Category Archives: Human Behavior

Human Behavior

Daily Habits That Can Help You Become A Saver – Femina

Source: Pexels

Why do some people succeed at saving while others do not? Read that carefully. I'm not asking why some people are successful investors, while others are not. What I'm asking is why do some people save while others do not save. Or, if they do save, it's not much more than whatever they are forced to do through EPF or NPS or tax-saving, etc.? They never choose to save.

This is something that all of you would have observed. With some people, it almost seems like a law of nature that they will save while with others, it seems to be the opposite. I'm sure you can think of many explanations and so can I. These explanations may or may not be correct. There may be many different explanations, which apply to different people. It does not matter, it's not very interesting actually.

What IS interesting is whether the non-savers can be converted into savers. Those of us who are non-savers, what do we do when we become self-aware of this unfortunate condition and would like to fix it? It isn't easy to drop a life-long habit. It is a habit, you know. Come to think of it, not saving may have more in common with addictions like smoking than anything to do with finance. Which means that what we are talking about has more to do with human behaviour and psychology than with anything else.

Therefore, this is about breaking one habit and taking up another one. Drawing graphs of compounding returns and SIP growth is fine for those who already have the habit of saving, but it does little to convert those who do not yet have the habit. As it happens, habit creation is something that a lot of people from psychologists to self-help authors have paid much attention to. Of course, 'self-help author' sounds a little disparaging but personally, I believewith experience--that for a subset of readers, and a subset of authors, self-help books do help.

About a couple of years ago,I'd written about a book named The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. The book detailsthrough anecdote and science how our routine behaviour is driven mostly by habit or the absence of habit. It also delves deep into how habits get created and changed, and how this can be achieved consciously. Duhigg's book convinced me that investing was not a choice in the normal sense but a matter of habit. However, the how-to part of that book was hard to work at.

Source: Economic Times

Recently, I came across another book, one by a social scientist named B.J. Fogg. Fogg is the founder and director of the somewhat ominously named Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, which was later renamed as Behavior Design Lab which means the same thing. He has written a fascinating book called Tiny Habits. The book goes deep and yet easy into the process of conscious habit formation. Of course, the actual anecdotes and examples are all from the kind of things that people commonly struggle in terms of habits. However, everything that Fogg describes fits very well into modifying personal financial behaviour. It's hard to briefly lay out the methodology that Fogg prescribes in a way that it can be followed here, nor am I going to attempt to short circuit an entire book in a few hundred words. Fogg says that there are three ways to change behaviour: have an epiphany, change the environment, or to create tiny habits. It goes without saying which is the only one achievable for almost all of us.

However, it is well understood by those who do not save that all you have to do is to make a beginning. If you have gotten as far as reading my columns then you probably also know that the ideal first habit to form is to start investing a small regular amount through an SIP. To those who haven't done it, it's hard to believe how change builds upon change and how behaviour changes. Tiny Habits can help.

This article was originally published in Economic Times and has been reproduced with permission.

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Daily Habits That Can Help You Become A Saver - Femina

Human Behavior

ABAC and VSU sign new articulation agreements to bring needed skills to rural communities – Moultrie Observer

TIFTON, Ga. Two freshly-inked articulation agreements between Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College (ABAC) and Valdosta State University (VSU) aim to provide students the skills needed to help build Americas rural communities.

The agreements guarantee qualified Bachelor of Science degree graduates in Rural Community Development from ABAC an interview and consideration for admission into VSUs Industrial-Organizational (I-O) Psychology or Counselor Education masters degree programs.

These new agreements are intended to make advanced training in key areas more accessible to our Rural Community Development program graduates, while also keeping them in the region for their graduate studies, said Matthew Anderson, dean of ABACs School of Arts and Sciences.

We are thrilled to provide a pathway for ABAC graduates to stay in the area by pursuing their graduate degree at VSU, Heather Kelley, interim department head of VSUs Department of Human Services, said. At the conclusion of their graduate program, we hope these new professionals will stay in South Georgia to enhance and build our local communities.

Adrian Israel Martinez-Franco, ABAC department chair of Rural Studies, saidABACs interdisciplinary bachelors degree program in Rural Community Development is designed to prepare students to make a positive impact in rural communities.

In the Rural Community Development program, we prepare students by emphasizing problem-solving skills, Martinez-Franco said. We develop leaders who can find trustable information and make decisions based on evidence with an ethical attitude toward society and our environment. These agreements will help our students become experts in a specific area to create positive change.

The VSU Master of Science degree program in I-O Psychology prepares students for the understanding and application of the science of human behavior in the workplace. I-O psychologists can play a key role in increasing workplace productivity and enhancing organizational development.

