interest in elevating the same thing that you want to elevate over time. And you sort of, you know, for lack of a better term, you Kind of find your tribe and the people that surround you end up being these people that are passionate in the same direction. And with that sort of critical mass behind you, then you can really start to make big changes. Right. Because either, you know, any individual behavioral scientist or any one of us who cares about this, we can still move things at the margin, we can still make change. But if we're all kind of banded together and doing something for the better of the practice, then that's where really fundamental change can happen. And really impactful and measurable change.
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Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's a, you know, a grouping of us that all kind of independently were doing this around the same time. And then now, whether it's because we were all kind of locked up in 2020 and starting to connect, or I just started connecting with people because of the podcast or whatever it was, you know, all kind of realizing, oh yeah, that's a lot like what I saw that too. I did this. And like you said, having that tribe of people that are like minded and feeling the same way, that have been through a lot of the same stuff is, is really fun to be a part of. Kind of the. Well, anybody in the academic side of behavioral economics and behavioral science would say, you know, we were late to the party in some ways, I think on the applied side, where we're kind of the originals, you know.
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Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
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Yeah. So tell a little bit about Salient. So I know you said you started while you were at university, but what's the point? I guess, like, what do you do with. What are some of your favorite projects? You know, however you want to jump in on that.
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Sure, yeah. So we, yeah, so like I said that the idea of sort of bridging that gap between academic insight and practical application of these, you know, intelligent knowledge nudges and interventions that we know quite well and being able to take them to different sectors. So we actually kind of either decided consciously or unconsciously. What I really have come to is that becoming too niche to one particular industry or one particular application of behavioral science didn't really resonate with me. So my business partner, his background is heavily in finance, so it's mine. And so, you know, naturally we attract those kinds of clients more readily, whether they're, you know, big banks or other financial institutions or, you know, fintechs or advisory services or anything like that. Those will naturally come. But the broader scope of these applications has always been what's interested me the most. So, you know, we don't have two clients in the same Geographical area right now, you know, we have a couple that are in the same country, but anywhere from London and across here in Canada and Indonesia, all throughout Europe. So, you know, there's nothing incredibly specific about what we wanted our focus to be. And that's what I love about this field, is that it's everywhere. So we decided very early on that what we wanted to stand for was continuous betterment and to be really authentic and transparent about what it is that we try to do. So in the world of, you know, behavioral science and behavior change, we know that some things work and we know that a lot of things don't. And what we kind of stand for is to use this sort of scientific method, if you will, as much as is possible when we're doing a project. So to measure what we believe the problem to be in the first place and say, do we even know that we have the problem that we think we do? Because we would hate to try and solve something when it isn't a problem in the first place. And then when we're doing these interventions to do a really strong analysis to understand, have we actually made the measurable impact that we hoped to? How can we control those variables in the kind of real world, which is so much less controlled than an academic research environment? But how can we do that as best we can to really understand that we've made a good change? And this idea of being really transparent about the risks and the potential spillovers that come with behavior change, because we know that there are going to be knock on effects from one behavior change to the other. And we always want to be really aware of that and we always want our clients to be really aware of that. But we found incredible people that are bold and want to work in this space and want to apply this stuff. And those are the kind of clients that we really like to have, I guess. For our favorite projects that we're currently been working on and have in the past. We did a really interesting piece of work in collaborating with Nest Insight. It was in the pension space and in the uk, a really well known kind of policy decision that was made was around automatic enrollment, which we know is based on save more tomorrow. So this idea that if you default someone in to be saving into a private pension rather than having them have to opt in to make that choice, those contributions will become more and more over time and doing things automatically. We all know that if you want somebody to do something, you must make it easy. And so what they realized several years later is that there's a Whole population of people in the self employed population that aren't being automatically enrolled into these savings programs because it's up to them to do it themselves. They don't have an employer doing it for them. So we were doing a project and we were doing some research around how can we get the self employed better able to save into these private pensions and not fall behind in their long term savings goals. So we did some message framing campaigns around. If we tell them that it's a palatable contribution, if we tell them that it's a just a small amount of money per day that really adds up over time and compare that with different message frames about things like tax efficiency or loss aversion. Because we know how strongly people react to things like the perception of loss. So framing something as if you had started saving in this year, you would already by now have XYZ more savings. And when we tested this in a qualitative focus group, people were really averse to that messaging. They really didn't like that loss frame. However, when we actually sent those emails out, there was a measurable difference between something like a loss frame was much more successful in getting people to respond to the email than those that had a different message frame. So you know, what people think they want, as I'm sure you're more than well aware of, and what people say they want and what they actually behave as and how they actually show up are very, very different. So we try to, we try to bring that in as much as we can.
