Dr Dario Krpan

Dr Stuart Mills

This course is available on the MSc in Behavioural Science, MSc in Organisational and Social Psychology, MSc in Psychology of Economic Life, MSc in Social and Cultural Psychology and MSc in Social and Public Communication. This course is not available as an outside option.

When Psychology and Economics got "married", the product was Behavioural Science. Although this discipline has elevated theoretical and practical understanding of human behaviour to previously unseen heights, recent technological developments have produced new insights in understanding and predicting people's actions that not only supplement traditional tools of behavioural science but also go beyond them. The future of the discipline will therefore likely depend on how effectively behavioural scientists can harness new developments in technology to understand and change the way people act. 

The aim of this course is to a) Introduce major technological advancements that are relevant for predicting, influencing, and understanding human behaviour; b) Outline how they supplement and extend commonly used tools of behavioural change; and c) Examine how they can be used to propel behavioural science into the future. The course will tackle behavioural science in relation to motion tracking, virtual environments, social robotics, social networks, and other relevant developments in information technology.

Example topics explored on the course:

Understanding minds by reading bodies: Implications of motion tracking for behavioural science; Changing behaviour through gamification; Social robots: Our new friends?; Behavioural science in virtual worlds; Behavioural informatics; Change thyself: Using technology to influence our own behaviour; Digital footprints and human behaviour; Psychological targeting in digital age; The ethics of emerging technologies in the context of behavioural science.

10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of seminars in the LT.

Students will be expected to produce 1 piece of coursework in the LT.

Formative coursework will serve as your preparation for the summative assignment. You will need to create a 5-minute presentation on the topic of the summative assignment: Propose an intervention that relies on technological tools that were either covered throughout the course or that you identified through personal search to create behavioural change in an applied setting of your choice (e.g. your organisation, personal life; you can select any setting you desire). In the presentation, you will need to a) Introduce the behaviour you want to tackle and argue why changing this behaviour would be important; b) Present your intervention that uses technological tools to change the behaviour and c) argue why this intervention would be effective based on your knowledge of behavioural science gained through the class material and personal literature search.

Similar to the summative assignment, the presentation will be delivered in a video format: you will be given a clear step-by-step guide describing how to produce the presentation in a video format (we will go through this guide during a seminar to make sure it is clear to everyone how the summative assignment should be produced). The main aim of the formative assignment is for me to evaluate your approach to tackling points a), b), and c) mentioned above so I can give you relevant feedback that will help you when preparing the summative presentation, and also for you to get comfortable with producing the video presentation.

Krpan, D., & Urbanik, M. (2020). From Libertarian Paternalism to Liberalism: Behavioural Science and Policy in an Age of New Technology.

Kersten-van Dijk, E. T., Westerink, J. H., Beute, F., & IJsselsteijn, W. A. (2017). Personal informatics, self-insight, and behavior change: A critical review of current literature. Human–Computer Interaction, 32(5-6), 268-296.

Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D., & Graepel, T. (2013). Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(15), 5802-5805.

Sailer, M., Hense, J. U., Mayr, S. K., & Mandl, H. (2017). How gamification motivates: An experimental study of the effects of specific game design elements on psychological need satisfaction. Computers in Human Behavior, 69, 371-380.

Broadbent, E. (2017). Interactions with robots: The truths we reveal about ourselves. Annual Review of Psychology, 68, 627-652.

Presentation (100%) in the ST.

The aim of the summative assessment will be to propose an intervention that relies on technological tools that were either covered throughout the course or that you identified through personal search to produce behavioural change in an applied setting of your choice (e.g. your organisation, personal life; you can select any setting you desire). This intervention will be conveyed in the form of a 15 minute presentation that will count as your summative assignment. More precisely, in the presentation, you will need to a) Introduce the behaviour you want to tackle and argue why changing this behaviour would be important; b) Present your intervention that uses technological tools to change the behaviour and c) argue why this intervention would be effective based on your knowledge of behavioural science gained through the class material and personal literature search.

The presentation will be delivered in a video format: you will be given a clear step-by-step guide describing how to produce the presentation in a video format (we will go through this guide during a seminar to make sure it is clear to everyone how the summative assignment should be produced). Together with the video presentation, you will need to submit an annotated bibliography that contains a) a list of scientific references you used for the presentation; and b) a short text below each reference (1-2 sentences) describing why exactly the reference is important in the context of your presentation. The main purposes of the annotated bibliography will be to demonstrate the academic background upon which your presentation was built.

Some departments have produced short videos to introduce their courses. Please refer to the course selection videos index page for further information.