Our faculty focus on training our students to aid businesses with a variety of core functions, such as personnel selection, employee development, strategic planning, organization development, job analysis, and program evaluation, Jeremy Bauer, program coordinator of I-O Psychology at VSU, said. Our program places an emphasis on helping local businesses thrive in rural communities.

The VSU Master of Education degree program in Counselor Education prepares students in one of two tracks, either School Counseling or Clinical Mental Health. School Counseling track students go on to careers in P-16 educational settings. Clinical Mental Health students are broadly trained for counseling work in a variety of settings. Professionals with these skills are desperately needed, particularly in rural communities.

Counselor Educators are committed to infusing considerations of culture including regional factors such as those in rural areas, Lee Grimes, program director of Counselor Education at VSU, said. In this program, students have the opportunity to intern in urban, suburban, and rural settings to understand the unique qualities of each.

For more information on the Rural Studies program at ABAC and the application requirements, interested persons can contact Martinez-Franco atamartinezfranco@abac.edu.

We are making critical coverage of the coronavirus available for free. Please consider subscribing so we can continue to bring you the latest news and information on this developing story.

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ABAC and VSU sign new articulation agreements to bring needed skills to rural communities - Moultrie Observer

Human Behavior

Could the COVID-19 Epidemic Fade This Fall Without New Lockdowns? – Reason

Human beings are often terrible at foresight and generally learn hard lessons chiefly from failure. That has certainly been the case for the COVID-19 pandemic. Public health officials, politicians, and the public, by means of repeated policy failures, are still learning what works when it comes to mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic.

A partial list of initial failures in the U.S. includes underestimating the virulence of the pathogen by some public health officials; a massive bureaucratic screw-up by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that delayed the rollout of diagnostic testing as the pandemic was taking off; the belief that airborne transmission was not a significant route of infection but instead the virus was chiefly passed along via direct contact with infected people and indirect contact with surfaces in the immediate environment; the early assertion that citizens didn't need to wear face masks to protect themselves from infection; epidemiological models making worst-case projections of millions of COVID-19 deathsby assuming that people wouldn't change their behaviors; the claim that the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine was a "game changer" as a COVID-19 treatment; and a president who has doggedly insisted since February that the virus would miraculously fade or disappear soon.

So what has been learned over the past eight months? While conclusions are still preliminary, researchers now calculate that the COVID-19 coronavirus is about three times more contagious than seasonal flu; the availability of diagnostic testing in the U.S. has greatly improved but is still nowhere near where it needs to be; airborne transmissioncontributes significantly to the spread of the disease; when the background rate of infections is high the widespread adoption offace masksis aneffectiveand very economically valuable method for stemming COVID-19 infections; when epidemiological models took into account actual changes in human behavior, their COVID-19 death projections declined steeply; and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has concluded that hydroxychloroquine is not a useful COVID-19 therapeutic. But what about President Donald Trump's oft-repeated prediction that the virus will one day soon just disappear?

Epidemiological research suggests that COVID-19 will only fade away once the threshold for herd immunity is reached. Herd immunity is the resistance to the spread of a contagious disease that results if a sufficiently high proportion of a population is immune to the illness. Some people are still susceptible, but they are surrounded by immune individuals who serve as a barrier, preventing the microbes from reaching them. Herd immunity can be achieved via mass infection or mass vaccination. Epidemiologists estimate that the COVID-19 threshold for herd immunity is around 60 to 70 percent.

Some of Trump's fans have recently been touting the idea that COVID-19 herd immunity is closer than initial epidemiological projections have suggested. I, too, have reported that very preliminary studies on unsuspected preexisting T-cell immunity to the coronavirus and speculative modeling results suggest that the effective herd immunity threshold may actually be close, at least, in some countries and some regions of the U.S. (In other words, the possibility of a lower herd immunity threshold is a lucky accident, not the result of presidential prescience.)

Now a new modeling study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by a team of researchers associated with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign suggests that the COVID-19 "heterogeneity-modified herd immunity" threshold has already been reached in some metropolitan areas of the U.S. Their model stands in contrast to many of the epidemiological models noted above that are based on the homogeneous assumption that basically every individual is equally liable to become infected and then to transmit their infection on to others.

The Illinois researchers define heterogeneity as the biological and social susceptibility of individual members of the population to COVID-19 viral infection. Biological heterogeneity takes into account differences in such factors as the strength of immune responses, genetics, age, and comorbidities. Social heterogeneity reflects variations in the number of close contacts that each individual has with different people. Basically the more social a person is, the more likely they are to get infected early in the epidemic and then become immune. The researchers combine biological and social heterogeneity to derive what they call an immunity factor.

