When I was 16, I had an aptitude tests to try and understand where my strengths lie and what I should be doing with my life. One of the things that came up was psychology. (another was being a chef 👨🍳 ).
I’ve always had an interest in psychology and understanding what makes people tick. The rise of writing around behavioural psychology (e.g. Malcolm Gladwell, Kahneman, Dan Ariely) really appealed to me. It made it a little easier to understand the framework of how the world works and why we do what we do.
The challenge of non-replication of a lot of these studies is worrying to me. What this means is that people have been trying to get the same results by running these experiments again, and failing to get the same results. This almost makes the bedrock of this behavioral science area a little bit shaky. Accepted wisdoms like growth mindset, grit are coming under more scrutiny and it seems results may have been exaggerated. I read an interesting New Yorker article about Dan Ariely that went into a lot of this detail (Link in the comments)
How we try to adapt? A lot of growth marketing and experimentation is based on consumer psychology. How should I alter my process when I’m looking at testing? And how do I use other scientific methods to overcome potential use of bias in these areas?
I believe the underlying spirit remains the same, ensure that you have a hypothesis to validate. We just need to ensure that the insights are based in fact and we’re robust in testing them.
Brendan McNulty 