Behavioral Science
Behavioral science is the study of human behavior and the factors that influence it, such as social, cognitive, and emotional processes. In a business context, it involves understanding how individuals and groups make decisions, interact, and respond to various stimuli. By applying behavioral science principles, businesses can improve employee motivation, customer satisfaction, and overall organizational effectiveness.
3 Key excerpts on "Behavioral Science"
eBook - ePubScientific Selling
Creating High Performance Sales Teams through Applied Psychology and Testing
- Nancy Martini, Geoffrey James(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
...However, in order to make those discussions meaningful, it's first necessary to explain some basic concepts and some of the science behind the concepts. This chapter does that for behavioral assessment, while the next chapter covers skills assessment. Behavioral Assessment Every sales manager (and indeed every manager) faces the following questions on a day-to-day basis: Who do I hire? Who do I promote? Who is my next leader? How do I keep my people engaged? How do I motivate my people? How do I bring together my team? How are my people going to react to change? How do I impact performance daily? How does my management style impact my people? All of these issues are obviously crucial to addressing the challenges that sales managers face every day. Because of this, it's worthwhile to take a close look at Behavioral Science and behavioral assessment, and how it's being used in business today. Traditionally, sales managers have addressed these questions on an ad-hoc basis, using a combination of gut feeling and trial-and-error. The results have been haphazard at best. Fortunately, there is a different, scientifically proven way to address these challenges: behavioral assessment. Behavioral assessment is the practical branch of Behavioral Science, a field that looks at individuals and their behavior along with their interaction with groups, cultures, and processes. Rooted in foundational research beginning almost 100 years ago, Behavioral Science provides empirical data with broad applications to business. The most fundamental of the applications is the tremendous amount of insight into a person's behavior allowing organizations to make better decisions. As workplace complexity grows and jobs become more complex, more technological, and more specialized, the measurement of personality is becoming an increasingly important part of matching individuals to the job roles for which they are best suited...
eBook - ePubWhat's Behind the Research?
Discovering Hidden Assumptions in the Behavioral Sciences
- Brent D. Slife, Richard N. Williams(Authors)
- 1995(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
...6 Science and Human Behavior The history of the Behavioral Sciences is marked by a struggle to separate these sciences from philosophy and establish them as a distinct set of scholarly disciplines. This struggle has led to a continuing concern about their scientific status. In fact, the Behavioral Sciences are distinguished from philosophy precisely because they rely on scientific methods and the application of science to questions of human behavior, whereas in philosophy rational analysis is applied. Because of the success of natural scientists in understanding the natural world and solving practical problems, it seems reasonable to suggest that the same success might be achieved in the realm of human behavior. Somewhere in the communal mind-set of behavioral scientists lies the expectation that careful scientific study of human beings will yield solutions to our most perplexing human problems. Our culture as a whole seems to share this expectation, continuing to respect scientific findings and turning to the Behavioral Sciences for answers to life’s problems. In this chapter, we examine the nature of science to see why people in our culture have come to trust it for answers to our important human problems and whether the Behavioral Sciences can, or indeed should, be scientific. The assumption that human beings can and ought to be studied using natural science methods has important implications for how we understand human beings. THE NATURE OF SCIENCE To be confident about whether the Behavioral Sciences are or should be sciences, we need to answer the question: What is science? On first examination, this may seem a trivial question with an easy and straightforward answer, but on closer examination we see that the answer is not as simple as it seems. Science and scientific findings have had a pronounced impact on philosophy since the time of the early Enlightenment and through the work of early scientists such as Galileo and Newton...
- Gideon Keren, George Wu, Gideon Keren, George Wu(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...25 Changing Behavior Beyond the Here and Now Todd Rogers Harvard Kennedy School, USA Erin Frey Harvard Business School, USA Introduction Behavioral Science insights are increasingly being used to enhance interventions that improve societal well-being. These insights are decreasing smoking, obesity, energy usage, littering, and conflict; and they are increasing savings, voting, medication adherence, donation, educational achievement, and tax compliance. As the applications of this science have developed, a class of questions has emerged related to how time affects the impact of interventions. This chapter explores several of these questions. The discussion has practical implications for policy makers aiming to influence behavior while also laying out a framework for future research and theory about interventions informed by Behavioral Science. Over the past 60 years, behavioral decision researchers have uncovered underlying patterns in how and when people deviate from the principles of rationality, and have developed a science of judgment and decision making (e.g., Gilovich, Griffin, & Kahneman, 2002; Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). In recent years this work has taken on a decidedly prescriptive thrust (Camerer, Loewenstein, & Prelec, 2003; Thaler & Sunstein, 2003, 2009), naturally suggesting innovations in how interventions are structured. In parallel—and in part because of the increasing application of this work—there has been an explosion in the use of randomized field experiments across the social sciences (e.g., Chattopadhyay & Duflo, 2004; List, 2011; Madrian & Shea, 2001; Schultz, Nolan, Cialdini, Goldstein, & Griskevicius, 2007). The current chapter combines these two developments: we use the insights and perspective of Behavioral Science to analyze how field interventions to improve societal well-being work over time...