The team tests their model on real-world empirical data from hospitalizations, intensive care unit (ICU) occupancy and daily deaths from New York City and Chicago to figure out changes over time in the effective reproduction number for the virus in those cities. The effective reproduction number is the number of people to whom an individual can transmit infection at any specific time, and it changes as more of the population becomes immunized through either infection or vaccination. In addition, the effective reproduction number is affected by people's behaviors such as social distancing and widespread mask-wearing.

Taking the effects of biological and social heterogeneity on COVID-19 transmissibility, the researchers calculate that the herd immunity threshold is likely somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of the population. According to recent reports, more than 20 percent of New York City residents have probably been infected with the coronavirus.

Seeking to see what might happen this fall, the researchers model possible outcomes of the second wave of the COVID-19 epidemic in New York City and Chicago. They consider what they call a "worst-case scenario" in which all current mitigation efforts are fully relaxed and bars, theaters, and restaurants open with negligible social distancing and mask-wearing. Their heterogeneity-modified model projects virtually no second wave of COVID-19 cases in New York City which indicates that herd immunity has likely been achieved there.

On the other hand, they calculate that Chicago has not passed the herd immunity threshold. Nevertheless, the effects of biological and social heterogeneity would still result in a substantial reduction of the magnitude of the second wave there, even under the worst-case scenario. The possible good news is that their results suggest "that the second wave can be completely eliminated in such medium-hit locations [as Chicago], if appropriate and economically mild mitigation measures are adopted, including e.g. mask wearing, contact tracing, and targeted limitation of potential super-spreading events, through limitations on indoor bars, dining and other venues."

Based on data from late May, researchers also calculate that most states were then still far away from reaching their heterogeneity-modified herd immunity thresholds. However, this summer's surge in COVID-19 cases may have brought some states closer to herd immunity. While the coronavirus may not just fade away, these calculations imply that the U.S. has a good chance to avoid a potentially disastroussecond wave this fall if the public maintains reasonable social distancing and mask-wearing efforts.

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Could the COVID-19 Epidemic Fade This Fall Without New Lockdowns? - Reason

Human Behavior

Glued to Your Phone? You Could Have These Disorders, New Study Says – MSN Money

It seems everyone is glued to their phones these days, constantly scrolling social media and refreshing their email. However, if you find yourself feeling anxious when your phone dies or when you head out of the house without your phone, you may have what some experts are referring to as "nomophobia." Nomophobia, short for "no-mobile-phone phobia," is not recognized as a formal diagnosis yet, but researchers have been examining how common it is among young people. And one recent study is looking at the concerning link between nomophobia and other psychological disorders.

The study, published in the August-December 2020 edition of Computers in Human Behavior Reports, used a questionnaire to evaluate phone use and the psychopathological symptoms of 495 adults, aged 18 to 24, in Portugal. Researchers found a positive correlation between nomophobia and certain disorders, meaning that if someone has one of these specific mental health conditionsfor example, depressionthey are more likely to also experience anxiety when away from their phone. Each condition correlated with nomophobia has its own symptoms, ranging from insomnia to delusions to digestive problems.

While the researchers acknowledged the positive contributions phones bring to our lives, they reminded readers that there can be negative side effects when people become dependent on their phones. The study showed that the more participants used their phones daily, the more stress they reported feeling without their phone.

These are the nine disorders associated with nomophobia, according to the study, along with the percentage of subjects who experienced them. And if you want to make sure you're keeping yourself healthy, check out these 25 Secret Ways You're Hurting Your Mental Health Without Realizing It.

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Glued to Your Phone? You Could Have These Disorders, New Study Says - MSN Money

Human Behavior

Podcast 262: Jack Alton of Neuro-ID – Lend Academy

It is a conundrum for every online lender. Why is it that such a small percentage of the borrowers who start at the top of the marketing funnel make it all the way through the online journey? And then a portion of those that do complete the journey are fraudsters.

Our next guest on the Lend Academy Podcast has made it his mission to help solve these problems. Jack Alton is the CEO of Neuro-ID, a new company that is taking the online lending industry by storm, providing new insights that helps reduce friction and recognizes fraud in new ways.

This episode of the Lend Academy Podcast is sponsored byLendIt Fintech USA 2020. The worlds largest fintech event dedicated to lending and digital banking is going virtual in 2020.

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION SESSION NO. 262-JACK ALTON

Welcome to the Lend Academy Podcast, Episode No. 262. This is your host, Peter Renton, Founder of Lend Academy and Co-Founder of LendIt Fintech.

