10 Best Articles on Behavioral Science

How do you motivate employees and sales partners? Do your incentive programs work? How do you know? If you have no idea, you’re not alone. Traditional management practices lead managers to treat workforce motivation as an overly simple “do this, get that” relationship between effort and reward. But surprising new insights from behavioral economics and social psychology are revealing that the psychology of motivation is more complex than that. Humans are influenced by a host of nonconscious factors that affect how hard we work – and it’s time for leaders to adjust our approach to workforce motivation accordingly. Cash is not always king. More is not always better. Leading like a scientist means challenging the status quo and testing new ideas to inspire discretionary effort of your salesforce and employees. What might you try? If you have a hunch, you have a hypothesis. In this talk, Maritz chief behavioral officer Charlotte Blank discusses a groundbreaking field experiment in an automotive dealership channel incentive program. Her surprising findings will change the way you think about incentives, recognition, rewards, and motivation. You don’t need a degree in psychology to lead like a scientist – you just have to be open to experimentation.

The Research Lead is a monthly digest connecting you to noteworthy academic and applied research from around the behavioral sciences. Here are our highlights from 2022.

A new study featuring more than 7,000 participants from six countries found that choice deprivation—a feeling of not having enough to choose from—not choice overload is the most common consumer…

We have more free time than ever before, but it’s so sliced and diced that we feel more time poor than ever. Here’s how to notice and overcome the time confetti in your life.

«When we try to have meaningful time off with friends and family, our alerts from work create guilt and dread over what we’re not getting done.»

Overworked and exhausted, around the early afternoon. We begin to lose our magic powers. We stop being so responsive. Our decision-making skills diminish. Critical thinking becomes not so critical. We gravitate towards easy and fun – tend to avoid everything that requires effort and discipline.

We often hold vague notions about what we want to do for our health. We say we want to exercise more, eat healthier or stick to the doctor’s orders. But it’s not often that we put those desires into…

The new science of optical illusions shows that "reality" is constructed by your brain.

The famous psychology test gets roasted in the new era of replication.