Making Better Decisions - Ben Newell Knows The Power and Limitations Of Our Cognition

All of us want to make better decisions, and lots of us wish the people around us would make decisions that we thought were better. Imagine being able to do this just by understanding the mechanics and mechanisms of our cognition, by re-organinising how information is presented or communicated to improve engagement or action. Cognitive science and behavioural economics has gone through a huge increase in popularity over the last decade, and while it’s been used to tremendous success in contexts like social media and across broader digital experiences, today’s guest - Ben Newell - has been seeking to take his decades of experience as one f the country’s most credential cognitive psychologists and apply it to support meaningful and effective action on climate change.

Ben Newell is Professor of Behavioural Science in the School of Psychology at the University of New South Wales, and is also the Director of the UNSW Institute for Climate Risk & Response (ICRR). His research focuses on the cognitive processes underlying judgment, choice and decision-making and the application of this knowledge to environmental, medical, financial and forensic contexts. I’ve wanted to get Ben on for a while so that I could also understand the secrets to mind reading, idea inception and cutting through the seemingly interminable effort of trying to convince people to play a role in creating a safer, healthier and more just world.

This was a fascinating conversation - getting into the details of how we make decisions, how our brains make sense of cues and create perceptions that determine judgements, and how variable the process of making and presenting choices is on an everyday basis. We also talk about the ICRR, the vital work this institute is doing as a model we can all learn from, his lessons from working on climate change over the last decade as well as clear advice on how to think about and aim for convincing and influencing others.

Check out the UNSW Institute for Climate Risk and Response and Ben's work.

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