Overview

The world of applied behavioural science, or behavioural insights is replete with claims that your mind is fundamentally flawed, or biased, and the road to good thinking is to fight against these biases or override intuitive ‘heuristic’ judgements. This simplistic picture is based on outdated research, and quick fix interventions based on this vision typically fail to have impact, or even backfire.

This four-week course begins with an overview from UCL academics on the how the human mind really works. It is a system of unfathomable sophistication, creating rich visuo-spatial simulations and manages to solve problems of incredible complexity which still defy computational and AI approaches. Biases can occur, but delegates will leave with a rich understanding of where these come from, rather than a checklist to avoid.

In further sessions delegates will be taught some key behavioural science frameworks for diagnosing and solving behavioural / social problems at work, they will be introduced to some key techniques for social influence and persuasion as well as the fundamentals of risk and uncertainty and will learn to apply a causal lens to any situation.