Personal Statement for Behavioral Science:
Link to the program:
Suggested titles:
- How Behavioural Science can help on fighting corruption in Latin America.
- Fighting corruption in Latin America through Behavioural Science insights.
- Insights from Behavioural Science: Choice architecture can help on discouraging corruption practices in Latin America.
Geographical Focus:
- Latin America.
Hypothesis:
- Constructing choices (through choice architecture) can discourage corruption practices.
- Exposure and media coverage of corruption scandals can discourage potentialcorruptors.
- Leveraging human biases can discourage corruption practices.
- Stronger institutions can only be built if corruption practices can be intelligently fought.
Biases and key concepts to include:
- Spotlight effect (we tend to strongly believe that everybody is paying attention to what we are doing).
- Availability bias (we tend to remember more and put more importance in more recent events).
- Loss aversion, credibility and reputation social punishment (we are disproportionally biased to preserve what we already have vs betting for potential gains).
- Overconfidence bias (we tend to think we are more accurate on our assumptions and decisions to what statically can be proven)
- Following the herd bias (we are strongly influenced to do or believe things because other people are doing it; more even so if those are like us).
- Short term preference vs long term (we overvalue short term gratification vs long term potentially bigger gains).
- Framing bias and Ethical decisioning (the way corrupt practices are presented can influence how ethical decisions are being made).
Quotes to include in the statement:
“Everything being done to combat this social plague deserves our utmost attention and help … This is a battle that involves all of us.”
“How much evil is done to our Latin American people and the democracies of this continent by this social virus, a phenomenon that infects everything, with the greatest harm being done to the poor and Mother Earth,”
Pope Francis.