What We Are Up To

There is no better time to go BEyond traditional notions of success and innovation, and aspire to be greater

Major transformations are driven by a growing consensus that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately. Most stakeholders agree we are at a major turning point. There is a significant opportunity to improve how we serve customer’s needs, how we motivate our teams with purpose, and how we empower leaders to drive with aspiration. But it is not enough to simply reject the status quo; rejecting one paradigm without simultaneously substituting it with another can be dangerous.

Behavioral science offers that new framework.

The Southern Ontario Behavioural Decision Research (SOBDR) Conference brings together researchers from Ontario universities (and beyond!) with an interest in the study of how people make judgments and decisions.

Registration and program details to come.

In partnership with Sheridan College, BEworks was awarded a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) grant, through the College and Community Innovation Program – Applied Research Rapid Response to COVID-19. The grant is designed to ‘Optimize Interventions to Combat COVID-19 Misinformation Online’. We will partner to apply our expertise in behavioural science to help devise and test interventions. We also have MediaSmarts, Canada’s Centre for Digital and Media Literacy, as a partner. Our academic collaborators Gordon Pennycook, Paul Seli, and David Rand, are amongst the world’s leading misinformation researchers and have published extensively on the causes of and solutions to misinformation.

Can behavioral economics aid in our industry recovery?

Travel Health Insurance Association (THIA) News spoke to Kelly Peters, CEO of BEworks, to get her insights into how the insurance industry can influence smart consumer decisions when recovery begins.

During the “Debiased Hiring Through Behavioural Science” webinar, the President of Clarity Recruitment Joe Diubaldo, will be speaking with Dhushan Thevarajah, the Chief Operating Officer at BEworks and Dr. Shelbie Sutherland, an associate at BEworks on various topics concerning diversity and inclusion including:

Behavioural Economics and importance on diversity and inclusion pertaining to hiring;
Examples of Issues concerning Diversity and Inclusion in hiring;
The typical approaches to improve these issues (and their limitations);
How to think about this challenge differently etc.

The purpose of this webinar is to better understand the challenges facing Diversity and Inclusion initiatives so that we can start to build better solutions moving forward.

It’s no secret that the world has changed. The pandemic has ravaged societies and economies, and financial companies are increasingly worried about the possibility of investors panicking and making poor decisions during the market-volatility that seems to be the new norm. Aware of the importance of understanding human psychology in these uncertain times, leading financial research firm Morningstar put behavioural economics center stage at its most recent investment conference.

Behavioural science thinktank BEworks and The Ontario Securities Commission celebrate joint success in identifying a strategy for protecting ageing investors.

Kelly Peters’ keynote talk at BlockHack Global focused on the topic of consumer technology adoption. In many cases, developers and organizations build a solution anticipating droves of consumer interest, only to find that unanticipated barriers are curbing uptake rates.

In her talk, she provides an overview of BE for blockchain developers looking to overcome adoption challenges at the very outset of their conceptual stage. She shares some key behavioural insights that can be used to understand how people typically make decisions, and how they can apply these lessons to overcome the most common pitfalls facing adoption today.

In this report, we outline key questions and problems raised by the pandemic, highlight relevant research we and others are conducting, and outline preliminary thoughts on how we might work together to bring behavioural science to the fight against COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced massive behavioral change for both investors and advisors alike. How can investment advisors maintain and build their relationships with their clients under these new conditions?

BEworks co-founders renowned Behavioural Economics Professor Dan Ariely & Applied BE Pioneer, Kelly Peters, are hosted by Catherine Milum, Head of Wealth Sales at Manulife. Their discussion is focused on helping advisors understand investor behaviour amidst the pandemic and arm them with actionable insights to guide clients at this critical time.

Where: Manulife

In The Wall Street Journal

In this conversation, Kelly and Cristina discuss how social norms and nudging norm behavior can be a powerful way to influence behavior during the pandemic. Cristina also discusses the interesting research she has been doing during the pandemic.

We examine a disposition—engagement in analytic-thinking—that might predict beliefs that the pandemic is a hoax and failures to change behavior in positive ways during that critical early period in March. Our results indicate that individuals less likely to engage effortful, deliberative, and reflective cognitive processes were more likely to believe the pandemic was a hoax and less likely to have recently engaged in social-distancing and hand-washing in March. We discuss possible implications of these results for understanding and addressing the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this Toronto Star article, our colleague Juan Camilo Salcedo, PhD is interviewed about surveys that measure employee comfort with returning back to life as we know it, return to school, return to work, or return to live entertainment. Everyone has their measurement tools out in an attempt to understand what it is that will help introduce the psychological and physical comforts necessary to bring people back in some capacity.

The top six banks have deferred mortgage repayments at nearly double the rate of their U.S. counterparts, accounting for approximately 16% of their mortgage portfolios, which amounts to over $250 billion. Many people, driven by well-documented behavioural biases, fail to grasp the negative impact that this will have on their finances over the long-term, and instead treat the deferrals as a way to enjoy some extra cash for discretionary spending.

Host Kelley Keehn interviews David Lewis and Kelly Peters of BEworks, as they discuss necessary changes to discretionary spending so that consumers and banks can be prepared to resume payments when required.