(music)

Todays episode is sponsored by Lendit Fintech USA, the worlds largest fintech event dedicated to lending and digital banking is going virtual. Its happening online September 29th through October 1st. This year, with everything thats been going on, therell be so much to talk about. It will likely be our most important show ever. So, join the fintech community online this year where you will meet the people who matter, learn from the experts and get business done. LendIt Fintech, lending and banking connected. Sign up today at lendit.com/usa

Peter Renton: Today on the show, I am delighted to welcome Jack Alton, he is the CEO of Neuro-ID. Now, Neuro-ID is one of the most fascinating companies in fintech right now, in my opinion. They have a very unique product, they call themselves Human Analytics for the Digital World and we get into exactly what that means, but, basically, theyre able to detect real-time fraud and reduce friction really for any company operating online. But, theyve really focused on the fintech space, particularly in the unsecured consumer lending space, and Jack will describe the company and describe the offering in some detail.

We get into all kinds of different examples, but I think what theyve been able to do, and theyve got lots of patents on this, is provide insight where there was limited insight and this is something that chief risk officers/chief marketing officers are crying out for even today with the reduced originations. Everyone wants zero fraud and a perfect kind of customer journey, but thats really what Neuro-ID is all about and we get into this in some detail. It was a fascinating interview. I hope you enjoy the show.

Welcome to the podcast, Jack!

Jack Alton: Thank you, Peter. Greetings from big sky country up here in Montana.

Peter: So, Ive got to ask you.I know this is a podcast, maybe this will entice them to go to YouTube and youve got a great background, a great Zoom background that is pretty spectacular. So, tell us a little bit about that.

Jack: Yeah. Thats actually our family farm, the big reason we moved back to Montana, to raise our kids here and try to keep doing technology things where we wanted to live and that picture is actually this morning. I was on a walk and the sunrise was so amazing that I stopped and took a couple of pictures and I thought this would be a great way to share it with everybody else. Even after growing up here and being five generations from Montana, when you wake up to a sight like that, its hard not to stop and take a picture.

Peter: That is spectacular, spectacular indeed. So, go to YouTube, youll be able to see it there, everybody. Okay so, lets get started by basically giving the listeners a little bit of background, tell us what you did before Neuro-ID.

Jack: Sure, yeah. So, I grew up in Montana, my wife and I both went to college here and then we moved down to Austin, Texas and I got involved in several VC-backed companies. I was involved with a company that invented WiFi which was later on sold to AT&T so that was super exciting and then moved back, wanted to take all that experience I had in Texas and apply it here in Montana. So, Neuro-ID is the third company that Ive done since I returned home here about 12 years ago and its been super cool to be able to demonstrate that you can live, kind of work and play where you want and COVID has really punched that out more than ever. I think our population here in Montana has probably tripled in the last five months.

Peter: Wow! Thats funny because you can live anywhere you want these days if youre just doing Zoom calls. So, yeah, maybe lets just talk about Neuro-ID and what you guys do. I know youve got this tagline on your website, Human Analytics for the Digital World, so lets just dig into that and tell us what you guys do.

Jack: Yeah. Its been super fun, its a cool story of kind of research and scientific discovery and patented technology all coming together to solve a really big need we have right now. You know, lots of scientific research shows that a foreign person, our own AI that we have in our head and in our eyes and in our ears, allows us to make really accurate judgments on trustworthiness and competence and frustration. But, when we moved online, all of that was lost so our two founders who have over 30,000 Google scholar citations in the field of human computer interaction, theyre literally the leaders in the world, they had this question, they said, what if we could digitally communicate the way we used to when we are in person.

That kicked off a bunch of research across several universities. In 2015, the company was founded and then in 2017, after they had proven that this technology, literally how we tap, type and swipe, could be used to understand your intent, to understand your identity, to really facilitate companies and customers online communicating better, they decided they wanted to take it to market so thats when I came in as the CEO of the company and started forming a team together, raising a couple of rounds of capital.

And now, 60 million customer journeys later, were quickly being adopted by leading fintechs, insurance companies and merchant inquirers as they realize whats missing is the human analytics, the human exchanges that we have when we are in person are gone when we moved online. So, thats what were doing, we install our Javascript and literally like a light being turned on, they can, all of a sudden, realize where is the friction in my current process and where is the fraud that I cant see today in historical data.

Peter: So, maybe lets talk about that and talk about the online customer journey that every e-commerce companyanyone whos doing commerce online and wants to optimize that. So, what are some of the things that youve seen thats bad about customer journeys today?

