Interview with John Beshears
- Merle van den Akker
- Jun 8
- 7 min read
Behavioural Science is a rapidly expanding field and everyday new research is being developed in academia, tested and implemented by practitioners in financial organisations, development agencies, government ‘nudge’ units and more. This interview is part of a series interviewing prominent people in the field. And in today's interview the answers are provided by John Beshears.
John is the Albert J. Weatherhead Jr. Professor of Business Administration in the Negotiation, Organizations & Markets Unit at Harvard Business School. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Before joining HBS, he was an assistant professor of finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. John’s primary research area is behavioral economics, the field that combines insights from psychology and economics to understand individual decision making and market outcomes. He collaborates with organizations to study how managers can change the design of decision-making environments — for example by altering the way choices are presented or by adjusting the process that is used to select options from a menu — to influence the decisions of customers and employees. In recent work, he has examined participation in retirement savings plans, household investment decisions, and health-care choices.
Who or what got you into behavioural science?
I was an economics major in college, fascinated by how people make decisions. I sought a summer job in economic research and landed a research assistant position with David Laibson, a behavioral economist. I worked with a team that included James Choi, Brigitte Madrian, and Andrew Metrick. Through this experience, I saw how incorporating psychology into economic analysis improved our ability to predict and influence behavior. It became clear to me that behavioral economics wasn’t just an interesting subfield—it had the power to make meaningful, real-world changes. That realization pushed me to pursue a career in it.
What is the accomplishment you are proudest of as a behavioural scientist? And what would you still like to achieve?
I would say that, in contrast to some people in the field, there is not a single paper that I would consider my crowning achievement. What I’m really most proud of is that I was part of, I don’t want to call it a movement—that sounds too grandiose—but there was a collective of people around the time I was getting started in behavioral science who were able to take these ideas and apply them in meaningful ways. We took the exciting beginnings of behavioral economics, which had largely focused on pointing out shortcomings of traditional classical economic models, and we advanced it to not just understanding behavior better, but actually designing policies and organizational processes that help people make better decisions. We were able to make behavioral science applicable in ways that positively influenced people's lives. Seeing our research actually implemented in real-world settings was incredibly rewarding.
Looking ahead, what excites me is taking this work a step further. A lot of behavioral interventions have been designed to target specific decisions—like getting people to sign up for a retirement plan—but I want to focus more on the long-term effects. Do these interventions sustain their impact over time, or do they fade away? And if they fade, how do we design behavioral strategies that help people make consistently good choices throughout their lives, not just at a single moment in time? That’s the next frontier I want to explore.
How do you think behavioural science will develop in the next 10 years?
I think one major trend is going to be a shift toward studying long-term effects. Historically, a lot of behavioral science research has focused on short-term interventions—things like nudges that help people make better choices in the moment. But we are increasingly recognizing that what really matters is whether those interventions lead to lasting change.
Take something like automatic enrollment in retirement plans. The initial results were incredibly promising—people saved more money when they were automatically enrolled. But when we follow those same people over longer time horizons, we see that a lot of them withdraw their savings when they switch jobs. Others, who weren’t automatically enrolled, eventually catch up over time. This means that some of the initial effects we measured were overstated when looking at the long run. Moving forward, behavioral science needs to think more about sustainability—how do we design interventions that not only work today but continue working 10 or 20 years from now?
Another big shift is that behavioral science is becoming more mainstream. Concepts like loss aversion, which used to be novel, are now widely known outside of academia. This raises an interesting question: will behavioral science continue to exist as a separate field, or will its insights become integrated into other disciplines, like UX design, marketing, and policy analysis? It might be that in the future, behavioral science won’t be a standalone specialty when applied—it will just be a fundamental part of how we think about decision-making in any field.
What are the greatest challenges being faced by behavioural science right now?
One of the biggest challenges is ensuring that behavioral science remains relevant and impactful. There’s been a lot of enthusiasm around behavioral interventions like nudges, but we need to be more rigorous in evaluating their long-term effectiveness. Too often, we measure success based on short-term behavior changes without considering whether those effects persist over time.