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Yeah, it's such an important, it's, it's fine to gather that research and you know, to just sort of see when you do, like you said, the qualitative studies, if nothing else, just to see how it compares or contrasts with what actually happens and to know that it helps to validate, like you said going in, that you know that loss aversion has been proven to be effective in a lot of ways. So you built it in and you ask people and when you, you know, when their conscious brain is going, because you know, it's the focus group and I'm going to really think about this, they say, I don't like that. Oh, that's offensive to me. I wouldn't be interested in that. That wouldn't work on me. Whatever sort of responses, I wouldn't be swayed by that. That would be actually offensive to me and I would not like your company. Probably. They say some things that are really concerning for the institution who's doing that study where they most, you know, if you didn't have the background in the behavioral science would, would read, hear that and say, we, well, we can't send that out. Like, look what's going to happen. Our clients are all going to hate us and they're going to leave and they're going to go bash us on social media because they think it's offensive and whatever. And it's just not correct. It just goes to show, like that's not how it works at all. And so that testing piece being really important to validate and you know, perhaps you send that to a small sample and see what happens. But did that change at all for you for future projects? You know, do you, do you typically still do the qualitative question asking research stuff or do you pretty much jump in on testing to see what happens or sort of depends.
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Yeah, I would say that it depends. Like context definitely matters, you know, the type of organization or you know, even things like the project budget that that'll really impact how much depth or how much breadth you can do. I really find that in an ideal world, if you can do something like some qualitative testing and then do something more quantitative and large and widespread, that to me really strikes a balance where, you know, you're going to get really rich information. You know, this, this was a great example of the qualitative feedback did not match the quantitative result. And we would never have known that if we hadn't done both. So ideally you can get both. I think probably in some cases it's a struggle for behavioral science practitioners to get full buy in from a potential client. And something that you alluded to was this idea of piloting before going full tilt, broad scale. So we suggest that a lot off the hop, I think that's beneficial for clients and prospective project owners to know. But it's very important for behavioral scientists to know when they're selling their services and when they want to engage with a client to say, I need to get my foot in the door here, I need you to understand what the value of this is. And so that little piece of it saying we can pilot this in a certain population in one sample, if you have multiple offices that you're gonna roll something out in, maybe just one for now, create that proof of concept before rolling out wide scale. And what that also does, and what that means is that then you can look at that pilot, you can look at that smaller sample and you can understand and then iterate off of it. So if there was something that was unexpected, an unexpected sample spillover happened, or you had a backfiring effect and something just either really didn't work or worked in the negative direction, then you actually have the ability to modify that and iterate before rolling it out more fully again. So you'll always have a more deep understanding of the mechanisms at play in that sort of sandbox environment, which is helpful for when you're speaking to clients because it gives them a bit of safety or it makes them feel a bit of safety and you get the ability to kind of test and learn in a smaller scale piece of the project before rolling it out more broadly.
