Decisions, Decisions

This past October, the Master of Behavioral and Decision Sciences program (MBDS) sent 20 students to participate in Rare’s Behavioral Design Challenge at Dickinson College. The goal: to encourage college students to eat more plant-based foods. In addition to MBDS winning the overall challenge, it also sponsored teams from Howard University and Cheyney University.

MBDS, a one-calendar-year program, is informed by contemporary theories and research methods of behavioral economics, decision sciences, network analysis, and public policy. It looks to equip students with theoretical and practical tools to address a variety of real-life problems. Created by faculty director Cristina Bicchieri, Sascha Jane Patterson Harvie Professor of Social Thought and Comparative Ethics, the MBDS program is in its third year and includes full-time students, part-time students, and Penn undergraduates submatriculating into the program. The current students hail from 12 different countries and 15 different majors, and are evenly split between those with established careers and undergraduate matriculants.

The Dickinson design challenge gave MBDS students an opportunity to showcase what they're learning in the classroom to try to solve real world problems. The twenty students were grouped in four teams and competed against eight teams from other colleges. Taking home first place were members of "Nudgetables," whose proposed solution was to provide green-colored plates for those eating plant-based dining options in the dining halls. The team advanced to present to a wider audience as part of Rare's BE.Hive on Campus: Climate Change Needs Behavior Change, a summit of campus change-makers exploring behavioral solutions to reduce campus emissions, and was awarded a monetary prize and trophies. The other MBDS teams included Impossible Beat, Misteaks, and No Beef with Anyone.

"MBDS focuses heavily on the intersection of qualitative behavioral insights and quantitative data analysis, and that's exactly the skillset that the challenge allowed us to showcase," says Marc Rauckhorst of the winning team, which consisted of members from Canada, Thailand, and China, with a variety of industry experience and undergraduate training.

Rauckhorst says the group first examined existing literature on the topic. The team then used a semester's worth of data from Dickinson's online daily menus to analyze existing trends in the relative environmental impact of the current dining system, and to get an idea of the range of potential outcomes they could hope to achieve. Once the group returned to the campus, they identified different key behavioral trends through interviews with students and closely observed the existing dining hall experience in action.

Mariagiulia Lauro, a Fulbright Scholar from Italy, says the challenge was a perfect combination of applied and theoretical components. "Even though this was the first experience of this kind for me, I felt that my knowledge of behavioral economics and interventions was nicely complemented by the expertise of my teammates in psychology, data science, and marketing," says Lauro. " I will always remember how much I enjoyed explaining our idea to the 400 people in the audience—including environmental sustainability experts, behavioral scientists, and student advocates—who were just as passionate about behavioral interventions and sustainability as we are."

The solution Nudgetables proposed is a prime example of the behavioral focus of the MBDS program. The handing out of green-colored plates serves as a cue for the diner and peers that those students were making a choice of a more sustainable option, a tactic that could benefit awareness and collective consciousness. Other group proposals included the creation of a movie night with plant-based snacks and a challenge to get students to create food choices that were plant-based.

"In our program, students take a portfolio-based approach, so they have to do a lot of connecting what they're learning from the classroom into real world experiences," says Christopher Nave, Managing Director of MBDS, and one of the coaches for the event. “At the broadest level, we're trying to create sustainable behavior change. We heavily emphasize Bicchieri’s groundbreaking research on social norms and highlight the collective nature of decision-making.  We have family, friends, and colleagues that help inform our decisions. And if we understand that, we can be more effective in creating and designing interventions that provide better behavior choices and options.”

MBDS also brings in alumni to talk about their experiences in behavioral science and researchers across the university to make sure students are being exposed to different ideas. The year culminates in an applied capstone project in conjunction with industry and the non-profit sector.

“Instead of a traditional thesis or dissertation, the capstone is more like a consultant's report or an action report where MBDS students translate academic knowledge into actionable insights towards a problem that they're really passionate about,” Nave says.