Another challenge is that behavioral science needs to be integrated into a broader policy toolkit. Nudges are useful, but they are not a substitute for structural changes. For example, if we want to help people save for retirement, automatic enrollment is great, but it won’t fix deeper issues like wage stagnation or job instability. We need to recognize that behavioral interventions work best when they are paired with strong economic and policy solutions.
There is also growing concern about the ethics of behavioral interventions. Some techniques, like using shame or social pressure, can be effective at changing behavior but might have negative side effects. If we use shame to get people to exercise more, are we really making them better off? Or are we just making them feel bad about themselves? As behavioral scientists, we need to consider not just whether an intervention "works," but whether it improves overall well-being.
With all your experience, what skills would you say are needed to be a behavioural scientist? Are there any recommendations you would make?
Part of what's hard is that there are a lot of different ways to contribute to behavioral science, and different people bring different unique skills. One person who just pops into my head right now is Devin Pope, who's at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. He just has this amazing eye for how data could actually give you the key to unlock a really interesting set of behavioral issues.
So that's one skill set, but that's not a skill set that's required of everyone in behavioral science. It just happens to be a skill set that he has in spades, among other skills, and he's able to bring a lot of fascinating ideas into the discussion by deploying that.
Another skill set, of course, is more on the experimental design side—someone who is very clear and systematic in thinking about exactly what is changing between treatment and control, and what’s really driving the effect. These are the types of skills that can set great behavioral scientists apart.
What advice would you give to young behavioral scientists or those looking to progress into the field?
One of the most important things you can do is build strong relationships with peers. Behavioral science is highly collaborative, and having good research partners will make your work more enjoyable and more productive. Some of the best research ideas come from conversations with colleagues, so it’s important to surround yourself with people who challenge and inspire you.
Another key piece of advice is to not overthink things. I’ve seen a lot of young researchers hesitate to pursue projects because they don’t think their idea is novel enough or impactful enough. But the reality is that research is an iterative process. Many great projects start out as simple ideas that evolve into something much bigger over time. The worst thing you can do is sit on an idea indefinitely because you’re worried it’s not perfect.
Lastly, be open to applying behavioral science in non-traditional ways. The field is expanding beyond academia into areas like UX research, data science, and AI. If you’re interested in working outside of academia, developing skills in these areas can make you a valuable asset in the job market.
What is your biggest frustration with the field as it stands?
Sometimes, there’s an overemphasis on "clever and cute" research rather than studies that address first-order, high-impact issues. Novel, quirky findings can be valuable, but the real goal should be applying behavioral insights to meaningful, large-scale challenges.
If you weren’t a behavioral scientist, what would you be doing?
I have no idea. At the time, when I was in college, I had a vague sense that after you graduate with an economics degree, you can go into “business,” whatever that means. Or you could go to law school. I knew law school was an interesting alternative because I had directly observed my father, who is an attorney. But beyond that, I didn’t think about it too hard. And it wasn’t so scary because getting an advanced degree in economics didn’t pigeonhole me. It wasn’t going to make me incapable of contributing to various other types of organizations that might want to hire me.
Now, at some point, I became sufficiently specialized in my knowledge and skills that it would be difficult for me to do anything else. I guess I’ve been lucky that I still find behavioral science engaging and rewarding. But if I had never discovered behavioral economics, I really don’t know where I would have ended up!
How do you apply behavioural science in your personal life?
You might think that behavioral scientists have perfect self-control, but in reality, some of us—myself included—are prone to procrastination. This affects things like writing papers. Maybe I promised to write the introduction, and I said I’d do it last week… and the week before that… and now I need another extension. When this cycle of procrastination repeats itself too many times, my team and I bring in commitment contracts. The way it works is that I set my own deadline, choose a monetary penalty, and pick a donation recipient. But the key part is that the money doesn’t go to my coauthors—it goes to an "anti-charity," a cause I absolutely do not want to support. This makes it painful to fail. So far, we’ve never had to actually pay up, which means it works as a motivator. We do use this sparingly because if we relied on it too much, the threat would lose its power. But when we really need something done, it’s a very effective tool!
Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions John!
As I said before, this interview is part of a larger series which can also be found here on the blog. Make sure you don't miss any of those, nor any of the upcoming interviews!
Keep your eye on Money on the Mind!