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Yeah, definitely. I know from talking with multiple people from that have been on the show and just in general conversation and for my own stuff too, is we are kind of programmed to think. So if you go in, we'll use the loss aversion example again here. So say that you had the plan and you said, yeah, loss aversion, we're going to use this and we're going to come up with our messaging to get people to do the pension plans. And then you sit down with the focus group and they all say they hate it. And you go, well, that wasn't what we expected. I guess it's a failure and it doesn't work. And then you just stop there, which is not the right thing for one, where we can continue to do some testing. But also, you know, even if you do the quality, you do the qualitative and then maybe the quantitative have backed it up and it showed that the loss aversion treatment didn't work in the way that you thought that it was going to. It doesn't mean that the entire concept is wrong. And also it doesn't mean that it can't work for you. But it's, and it's not an opportunity to say that you fail, failed. Instead it's. It's this really big opportunity to say, well, that's interesting, I wonder why that happened. Like what else is at play that's maybe trumping the loss aversion so that we're not seeing that effect. You know, is there something we didn't think about? How can we dig deeper like you were talking about to continue to iterate and to learn that it's just because something didn't happen the way that you wanted it to doesn't mean that it's bad. It can be a really good opportunity to dig in a little bit further and find something that's this actual problem which you were saying at the beginning. I talk about all the time the biggest mistake that businesses make when they Go to apply behavioral science or behavioral economics is they start working on the wrong problem, and it's really easy to find the right answer to the wrong question. And if you're working on the wrong thing, it just isn't going to have the impact that you want it to. And so spending that time to make sure that you're working on the right question, that you're solving the right problem, is where you should be putting all this time in so that it doesn't end up being a bust. But if you come through and find, you know, potentially that what you were trying to affect on the behavior, you know, you're trying to change something to happen, it didn't. That might be a sign that you haven't thoroughly found yet the exact problem that you're trying to solve, that there might be something deeper and you should keep looking.
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Yeah, I think so. You mentioned a couple of really, really interesting points. And one is sort of this idea of being able to fail or being able to reframe the way that we think about failure. And this idea that when we are sharing results of projects or sharing results of research, and this bias towards having a measurable effect or a positive impact and the bias inherent in our field that sort of favors that. What I really hope for the future of behavioral science is a much wider impression race of quote, unquote failure or things that don't work or work in a negative direction, because those insights of what doesn't work are just as valuable as what does. When I was doing my master's thesis at lse, it was around the impact of mindfulness meditation on temporal discounting. And so temporal discounting is present bias or this propensity to prefer to consume in the present rather than delay gratification. And so my hypothesis was, if you could have people do a short mindfulness meditation that they would be less inclined to consume in the present, they'd be better at sort of delaying gratification. It might calm them down. There were some common mechanisms of the activations in the brain that I thought might be a mediator to cause that outcome. And so I did this. I did this study.
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I did.
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No, I think it was about 250 people. I had them come into the lab and they were randomized into one of three conditions. So one was the mindfulness meditation. One was jazz music, because jazz music has sort of a relaxing effect. So to be able to tease those apart would be interesting. And then the third condition was a podcast about water beetles, because I just needed it to be the least activating thing, but it couldn't be silenced because silence would have a certain impact. So it's like choosing your control condition is actually so much harder than choosing your treatment condition. So we went with podcast about water beetles and what we found was actually that the meditation group had a measurably higher rate of temporal discounting than the control and the jazz condition. So people were actually more likely to consume in the present and choose that smaller sooner reward over a larger later reward than the other group. So to me, I thought this was fascinating. I think it would be very easy to see that as a terrible failure. But to me, and maybe this is just me choosing my, my frame around it, but especially with something like meditation, if we just assume that this is good for everything, that this just impacts every mechanism positively, then does it really affect anything positively? You know, like to really be able to say this does work for this and this doesn't work for this. And you know, obviously more research is needed around this. I don't necessarily think that this is the be all and end all study to, to tease apart meditation and temporal discounting, but I still think it's a valuable contribution in that we need to know what does and doesn't work through these mechanisms and we as a field need to embrace those instead of feeling like there's failure in a null result or in a, in a negative. Negative result.
