Workshops

The applicants will be informed by the decision of IAREP Managing Committee by 4th March 2024.

In 2022, the IAREP Managing Committee funded 3 workshops and summer schools.

European Group of Process Tracing Studies (EGPROC) 2022
By Dianna Amasino

Organizers: Dianna Amasino (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), Jan Hausfeld, Alejandro Hirmas, Jan Engelmann, Carsten de Dreu
Location: University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Date: June 29 - July 1, 2022Conference website: https://neuroeconomist.net/EGPROC

The 40th Annual EGPROC conference took place in person (and streaming on zoom) at the University of Amsterdam with 42 participants. The first two days were focused on insights gained from using process tracing to understand behavior across cognitive neuroscience, psychology, biology, business, and economics. This included 17 talks and 7 posters in addition to two keynote talks. Giorgio Coricelli (University of Southern California) gave the first keynote on how eye-tracking can be used to decode strategies in economic games. Joanna Lahey (Texas A&M) gave the second keynote on the role of eye-tracking in understanding hiring discrimination focusing on age, race, and gender. The final day of the conference was a workshop focusing on applications of process-tracing to societal problems including discrimination, inequality, and sustainability. We brought in local experts to give overview talks on societal issues to foster discussions of how process-tracing could be used in these fields. Katharina Block talked about the lack of men in caring careers and Thomas Buser discussed the gendered impact of competition. Jantsje Mol discussed the use of virtual reality in disaster preparedness communication and Dianna Amasino talked about using online process tools to study justifications for inequality and use of ethical labels. We ended the day with Vojtěch Bartoš giving an overview of his work on field-measures of attention in discrimination, intertemporal choice, and communicating doctor’s support for COVID vaccines. Thanks to the support of IAREP, having in-person lunches, coffee breaks, and a conference dinner allowed for a very engaging and successful conference.

CEBEX Summer School on Behavioral Sciences 2022
By Dominik Stříbrný

 At the turn of July and August 2022 was organized the sixth year of the CEBEX Summer School on Behavioral Sciences. The eight-day program was focused on the entire process of making experiments in behavioral economics and public policy. Each participant also worked on their own experiment, so they have hands-on experience using the knowledge. In the first part of the course, we went through the theoretical overview and everyone created their research topic. The second part was dedicated to methodology, statistical tests, data presentation, and using online tools for developing and running experiments. And in the last part of the course, participants learned how to work with R software to do data analysis. The lectures were taught by researchers from both academic and business backgrounds working at prestigious institutions such as the University of Amsterdam and the University of Zurich. Thanks to the IAREP, two students from low-income countries attended the program for free. We are glad they gave us very positive feedback and we hope the knowledge from the course will help them to achieve their goals, such as creating policies to prevent infectious diseases in India and Africa or educating children to prevent gender-based violence in Bangladesh.

Busara Center for Behavioral Economics “Applying Behavioral Science and Open Science for Development” 2022
By Joel Wambua

Workshop: Applying Behavioral Science and Open Science for Development
Organizer: Joel Wambua (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)
Location: Busara Center for Behavioral Economics, Nairobi, Kenya
Date: October 4 & 6, 2022
Website: https://www.busaracenter.org

Despite behavioral science emerging as a leading innovation across disciplines in the development space, its application in the Global South is facing some unique challenges.  Not many African universities teach Behavioral Science courses or elaborate on their linkages to human behavior, marketing, economics, and psychology. Also, policymakers in the Global South are often unaware of behavioral science findings that may help them develop and implement more effective policies. Finally, the existing knowledge does not adequately address the realities in Africa and is difficult to access. Therefore, the main objective of this workshop was to build a network of African researchers who are knowledgeable about using behavioral science, and evidence-based approaches to policy-making and promote knowledge-sharing practices. The workshop adopted a blended learning approach. We conducted a theoretical training session virtually for all participants and an in-person session for a group of selected participants. The participants were from different countries in Africa; Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Egypt, Tunisia, and Ethiopia.

Given our objective, the content of our workshop focused on the theoretical foundations of behavioral science and proper measurement techniques. Participants learned different building blocks of behavioral science, such as the concepts of nudges & boosts, heuristics & biases, and behavioral mapping. These concepts are critical in identifying behavioral problems, especially when answering policy-relevant questions. However, identifying problems is not enough if we do not have the proper tools to solve them. Thus we expanded the discussions. First, we emphasized the importance of using experiments in behavioral science to identify solutions that work. We made this point by illustrating case studies, such as a study evaluating the impact of community masking on COVID-19. Second, accurate measurements are essential when conducting experiments. We took participants through how to choose what to measure and what makes a good measure. Lastly, some of the challenges facing the application of behavioral science in Africa are accessibility and threats to credibility. We demonstrated to the participants how researchers can abuse the flexibility in study design and analysis through a practical example and how open science can help overcome these challenges.

Throughout the workshop, we used different strategies to incorporate practical and real-world applications to provide a hands-on learning experience. Our examples and discussions ranged from using behavioral insights to design policy-relevant interventions that improve outcomes to selecting the best outcome measures. Furthermore, we made an explicit link between behavioral science and public policy by using a case study of the covid vaccine campaign in Kenya. We worked with the participants to identify the behavioral barriers to vaccine uptake.  Participants applied behavioral mapping and developed outcome measures for vaccine acceptance and uptake. Finally, we organized a tour of Busara’s decision lab that can collect data from up to 530 respondents in a day to help workshop participants visualize some of the behavioral games that we discussed during the sessions.

Even though the workshop was just two days long, we believe participants’ found it valuable. Especially from those who had no previous knowledge of behavioral science. We got the following feedback from participants;

“A solid basis on the practical aspects of behavioral science.”
“The information is quite relevant, and many individuals would benefit from learning about behavioral science in general.”
“I believe it is an amazing workshop for anyone interested in implementing Behavioral Science in their research or day-to-day activities.”

Date: January 2nd 2023