Guest Post by Yen Chai Chen, BCBA (yenchai.chin@gmail.com)
SingHealth Centre for Population Health Research and Implementation
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yenchaichin/
Selectionist Blog: https://selectionist.substack.com/
Section Coordinator’s Introduction: Quite by accident I recently stumbled across Yen Chai Chen’s excellent blog, Selectionist, which can be accessed over at Substack. His goal is to explain behavior to people who aren’t behavior analysts, and he communicates clearly about complicated issues, as you can see in these sample posts: Living for the Moment and Discounting the Future; They Not Like Us; and What’s in a Nudge? (3-part series). I asked Yen if he would share a few thoughts with ABAI’s blog readers. This is the first of two guest posts he’s be contributing. His message concerns something near and dear to the “Something Interesting” blog: Insinuating the science of behavior into as many corners of the world as possible.
Author’s Note: I am a Board Certified Behaviour Analyst working as a population health and implementation science researcher. I’m the Principal Investigator of a study using a mixed-methods approach to understand factors influencing medication adherence. I also support 3 other studies: (1) examining how we can help seniors age well in their communities, (2) examining the effects of a digital health intervention on diabetes management, and (3) developing a measure to evaluate the relationship between the built environment and health. I hold an M.S. in Applied Behaviour Analysis from St. Cloud State University, and a PCert in Data Science from HarvardX. I also publish a science dissemination blog. The views expressed in this article are entirely my own. I used LLM tools to aid with clarity and concision.
I’m a behaviour analyst.
Photo credit: Author
I’m also a population health researcher. In my work, I try to solve problems most behaviour analysts aren’t familiar with, using tools and techniques most behaviour analysts aren’t familiar with.
In my free time, I also write a behavioural science dissemination blog for a general audience.
In the spirit of full disclosure, let me first state the reinforcers for my writing this article:
- I hope to increase the readership of my blog.
- More importantly, I hope to convince you of the value of practicing behaviour analysis outside our traditional domains.
You see, I’ve a confession to make. None of my colleagues are behaviour analysts, so I can’t nerd out with them on stimulus equivalence, behavioural momentum theory, and such. My behaviour analytic buddies work in autism and adjacent fields. They flash me polite smiles when I talk about my work. I straddle two worlds, without being quite a part of either. Other than the occasional discourse with random Redditors/Substackers (on a very thin reinforcement schedule), it’s just me with my own thoughts. It gets a little lonely sometimes.
How did I get here?
A Brief Behavioural History
Allow me to ramble a little. Some years ago, I picked up a book that was lining the bestseller shelf at my local bookstore—it was Thinking Fast and Slow by the late Daniel Kahneman. I read it from start to end, and then again (I reckon I’ve read it 6 times in total). Then, I picked up a copy of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.
These books proposed explanations and solutions for some of the wicked problems we face, to borrow the concept from design theorist Horst Rittel (Rittel & Webber, 1973). As an undergraduate with little love for memorising concepts and names of long-deceased individuals, they lit a fire in me that dry lectures delivered in dusty tones did not. They convinced me that we can change the world if we understood behaviour just a little better.
Then I got into the practice of behaviour analysis working with autistic individuals and liked it enough to pursue a Master of Science in Applied Behaviour Analysis1. All the while, I kept wondering—how do I connect all that I was doing and learning to the work Thaler, Sunstein, and others were doing to solve those wicked problems?
While some behaviour analysts like Steve Hursh, Tony Biglan, and Sigrid Glenn (to name a few) have done pioneering work in advancing behaviour-analytic theory and practice in that direction, their numbers are few and far in between. In many important areas, from climate change, to healthcare, to social inequality, in critical engagements between scientists and policymakers, behaviour analysts seldom have a seat at the table.
Meanwhile, Kahneman had won a Nobel Prize for his work, and Thaler had since won one too. Behavioural insights teams oriented in the behavioural economic tradition of Thaler and colleagues have sprung up in various countries and organisations, contributing significantly to policymaking2.
Where are the behaviour analysts working in these important areas?
There are two possibilities:
- Behaviour analysts simply aren’t interested in these problems.
- The contingencies surrounding our science and practice are constraining the directions in which behaviour analysis advances.
Surely it must be the latter.
The evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson (2012) writes of an Ivory Archipelago (as opposed to Ivory Tower)—countless disciplinary islands of scientists sharing a common scientific ancestor, but through the process of selection, now speak mutually indistinguishable languages, and have minimal interactions with each other. Our discipline is on one such island, one that is particularly isolated from the others. With this article, I hope to convince you, my esteemed colleagues, that it is worthwhile crossing the straits to visit other islands, profit from their inhabitants’ knowledge, and share our own gifts.
Why Engage?