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Yeah, that, that is very interesting. And as you said, it's just this opportunity that you get to kind of sit with it and go, why would that be? What is it that's happening? So if I calm my mind. But when you, for me, I think about, okay, so if I'm meditating, I'm being very present. I'm focusing on being present in the moment. And about today, I'm essentially priming myself about the importance of this moment right now and taking advantage of and doing the best thing right now for me. And so then when an opportunity presents itself in the present versus in the future, perhaps I have primed me to think about now and not worry about stuff into the future. And so, I mean, I can see how I could make an argument for that.
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Melina Palmer
Right.
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Maddie Quinlan
That was one of. And that. And so when I, when I was, you know, writing up the results and things like that, that was one of the alternative hypothesis basically is that if you say, you know, be in the present, be in the present, be in the present, be in the present. Would you like this money in the present? Yes, of course I would. So that was one of the alternative hypotheses and. And the other was that many of the meditators were novice meditators. Right. So if anybody, anybody who's meditated, you know that that first time you do it, or the first few times or the first a hundred times can be really uncomfortable because you're trying to relax, you're trying to quiet your mind, and it feels very antsy to a lot of people at the beginning being like, hey, what am I doing? And trying to calm my mind down. But now I'm thinking about calming my mind. And so then there was this idea that maybe there was actually more activation happening as a result of that that could lead people to have more present bias. So, yeah, it would be, I mean, a fantastic place for me to take my PhD if and when I do that, to sort of dig a little bit deeper into what exactly is going on there. But we would never have more questions if we didn't run into these sort of, you know, roadblocks or unintended results.
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Yeah, well, and from what you were saying there, the. That cognitive strain, that overload on the conscious brain and even feeling like I made good decisions now, like I did good things for me by meditating and it was hard and I forced myself to do it, so I deserve a reward into the future is very much tied in with that, I would think.
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Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, definitely. Definitely more research to be done.
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Yeah, well, and this just goes to show too, with the example I made about the loss aversion, which is potentially why you brought this up, is where you're thinking about the. So you. You've been saying temporal discounting for the audience who's been around with, you know, me and the show for a while. I did an episode on what I call time discounting or hyperbolic time discounting. It's the same concept here. And also what I call the I'll start Monday effect. Basically all the same thing that we're talking about, but knowing that, you know, there are some other things at play.
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Right.
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So the priming we're talking about may have been more important and impacting the time discounting people piece or the cognitive overload and the overwhelming of the brain with these reward and incentive pieces on a conscious space that could be something that's at play that you didn't know when you created the addition, the initial experiment and the parameters of it. And for anyone who's listening, that's not in that kind of academic side. You really have to shape your experiments for everything you want to find out and how you can minimize your Confounding variables as much as possible on like both sides and trying to think as much as you can about, okay, I really want to look at time discounting, but I don't want anchoring to be an impact. So how can I make it so that that's not included and it's not going to mess up my results? And you have to try to think about as much as you can, but it's basically impossible to think through absolutely everything that could be coming up. And so essentially you just found something that was related that you didn't realize that you should have worked around, and now you have an opportunity, like you said in a PhD or some other project down the line, or someone else can take that research and move forward and find out what else might be happening there.