Jack: Yeah. I think that the thing that was most shocking to us ..I think if you dig deeper, you talk to the analyst community, youll see the ugly truth behind our digital transformation, so far, 15 years into that weve stalled out. Weve tried to take the friction out of a customer journey, but we get to that same point where we may have made our offer, selection process easy and your purpose of your loan or your credit card, but then we go to the chief risk officer and here she has a really difficult task of determining, of these 100 people that are coming through, who are my 95 customers that have, you know, a legitimate intent, they are who they say they are and their intent is good and then who are the five that are disguised as good customers but really are fraudsters. And, because we havent had access until now into this in-session behaviors, you know, kind of whats going on as theyre filling out or interacting with your brand online, theyve been forced to make all those decisions on historical data alone.

So, theyre looking at your FICO score, theyre looking at your past credit performance, theyre looking at all kinds of historical data and theyre trying to predict something in the future and the gap that were filling is they still use all that historical data, but now, were giving them a real-time view into how did that customer journey unfold, where are the sticking points and thats really been the big game changer for everybody.

Peter: Right, right. So, Im curious because what you just said there is applicable to just pretty much any industry thats operating online and Im curious about why you decided.I mean, you did mention insurance and merchant acquiring, but why focus on online lending as one of sort of the first places to go?

Jack: Yeah, its a great question. You know, we had patented the technology and validated it in the lab and through research, but we really hadnt commercialized it and used it in the wild. What we found in unsecured consumer lending, specifically, is massive data sets, sophisticated data science teams and teams & organizations that were really trying to figure out how do I improve my customer experience and how do I also detect fraud and they really work hand in hand.

What we found is that if you could see your fraudulent customers better and be more sure about that, you could start to kind of release some of the pressure that youre putting on your best customers so allow them to really start to differentiate and see those good behaviors versus those fraudulent behaviors. Unsecured lending was just a great space for them to share those outcomes for us to train all of our models and then once were able to train those models to these behaviors, were able to move it from vertical to vertical after that.

Peter: Right, right, okay. So, I want to sort of get into.Id love to get a real life example. I mean, you did a session on LendIt Fintech Digital a little while back and did a great kind of visual run through of how this works. So, maybe in the audio kind of environment, maybe you can show us, demonstrate, as best as you can, a real life example of a customer journey and how it looks after youve implemented Neuro-ID.

Jack: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Its literally.our customers have said things like, its like youve turned the light on, I cant believe how blind we were before. You know, once someone sees the demonstration of our technology.one of the things weve heard is, you know, I was literally taking just the last answer that the customer input, if we were sitting across a table from one another and I asked you for your social security number and you wrote it down and then you left and you came back and you changed it four or five times, that would make me ask additional questions.

Today, were blind to that when were just looking backwards to predict the future. And so, when we talk about the customer journey theres always been big blind spots on key fields that are really important if youre going to be optimizing experience or youre going to be trying to detect fraud. There are really two camps we look at, our third party fraud so identity-based fraud. How familiar is Peter with the information that hes putting in, right? We get very familiar with how we put in our first and last name, our date of birth, our social security; those are things that should come literally to the tips of our fingers, whether were using a touch or a mobile device. You shouldnt see a lot of manipulation in that, thats something we ask for on a common basis so, our algorithm is looking for anomalous behavior on that perspective.

The other area that weve come into and its part of our name, you know, if you think of the ID portion of our name a lot of people think its for identification, but really, its for Intent Detect. The technology can also start digging into difficult forms of fraud like first party fraud where theres an intent to fraud someone. In the past, this has been a really difficult field and it was one of the things that was very encouraging to us when we first took our technology to unsecured consumer lenders. They said, you guys are picking up on family fraud that weve never been able to pick up on. They have the credentials, they may live in the same address, but it is not that person that is trying to get a loan.

So, the two areas that were really using it to improve the customer journey are two. Answer that first question, is Peter who he says he is, that identification question, the third party fraud question, but also to look at .in an environment post-COVID, as an example, if we ask are you currently employed and we have 20% unemployment rates, those are things that really had people pulling back on issuing loans because they just couldnt get comfortable with what the current state was and thats what were giving visibility into.

Peter: Right, right. Lets just dig into that a little bit because when you did a demo for me months and months ago, I was blown away because you could see in real-time. You also said that you could see when there was an intent to be fraudulent and like you somehowyou have these profiles that a normal person..obviously, everyone has their own typing style and you really get granular with this, like how someone is typing in a field and you can tell with a lot of accuracy whether this is a human or a bot because bots can try and imitate humans, but you said you can pretty much figure that out so, tell us a little bit about that technology.

Jack: Yeah, yeah, its a great.the analogy we use is in person we have body language that were exchanging even if when were on a Zoom call, but when we move online, youre also portraying or projecting a digital body language as you move through. And if youre moving through an application process or an interaction and youre confident and it is you and you are who you say you are and your intent is good, your digital body language will reflect that.

