(DIS)EMBODIED RATIONALITY?: Behavioral Design’s Mind-Body Problem
In The Routledge Companion to Practicing Anthropology and Design. Chris Z. Miller and Jenessa Mae Spears (eds.).
INTroduction
Unlike design research’s focus on individuals’ latent needs, the practice of behavioral design employs insights into human cognitive biases that lead individuals to act ‘irrationally’ or against their self-interest to create solutions that deliberately encourage or integrate behavior change. Where design research typically enlists research as a means to probe specific issues, in the interest of understanding an individual’s particular context, behavioral research tends to employ methods that elicit broad but enduring insights into human decision-making. In other words: while design research might delve into how people use digital currencies to pay for goods and services to understand their attitudes toward purchasing, or how families negotiate what to watch on Netflix to develop insights into communal media habits, behavioral designers are more likely to target underlying behavioral principles that inform these activities—such as why people tend to stick with default options in the absence of urgency or strong preferences, how to overcome decision-making difficulties where there are too many options, or how an initial experience can flavor subsequent ones—that transcend any one particular contextual situation, era, or device.
To uncover these insights, behavioral research employs a scientific, hypothesis-driven mindset and experimental rigor. But testing ideas in a lab environment to determine causation often requires reducing the messiness of the real world. This can lead to research insights and proposed solutions that work in controlled settings, but don’t function as planned or expected in real-life contexts. In addition, while behavioral science’s rich insights into human tendencies provide a useful generalized lens into why people behave as they do, these decontextualized findings often fail to reflect the true diversity of values and plurality of frames that characterize the full range of human experience.
As a result, the quest to encourage rational decision-making and behavior through designing primarily for cognition may keep behavioral problem-solvers from designing for people if they fail to consider the full diversity of contexts, values, and conceptual frames that exist in the real world. By leaving out the importance of individual, bodily, lived experience in shaping choice and instead looking for more universally applicable rules that govern behaviors and preferences, behavioral design risks designing only from the neck up unless supplemented by other forms of research. Leaning into the human context of bodily lived experience—reinserting what might be called ‘choice posture’—provides an entry point for design and anthropology to enter the behavioral conversation.
Cite as: Schmidt, R. (2024). “(Dis)embodied Rationality? Behavioral Design’s Mind-body Problem,” in The Routledge Companion to Practicing Anthropology and Design. Chris Z. Miller and Jenessa Mae Spears (eds.). pp. 307-319. New York: Routledge.