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Yeah, absolutely. And I think that becomes really relevant and really obvious when you kind of step out of the academic sphere and into these real world practical applications of this insight is you are going to have less and less of an opportunity to have a quote unquote perfect experiment or a perfect RCT randomized control trial, because the context for that is quite stringent. And so when you're doing it in practice, it's difficult to have all of those variables kind of accounted for. But we definitely, we try to do our best. And what we also try to do is we try to encourage our clients to be willing to share those results of what they've done as well. Because I think in the field, something that creates a lot of challenge in terms of elevating the entire field forward is if we were to publish all of the behavioral insights that companies are actually using, we'd all be able to do a lot better because we would have a repository of all of these different cases of what has worked, what hasn't worked, in which context, with which populations. And that's something that we can access more readily in academia. But in the real world, either companies are not willing to share that because of competitive advantage issues or things of that nature, but then what that ends up doing is limiting the entire field. And so I think there's a way for us as practitioners to kind of come together and to share this, you know, insofar as, you know, Nobody's violating any NDAs or anything like that. But to say, you know, here's some techniques that are working for me, here's what I've seen in these types of fields, and that really was part of what GABS ended up being in its attractiveness to me to be involved in sort of building this out was if we can bring together an entire globe of behavioral science practitioners who otherwise don't have an official kind of way to connect. Right. So, you know, we know people through our own networks, and, you know, because of the size of the field, maybe we're only a couple of degrees of separation from anybody, but we aren't all connected in one place to share those insights and to establish what a best practice is. And in trying to avoid this propensity for people to, you know, read, nudge, or pick up an article about behavioral science and then just take on the role of behavioral scientists in their organizations without understanding things like, as you described, Melina, you know, confounding variables or controlling for variables and making sure that there aren't going to be these broader implications or that we're not measuring the problem in the first place. Unless you've done a bit more rigorous work and training in a field, you might miss some of that stuff. And when we're changing human behavior, the risk of doing it is really high in some cases. So I think attention to the quality and the rigor with which we're conducting ourselves in this field is going to be ever more important.
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Yeah, I definitely agree. And I. I know that when I had heard that GABS was coming, I was so, so excited because in the same way, like we said, being in sort of this original grouping of and knowing that there are definitely people before me, so it's not like I was the first person in the whole world to do, you know, applied behavioral economics and behavioral science. But, you know, I had the first podcast, as far as I know, on applied behavioral economics. And so helping to spread that word and then having a space where we can all get together and share information safely with others working on the same stuff is just a really great thing. And I love that GABS exists and I'm honored to be one of the early members. I don't think I made it in the first hundred, but I know I was in the first, you know.
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Oh, I think you were. I think you were in the first hundred for sure, Molina. Yeah, you were right off the hop for sure.
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Yes, I knew it was coming and so I was definitely checking my email all the time for when those would come in, so. Well, awesome. And so if we can, we'll go ahead and close out with. If you look out for more of what's on the horizon. You've obviously already been doing work to shape the future of applied behavioral science and the work that you do and helping to co found GABS but what else are you looking forward to or types of projects you're excited to be working on into the next five years?
- [38:32]
Sure. You know, I mean, I'm excited to get to work with a bunch of different sort of sectors. You know, we've been working with a nonprofit in Indonesia to encourage healthy practices for pregnant mothers and, and mothers who are breastfeeding for things like nutrition. And the idea was that they, for example, had all of these in person sessions and those were obviously prohibited when Covid came down. And so they needed to take all of these interactions and games onto an app. And so we've been working with this gamification team in order to elicit these healthy practices for mothers. And like that. That kind of opportunity to me is just like, this is why I do what I do and why I believe in this work so much. So more opportunities to work, you know, with nonprofits, with other, you know, either policymaking organizations or broader behavior change out in the world while still maintaining this, I don't know, more private sector opportunity as well. But I think something that overall I find exciting about the future of behavioral science and maybe what I see as the next frontier is, is we've done a lot of work as a practice in sort of generalizable types of behavior change. And by that I mean you take a population and you know that something will work, like defaults will work generally for most people, or we know that socially normative messaging, you know, people like you do this, this percent of the time, we know generally that those things have an impact en masse for a large population. What I think the next phase of behavioral science will have is a much more focus on personalization. And you know, we definitely do still, we see a lot of this kind of coming through and especially with things like machine learning and AI and really, really rigorous data collection and just the breadth of data that we now have access to, we can actually personalize behavioral science nudges and we can personalize interventions so that we know that it will work for an individual and not just general population. And so that we can kind of close those gaps of things that we know might not necessarily work for everyone. So to really tailor behavioral science to individualization, I think is going to be the next frontier.