When we see machine-type behavior or bot behavior, the fact of the matter is its pretty much impossible, almost impossible to replicate human behavior because were all different, but what our technology uniquely does is were able to baseline you against you and then you against the journey that youre on. So, it allows us to be able to really understand that digital body language, whats consistent and what is inconsistent.

Peter: So, when you say you against you, you mean you build a profile.like someone is typing in their first name, is that what youre doing? I mean, what does you against you mean?

Jack: Yeah. From the moment you, as an anonymous customer, we collect no PII. From the moment someone arrives on a mobile or a cursor device, our algorithms starts baselining their movements and looking at how you answer questions and comparing them to how you answer other questions.

So, if youre looking at it through a fraud lens, if youre asked a risk-relevant question like do you foresee a change in your income or your ability to pay back a loan and you first answer no, I dont, and you change it to yes, I do and then you go back to no, I dont because you realize you probably wont get the loan, thats behavior that our customers have no access to today that if we were in person would cause you to probably ask a few more questions.

Peter: Right, right, that makes perfect sense. So, obviously, what people get is the end result which is someone says no and thats all you know and you dont know they go back and forth. I remember one of those things you said there was likeone of the things at the demo like a social security number that was edited like 34 times.

Jack: Yeah. When people see that, thats when the light bulb really goes off and theres both an intuitive use of our technology and then the data science use of our technology. Fraud and risk teams are really good at spotting fraud and risk, they just havent had visibility that they used to have in person to be able to do that, conversely, marketing and CX teams are really good at seeing their best customers. Again, theyve just been operating kind of in a dark vacuum and havent been able to personalize that experience is all as theyre going through the journey.

Peter: Right. So, I can see the application there, but I want to also talk about the friction and the process because, particularly pre-COVID, every online lender wanted to make a frictionless process or as frictionless as possible. Some have now introduced friction as theres volumes are down so far, but regardless. So, lets assume that were back to a normal state of the economy and people want to maintain frictionless..one thing that was fascinating that I saw was you can tell not just sort of the page that someone left on, but the actual field so you can say, right, its date of birth or its income, whatever. This is the thing thats saying people get to there and they quit. Tell us about that friction piece.

Jack: Yeah, yeah. The product that we have is called the Friction Index Dashboard and what we realized is that everybodys trying to deliver the best experience possible, but no ones scientifically measured friction, they never quantified it to know where am I starting from and where am I going. Its only been measured really through conversion which doesnt really tell the whole story and, frankly, hasnt been moved upon in the last decade so, the Friction Index Dashboard was really a customer-driven product.

They loved the new scores and attributes we could use to help them build better decision models for fraud, but every time we would give them a glimpse of what their customer behavior was, we noticed that the customer would literally get up out of their chair in a board room and go toward the screen because they have been trying to understand why is it that Im putting a thousand people to the top of my funnel every day only to have, you know, 10% go through, why are 90% ending up in fraud, frustration or failure. These session level behaviors are helping them see exactly where, not just the page or the event, but actually the session.

Where is the friction happening and then what are the underlying behaviors that are causing it. So, why? When you get down to the level of understanding why somethings happening, that gives them all the data they need to make data-driven changes to their form, to their application and then the cool part with our Friction Index is it goes on and it continually monitors that friction across both mobile and cursor devices.

So, CEOs and chief product officers and chief marketing officers dont have to wonder what their customer experience looks like or send a survey out, it literally can log into the Friction Index, can see whether if the consumer friction is going up or down by question, by device type. Its really given them that last leg of visibility that theyve needed to kind of get closer to the same person interactions and move away from just digital transactions and start building a real digital relationship with the customer.

Peter: Right, right, that makes sense. So then on that, Id love to kind of get some sense of, you know, the impact of what youve done. You said a thousand people at the top of the funnel and 10% go through, what have you seen as far as impact on.when someone puts in Neuro-ID, what is the conversion rate, what can it change to?

Jack: Yeah, its a great question. Its really two things and oftentimes our ROI has a component of increasing your conversion and another one of reducing your fraud. Weve seen our technology being implemented at, you know, $70 Billion fintechs, merchant processor payment facilitator-type companies that have had a decade to build their fraud system. They have ten or more third party fraud vendors included and literally install our technology and see the ability to eliminate 35% additional fraud and the cool part is they do that without impeding their conversion. So, they both had a small bump in conversion and they were able to knock out 35% of their fraud.

