Where is behavioral science heading?
I think still today people's understanding of behavior change is around cognitive biases and nudging, which has definitely created challenges for what is maybe a small subset of what is used to work on behavior change.
There is no way you can create change with the cognitive biases you learned in a codex - it takes so much more to de-risk a hypothesis in a real-life project.
It also takes knowing the context (and even this is tricky) and so much more, because if you copy things they either won't work or will backfire.
It is clear that Behavioral Science has and continues to evolve, and if you are applying it right, then it should feel very multidisciplinary.
In fact, it's not behavioral science, but really the science of behavior change that I am interested in, where we are working on helping organization solve their challenges or find them better opportunities to succeed.
To do that, you have to borrow from many areas like:
-Psychology -Anthropology -Sociology -Culture -Cognitive Science -Systems Thinking -Human-Centered Design -Implementation Science
You need to then leverage the models and tools these disciplines have, contextualize them and make them practical, so you can use them in the real world, with of course a focus on needs and behaviors as a starting point, and with less reliance on gut and luck and more on evidence to build a solid (and testable) hypothesis.
Do the authors of this paper, where the image is taken from cover everything... of course not, it would be quite hard - they are doing so from their point of view, and I thank them for doing so, because it helps me think about what may be missing and what they get right.
What I do know and share as a practitioner is that you need to go beyond one discipline, mix roles, mix talent in your organization and work together on getting better behavioral outcomes for your employees and customers.
The science of behavior change does not need to be a black box of magic and easy tricks (if they tell you this, please run the other way) - it is really about embracing mixed methods, evolving from learnings, and using science in your context.
This is learnable, either you can teach yourself, or someone like me or many others can teach you... but it can be done, it can be a competency your organization has... the pieces for most are there.
Just make sure you go beyond the easy stuff of biases and nudges and get the other 90% of value from it.
The authors of the paper are Robin Schimmelpfennig and colleagues (2022) The Evolution of Behavioural Science in Public Policy