- [41:02]
Yeah, finding that kind of balance in the. Where it's not specific to where, you know, as a organization saying you have a million customers to say, well, we need the Molina plan and we need the Maddie plan, and like everything is completely different. But being able to understand those, that balance of segmentation on what items are going to be most important to know. You know, people who have kids are going to be different than those who don't. And those who are single parents are different than this. Or people who, whether it's gender or some sort of contextual background that seems random but actually really determines if someone's going to be more loss averse or not or you know, whatever that is, to be able to use the value of machine learning and these other aspects to find that balance between the just sort of like you said, en masse concepts, but then narrowing them to groups in the way that they will be most effective and feel personalized for the people that you are targeting.
- [42:07]
Yeah. And I think that that really gets at sort of what the heart of all of this is about for me, which is that there's a person behind every decision. There's a human being behind all of this. And that's really something that I think that we can lose if we go to general and we go to, oh well, this percent of people did this and this percent of people did this is like, yeah, everybody was a person that made that decision. And so, you know, making, making the human. Of human behavior a little bit more salient.
- [42:36]
Yeah. Oh, I love it. And good, good tie in there at the.
- [42:41]
I use, I use that word more than any other person on the planet. I'm certain of it.
- [42:46]
I like it. Well, speaking of. So for anybody that's listening now and is excited and wants to reach out to connect with you, learn more about the work you do, you know what's the best way for people to, to get a hold of you?
- [42:59]
Yeah, absolutely. So we are salient. So our website is thisissalient.com or you can email me at maddie this issalient.com to get more information about GABS, the Global association for Applied Behavioral Scientists. Information is@gabs.org and yeah, and then you'll, you know, I'm on Twitter at Maddie Quindlen and all of the usual places. But yeah, that's the, that's the main places to find me.
- [43:27]
Melina Palmer
Perfect.
- [43:28]
Maddie Quinlan
Well, we will definitely be putting links to all that in the show notes though. So you all know I tend to not put email addresses out on websites and things for the sake of people's spam folders. So that's a special treat for the listeners. Write it down and you'll have it for future and know that you're one of the special ones if you take the time to write that down. So thank you so much again, Maddie, for joining me on the show. It was wonderful to chat with you and to learn more about the amazing work that you're doing at Salient.
- [44:04]
Amazing. It's been so good to chat, Melina, and I am really looking forward to your book that I know is coming out, so I'll be picking that up too.
- [44:11]
Thanks so much.
- [44:14]
Melina Palmer
So what got your brain buzzing as you learned from Maddie Quinlan today? For me, I've always enjoyed the similarities in my path and Maddie's. While they aren't identical, we definitely have a lot in common in our journeys in behavioral science, which is cool. It's funny. While Maddie lives in Canada and I'm in the us, we met in person for the first time when we both happened to be in London in the late spring of 2023. I was there finishing up my book the Truth About Pricing and we were able to get together and have a lovely dinner. It was so nice. I met so many past guests from the show for the first time in person on that trip. Nuala Walsh, Christian Hunt, Phil Agnew, Jez Groom, Jen Kleinhans, and of course Maddie. Such a wonderful time where I got to meet with so many people who have inspired me over the years. And speaking of inspiring people, the reason I refreshed this episode today is in preparation for the new episode this week, coming out in just a couple days with Dr. Adam Galinsky discussing his new book, Inspire. It is a fascinating dive into what makes people and leaders inspiring and how the three universal traits live on a continuum from inspiring to infuriating. It's so good. You don't want to miss that one. If you aren't already subscribed to the Brainy Business Podcast, now is a great time to do so. As we close out the show. Don't forget about those show notes with links to my top related past episodes and books, ways to get in touch with Maddie and myself and more. It's all waiting for you in the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 464. And just like that, episode 464 with Maddie Quinlan of Salient is done. Join me Friday for a brand new episode with Adam Galinsky, author of Inspire. It's going to be a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me and remember to be thoughtful.
- [46:25]
Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.