If I take it to the lending use case, a lot of times lenders are using things like Plaid or Yodlee where they are asking the customer to log into their bank account. The customer may have worked really well to get the customer to the site, theyve selected their loan, theyve selected their purpose, theyve said yes, I want to do this. Their score card says, you know what, this customer looks good, but Im going to ask them to log into their bank accounts so that I can see if the income they stated is accurate and if they are who they say they are. While thats a very valuable fraud tool to verify identity and to verify that they have income there, its not such a good tool from a customer experience standpoint.

In fact, this customer was losing 40 to 50% of their customers every time they would get to that point. So, what we did is gave them a score to say, hey, here are your customers that have exhibited no anomalous behavior, theyve interactive with all of their fields as they should have. You have the opportunity to fast track them around that point on verification friction thats causing you to lose 40 to 50% of your customers every day.

From an impact standpoint, what we saw was that they customers that they fast tracked around that bank verification log-in, they were able to double their conversion without increasing bad debt so that drops straight to the bottom line. For them, it created a better experience, it reduced that unnecessary verification friction that they were putting on everybody and focused it on those that maybe were closer to the threshold of their internal score card or exhibited anomalous behavior.

Peter: Right, right, yeah, thats fascinating and I could see howthere are so many applications to that as well. I want to ask this one follow-up on that, but before I go on, you know, you say thatlike someone may be very legitimate, but they may not know their income because they just got a pay decrease, for example, so they might have been, you know, three minutes on that field typing in multiple things and thats not forging, thats just someone who just doesnt know. I mean, do you have triggers that sort of set up that kind of real behavior that is just a lack of knowledge versus fraud?

Jack: Absolutely. Its a great nuance and its something that our Friction Index Dashboard picks up really well. Example Ill cite is we had one of the lenders that was asking for annual income and the type of clientele that they lend to really look at their income on a hourly basis, what do I make per hour and maybe what do I make per month. What they saw was there was a tremendous amount of friction there a lot of time as these people were literally being forced to take their hourly wage multiplied by their weekly wage multiplied by their monthly wage to come up with a gross income wage.

It was a ton of time that our Friction Index was picking up on a lot of edits, a lot of changes that had nothing to do with fraud or malfeasance, but rather around how they were asking the question. They took this feedback, they implemented a tool tip that moved it back to an hourly rate for their applicants to put in and then they did the math and the background and all of a sudden, the friction went down, the conversion went up and satisfaction role went up as well.

Peter: Interesting, interesting. So then, who are the kind of lenders that youre working with today?

Jack: Yeah. So, they span the gamut really from, you know, I would say 550 and above all the way up to prime lenders, both consumer and business, also a lot of the top merchant processors now are using us and with our new relationship with Trans-Union, they are taking us into the interim space to kind of reinvent that digital quote and digital claim process for the interim space.

Peter: Interesting, interesting. So then, I know you havent been in business a huge amount of time, but.I mean, Id be curious when someone is hooked, when someone is running your data, running your code, I should say, how many of them just.whats your retention rate?

Jack: Yeah, its a great question. We joke around internally that once you see it, you cant unsee it, once you have access to this visibility and you know that its just one partnership away and it literally spans across all your departments to facilitate that collaboration that you need to digitally transform, we have never had a customer that has installed our Javascript move forward as a customer and ever left. In fact, the ones that are on our initial contracts signed multi-year contracts now and continue to see more value as they move from maybe chief risk over to chief marketing and chief product that these insights are invaluable throughout the customer life cycle.

Peter: You dont have lenders that have dropped their originations dramatically, theyre still keeping you on?

Jack: Absolutely. Yeah, I mean if you think about it, a lot of their credit risk models blew up during the COVID pandemic and its going to take time for those historical (garbled) as in to someones credit risk, as an example. But, if they can have it, if their customer journey is implemented with our real-time behavioral analytics, they can have a leading indicator of if theres any type of anomalous behavior, which is really what they are looking for now, is they slowly build their confidence toward lending again.

One of the things they want to do is not lend out a bunch of money and find out that that was wrong. We can give them the behaviors that are occurring in real-time and help them make better decisions as they recover. What we want to point out is the lenders definitely got hit hard, some harder than others, but other aspects of our customer-base, we have seen massive acceleration on the payment side and the merchant inquiry side as people who maybe had visible and digital properties, they are forced to push everything digital and weve seen account openings just spike, weve seen that at some of the major merchant processors out there.

Peter: Okay. So, say there is a lenders listening to the show and theyre interested, whats the process, how complicated is it to sort of just implement your code into their system?

Jack: Yeah, its a great question. Were on our third generation of our Javascript to ensure that its super easy and very light. Everyone says that, we actually do it. Our customers can typically get us up and running in less than one development day so its a pretty easy trade-off for them to go from not having visibility into their real-time behaviors to literally lighting that up in a day.

