At the time of this writing we’re hovering around a 50% vaccination rate for adults in the US.
As the progress continues, companies are looking forward to the time when they can start bringing more of their employees back into the office. This forward-thinking has focused a lot on the physical building design and safety protocols but is often missing a key aspect of the return to work: their employees’ emotional wellbeing.
While many companies have started to bring people back slowly, there has not been a rush except for aside from essential businesses where it has been required. The new normal will probably look nothing like the old normal.
We’ve boiled 12 of the most common biases and influences that guide our decisions down into a visual and easy to understand 2021 calendar with actionable advice on how to overcome or leverage them. Check it out here and get yours today!
Start the new year off right by joining us in January at the Nudge it North Conference – a digital Behavioral Science conference taking place on January 8th, 2021.
The Lantern Group, Behavioral Grooves, Behave MN have collaborated to bring together an all-star cast of speakers that includes industry veterans, world-renowned experts, and amazing new voices in the field.
In a continued effort to make behavioral science and behavioral economics more accessible, The Lantern Group and The Behavioral Grooves Podcast are building resources to help you make more informed decisions, understand your influences (and how you influence), understand biases, improve happiness, build better habits and more. This includes a self assessment to help decide which behavioral science or behavioral economics book to read and The 100 Behaviors Project – a weekly exploration of human biases and behaviors. Check them both out below.
Behavioral Learning Self-Assessment
The self-assessment below combines 30+ years of collective experience in behavioral science to help you determine which of our top 40 books will be the most beneficial to you. Take it now and start (or continue) learning! If you have already read the recommendation, reach out in the form below or email behavior@lanterngroup.com with your result and we will recommend 2 or 3 alternates!
Would being able to understand the underlying reasons why you and others “do the things you do” be helpful to you in your job? Is there value in having the knowledge to be able to predict and understand people’s responses to your requests or changes? How about being able to anticipate how people will most likely respond in a given situation or environment? Would the ability to make more rational and sound decisions help you in moving your business forward?
For most
people, that answer is “yes.”
Most of us
work in an environment that involves some level of involvement and interaction with
other people. Whether it be coworkers, bosses, employees, vendors, or customers
– at some point in your workday, there is likely a human involved.
How you interact with those humans can change how they respond.
We need to
be able to work effectively with those humans. If we can understand and
empathize with their underlying drives, decipher how they are interpreting our
words and actions, and anticipate how they will respond to what we do, our
interactions with them will be significantly improved.
For those of you who don’t know, The Behavioral Grooves is both a meetup and a podcast – sort of like a breakfast cereal and an energy drink at the same time.
Kurt Nelson, PhD and Tim Houlihan, Behavioral Alchemist founded the Behavioral Grooves as a non-profit organization to share their enthusiasm for the application of behavioral sciences with a wider audience.
Read along for a brief overview by Tim as he takes us on a ride through the experience:
No, this isn’t one of those government studies where you wonder how it ever got approved (i.e., how long can shrimp run on a treadmill or does playing FarmVille on Facebook help people to make friends and keep them?*).
Socks and behavioral science. The two do not seem to fit together, yet I consistently use my socks as a personal behavioral modification tool.
Back in September, I partnered with Tim Houlihan to start “a monthly gathering of curious minds” which we called Behavioral Grooves. We thought it would be interesting to get like-minded people together to talk about applying behavioral science to life and work.
We had no idea if others would be interested in this…
We announced the meetup and were hoping to get at least a few of the friends that we had contacted to show up. We ended up with 24 people for that first session where we talked about habits – how they are formed and what people can do to improve them.
We were thrilled!
From there, it took off. We have over 180 members signed up to our meetup group and it is growing fast. We have had three monthly sessions as of early January 2018 and our fourth is lined up for two weeks from today. We have over 20 people who have made it to two or more of the sessions.
I guess we struck a nerve.
For our second session, we invited Professor James Heyman to speak and thought, hey, since he’s here, why don’t we interview him and make a podcast out of it. Thus, our Behavioral Grooves podcast was born. Tim and I both loved that so much that we decided that we didn’t want to wait for the next Behavioral Grooves session to record our next one – so we started to invite people and interview them – both live and over the internet.
To date, we have seven interviews recorded and three more in the works. These podcasts mirror the Behavioral Grooves sessions in that they are conversational in nature where we geek out over behavioral science and how we can apply behavioral science insights into our daily work and lives.
They have been a blast!
In reflecting on this, it appears to me that these two outlets provide us with a way of both learning and sharing. We want to be advocates for good, ethical use of behavioral science. We believe that there is much to learn and we can improve our work and lives by understanding and by applying these principles in a thoughtful and deliberate manner.
We also realized that we love the community that this is creating. A community of curious minds who are interested in science and the application of that science. A community of people that we can bounce ideas off of. A community of people that can push us to think about things from new perspectives.
This is ultimately what we have been building and hope that it grows and provides a place and outlet for others, as well as ourselves.
If you are ever in Minneapolis on the third Thursday of the month – please come and join us at our meetup (find out more info here) and if you can’t make that, please listen in to our podcasts (click here to find the latest).
Humans are interesting, they are quirky, they are irrational.
We think we know what is best for us. Often, we even assume that we KNOW what is best for us. e funny thing is – our behaviors do not always align with what’s best.
Dan Ariely introduced us to the fascinating world of irrational thought in his flagship book Predictably Irrational (one of our all time favorites) and I recently observed an interesting example of it at Denver International Airport.
Here at the Lantern Group, we specialize in applying behavioral science insights to drive organizational performance and change employee behavior.
For this article, however, I am going to take you on a journey deep into the mountains of northern Pakistan. Right now, you are probably wondering: “what could the Hindu Kush possibly have to do with behavioral science!?
Well, as we have been telling you, it’s everywhere!
So, bear with me and let’s have some fun while we talk about behavioral insights in action; observed from a recent adventure in northern Pakistan.