1) Replicability
2) Unknown Boundary Conditions
3) Complementary & Crowding-Out Effects
4) Cultural Variation
5) With-in and Between-subject Idiosyncrasies
6) Channel & Data Access
7) Implementation Issues
8) Unforeseeable Second-Order Effects
A barrage of replication failures has called behavioural research findings, and the methodologies being used, into question.
Pre-registration, larger samples, field experimentation and research replication incentives are being used to overcome this 💪
Okay, this one's a bit more tricky. Interventions are more effective given the presence of certain conditions. These conditions aren't well understood yet.
Progress is made here by studying a variable across a range of contexts + meta-analyses.
This is similar to boundary conditions I suppose. Practitioners often use a combo of interventions. Is more better than less? Maybe. Maybe not.
Studying the combinatory effects of interventions (e.g WOOP) is the way forward here.
This one is close to home for me. I work in Africa, yet lean on US/UK research. The challenge? Cultural factors (e.g. norms) can mediate the effects of interventions in unexpected ways.
To solve: Treat findings as hypotheses and run experiments locally.
Individuals within a seemingly similar context are more or less responsive to interventions for unknown reasons, and their responsiveness changes over time.
Data access + ML and behavioural profiling are making some inroads here.
The effectiveness of interventions can be constrained by the channels available to the practitioner. In addition, data on the target behaviour can be hard to collect, leading to a reliance on proxy measures.
These are tricky to overcome🤔
Even if a robust behavioural research finding is trialled and proven to be effective within a local context, it can still fail when implemented at scale.
The scaling scenario should be mapped out before the test, examined and resources identified.
Interventions don't affect behaviour in a vacuum. There can be serious side effects and externalities. These are difficult to map, let alone measure.
Premortems and systems thinking tools are useful for mapping here. Measuring is tricky.
However, these need to be considered alongside the ethical limitations.
1) Preference Ambiguity
2) Intention Misattribution
3) Lack of Transparency
4) Pseudo-Reversibility
5) Unknown Externalities
6) Data Tracking and Privacy Issues
7) Broader Psychological Implications
In some situations, it may be relatively easy to infer what an individual's preferences are. However, there are many scenarios where it's not so clear.
Asking people helps. But that's often not possible or practical given personalisation constraints.
Sometimes the overarching value of an individual is clear (good health), and this leads to the assumption that they intend to perform an action (getting a vaccine).
This kind of misattribution of intention means we can't rely on revealed values.
Some behaviourally-informed interventions (by their nature) work better when the targeted individual isn't aware of them.
Another issue here is that the intervention may be known, but the mechanism doing the work is opaque to the individual.
Because behavioural interventions often operate outside of conscious awareness, even when optionality is available, the ability to reverse a choice may not always be possible, practically speaking.
Even if it is clear that an intervention has a positive effect on a behaviour (that an individual knowingly intends to perform), there may be second-order effects that outweigh the value created (e.g. pendulum or moral licensing effects).
Behavioural, linguistic and psychographic data can improve the impact of an intervention. However, this data can be (and has been) collected without the individuals' knowledge or consent, to influence mental representations and behaviour.
Feedback I often see is that the worldview presented by behavioural science leans more towards the paternal than the liberal. This psychological implications of this belief-set shouldn't be overlooked, given the research on the subject.
Additionally, some of them seem destined to be exacerbated in an attempt to overcome the technical limitations (e.g. individual-level data collection).
The path that I'm the most optimistic about at the moment self-initiated behavioural science. More on this soon.