My internship with The Decision Lab has been a rich and informative summer experience. I am about to begin my third year in the Cognitive Science program at 69热视频. I first approached the program seeking an interdisciplinary study of the way people think and act. The breadth of the program has been largely successful in integrating insights across the various disciplines that inform this goal. I have taken classes in neuroscience, political behaviour, linguistic meaning, economics, the philosophy of perception, and modern physics to understand human behaviour better.
My academic experience in this program has been exceptional; however, I quickly developed a need to see the academic developments in this niche field applied in a professional context. I sought out this internship to understand how behavioural science is applied to projects in such diverse fields as public health, political participation, educational reform, and insurance policy.
The Decision Lab is a non-profit research and consulting organization based in Montreal. It addresses a monumental gap between the academic acceptance that our brains make routine, predictable mistakes in decision-making and the assumption, across business, public policy, and legal systems, that people generally recognize and pursue their own preferences autonomously. This think tank advises some of the largest companies in the world, including several Fortune 100 organizations, to apply this cutting-edge research towards improving institutional, individual and consumer decision-making. Some recent work includes refining the World Bank鈥檚 efforts to reduce the top cause of death in Uganda, bringing behavioural science in-house for one of Canada鈥檚 top insurance companies, and working with the City of Rome to apply behavioural science insights to city planning, healthcare, and political participation.
As an intern, my work is centered around the creation and dissemination of content, with two major goals in mind. The first is to amplify the organization鈥檚 place in the behavioural science space. The second, and central, purpose of my work is enacting the organization鈥檚 mission of proliferating knowledge about behavioural science so that influential decision-makers across a broad range of circumstances make choices that reflect the best understanding of our cognitive capacities.
Within the organizational structure, I belong to the editorial team on several distinct projects. The Decision Lab publishes a comprehensive collection of the biases and heuristics that underly their specialized insights as behavioural scientists. One other associate and I edited and managed content developed by a team of contracted writers. The organization also collaborates with researchers in the decision science space to proliferate the impact of their work. I am responsible for seeking out these experts, assessing their work and editing the resulting written pieces. I鈥檓 also managing the distribution of the company podcast, which has been an exciting project thus far.
One major highlight from this summer, related to this last project, is still to come. When I first applied for this internship, I discussed how my interest in behavioural science developed through reading the work of Cass Sunstein, one of the founders of the discipline and a renowned legal scholar. He has recently agreed to record a podcast with The Decision Lab! Our director of research will conduct the interview. From there on out, however, I will handle the presentation of the information and its dissemination across several platforms. Sunstein is a downright celebrity within the behavioural science sphere, so working with him, even indirectly, is going to be informative and useful for my future in this field.
Strategically, I expect that the organization will be able to recruit higher-caliber experts and advisors due to Sunstein鈥檚 involvement. Behavioural science is still niche enough that a few influential experts take up most of the space from an outside point of view. For example, Sunstein co-wrote a book in 2008 called Nudge, which established one of the central interventions in use in behavioural science today.
I am not receiving academic credit for this internship because of the restrictions of the Cognitive Science program. Nonetheless, I hope to leverage this experience in the short term in two ways. Now that I have a sense of the organization鈥檚 internal mechanisms, I feel like it could magnify its impact if taken in the right direction. I want to remain involved in the organization and hopefully gain additional say into how its vision is enacted. Second, I hope to begin my Honours research project this winter based on some of the themes that emerged from my work during the internship. I have always been most interested in behavioural science as a tool to overturn established doctrine in public policy. This internship has reinforced that early intuition of mine and encouraged me to pursue the integration of these insights into my academic projects.
I grateful for The Arts Student Employment Fund which made this internship possible.