To extend Wilson’s metaphor further: here on our island, life is pretty good. We’ve developed and refined technologies which have enabled us to flourish. For one, we’ve perfected the technology of spearfishing3. We deeply understand the properties of spears and triggers, making us extremely good at catching the fish we want, with a high success rate, and unparalleled precision. At the same time, some of the knowledge and crafts our pioneer islanders once knew have fallen into disuse and since been lost, including mastery of the strange waters beyond our reefs.
Now, imagine setting sail and landing on an island ruled by Chief Thaler, where the inhabitants speak the language of human irrationality. As you observe their verbal interactions, you hear things like, “She refused my generous offer to buy the shell she found due to the Endowment Effect,” and “He didn’t think his haul today was good because he was anchoring onto yesterday’s catch.”
Any behaviour analyst worth their salt might readily conclude that there’s nothing to be gained here, and head back to our island. And we are perhaps somewhat justified doing so. Irrationality is a deeply flawed paradigm, developed in response to another deeply flawed paradigm in rational choice theory.
Yet, if you ignore for a moment what they say (we’ll come back to that later) and observe how they fish—their technologies are somewhat successful. Sometimes, their nets come up empty; often they net by-catch. But because they target shoals rather than individual fishes, and because the currents provide them access to the best fishing grounds, overall, they catch many more fishes than us.
Also, on close inspection, their fishing methods correspond more closely with practical need, shaped directly by successes and failures, rather than the exhortations of the village chiefs that echo in the village halls.
The point is: what they do actually works. On one hand, we, with our sophisticated understanding of behavioural mechanisms, are well positioned to explain why it works, and perhaps further refine their technologies. What if we can combine our precision with their scale? On the other, there are organising principles that emerge when we go from individuals to groups which others have explored extensively, but which we are only beginning to understand (e.g., Krispin, 2019; Marr, 2006).
The second point is: they know a lot more about catching shoals of fish and spreading their technologies than we do. They know how to navigate the currents where the largest shoals linger. They have extensive interactions with people of other islands, and know things of selling the wonders of their nets. Their knowledge base and practices have been shaped by decades of successes and failures in such attempts. There’s much we can learn from them there.
Returning to what they say, if you listen closely, you find that many of these fishermen speak Irrationality with a great deal of pragmatism. They propose frameworks such as the EAST framework (Behavioural Insights Team, 2024)—to encourage behaviours, make things
- Easy—keep the response requirements low
- Attractive—stack the motivational variables in your favour
- Social—leverage social influences where possible
- Timely—pay attention to the asymmetric effect time has on behaviour
I’m sure many of us can agree with the guidelines listed here. This leads us to our final point: there exists a large degree of consilience between our ideas and approaches and theirs.
It must be so.
We are bound by the same laws of human nature. In that we are getting similar results, our understanding of what influences behaviours must converge (Point 1). What they have done far better than us is making their nets available to others in the archipelago (Point 2). The EAST framework, for example, provides an easy way for policymakers and industry leaders (most of whom are non-behavioural science experts) to understand behaviour change, making it significantly more attractive for these non-experts to effect their own behaviour change implementations.
Conclusion
There are storms looming on the horizon, not too distantly, that no single island in Ivory Archipelago is suitably equipped to weather. I encourage those of you who will to step forth and join me4 and natives of other islands in facing these storms together. It requires venturing out into those strange waters with their strong, unfamiliar currents. If what emerges from these efforts little resembles your current practices, take comfort in knowing it will be more resilient and adapted to solving the wicked problems you hope to solve.
In Part 2, I will share lessons I’ve learnt in working with non-behaviour analysts and specific strategies I’ve used. Stay tuned.
Footnotes
1 I consider myself immensely fortunate that both my professors and the course content at St. Cloud State University’s M.S. in ABA encouraged thinking broadly about the applications of behaviour analysis. I fondly recall writing essays on topics such as a behaviour-analytic interpretation of science denial and the functions of genre choice in Beyoncé’s Lemonade album.
2 Here in Singapore, I count at least 8 government agencies that have a behavioural science team.
3 Pardon me if I’m spouting gibberish. I know absolutely nothing of spearfishing.
4 Yes, this is an invitation to connect with me.
References
Behavioural Insights Team. (2024). EAST: Four simple ways to apply behavioural insights. https://www.bi.team/publications/east-four-simple-ways-to-apply-behavioural-insights/
Krispin, J. (2019). Culturo-behavioral hypercycles and the metacontingency: Incorporating self-organizing dynamics into an expanded model of cultural change. Perspectives on Behavior Science, 42(4), 869–887. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40614-019-00212-3
Marr, M. J. (2006). Behavior analysis and social dynamics: Some questions and concerns. Behavior and Social Issues, 15, 57–67. https://doi.org/10.5210/bsi.v15i1.345
Rittel, H. W., & Webber, M. M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences, 4(2), 155–169. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01405730
Wilson, D. S. (2012). Consilience: Making contextual behavioral science part of the United Ivory Archipelago. Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science, 1(1–2), 39–42. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcbs.2012.09.005