The other thing thats happened in the last year thats exciting is our first customers.it took us a while to build the models for them, now, weve been able to do what we call Day One Value. So today, when you install that Javascript, we immediately turn on your behavioral dashboard, the Friction Index Dashboard, and then you also start getting a stream of real-time behavioral analytics that feed a new source of data for your AI and ML models so, literally, day one value when you install it.

Peter: Interesting. So, I guess this is a whole. another data stream that all the data scientists can pore over and create new models from using this as a new data source, right?

Jack: Absolutely, yeah. Everything that were measuring and stuff that they havent been measuring so the data scientist would say that its orthogonal lift of the model and they get quite excited about that.

Peter: Right, right, So, you know, as were chatting here, and you know Ive been a big fan of what you guys do, Jack..I mean, when youre in a Zoom call, I guess it would be these days, like a sales call, what are the objections that people and how do you respond to those?

Jack: Were seeing that the market is rapidly adapting behavioral analytics which is terrific, I think, for everybody. Its great for consumers, its great for businesses. The biggest objection is just development cycles, product roadmaps, you know, prioritizing this integration and even if it is lightweight and most folks are stuck up six months to a year in their debt cycles so it really requires some executive sponsorship so its really our job to show this behavioral dashboard. Once we do that, that seems to pave the way to getting us integrated and up and running quicker.

Peter: Right, right. So, I know youve got a whole bunch of patents that are pending, I dont know, you tell me, whether theyve been improved. Youre the only company I know doing this, I mean, it seems to me to be something that will..you know, once people see or you get it, this type of thing will be standard at some point. Are you protected, whats stopping someone from just taking. they can see your Javascript and whats stopping someone from going up against you.

Jack: Yeah. So, we do have some really foundational patents in the space which are great, we use those, not necessarily to go after anybody, but to protect our right to do business. Theres a pretty big moat around what we do and what we found is a lot of our customers had been collecting behavior. The real challenge is taking that digital body language, that behavior they are taking.you know, scientifically, its considered a very noisy signal. Theres a big difference between how you interact and how I interact online.

Being able to baseline that, being able to surface the meaningful attributes that are the ones that can help you make better decisions, thats really the key, I think the breakthrough we had to be able to do that in real-time. So, when you think about where the real pinch point is in digital transformation today, were still having a really tough time landing a customer. Youve got one shot to get both the customer experience and the fraud signal right and the evidence is showing that were still struggling mightily there.

Were trying to strip out all of the friction, but then when we go into the verification process, the amount of verification that were throwing at customers that requires interaction, a document upload, a bank verification, a picture of yourself, its so out of the norm of what we would do if we were in person. Its really turning people off and preventing that real transformation to happen. So, were going to continue to use this patents, develop more patents, as I said, weve got four PhDs on staff and two of the brightest founders in the world so we think were at the very beginning of this, you know, kind of digital transformation being filled by behavioral analytics and were going to try to plant our Javascript everywhere we can. (Peter laughs)

Peter: Indeed, Im sure you are. Were almost out of time, but Id love to get a sensemaybe an example or two of insights that people have done that have made.we touched on it a little bit, but what Im talking about iseveryone has the customer journey, whats the theme for improvement like what do people sayeveryone is saying, oh, we need to get rid of this, we need to change that or is it really dependent upon whatever kind of lender is doing it.

Jack: Yeah, I think its a great question. I think there is a collision, a re-occurring collision thats happening every day in every digital lender and that is marketing and CX are trying to take all that friction out of an on-boarding journey so theyre asking the customer for very little information. But then, the chief risk officer is getting very little information and kind of having to start from scratch to ask them basic fundamental questions. It would be like, if we were going down a sales process and everything was going well and then I backed up and I said, well first, I need to ask you your name, are you sure thats your name and are you sure thats your address, it would throw everything that we did.

That collision continues to happen everyday and what we see happen once digital companies can see their customer through the eyes of their customer like see the fact-based behaviors that have happened.weve been in rooms where theyve said, I told you, you know, the risk officer would tell product who have been trying to get rid of a question, I told you that question wasnt causing any friction and thats an important question for us because they can actually see it in the behaviors.

Vice versa, weve seen the product or marketing teams say that question isnt worth the friction that its causing so for the first they time they can move away from these internal debates and this guessing and this endless AB testing to a data-driven approach that says, here is what happened descriptively in the customer journey and then theyre really good at making calls there now that theyre not operating blind.

Peter: Right, right. It goes from a subjective decision to an objective decision.

Jack: Absolutely.

Peter: Okay. So then, whats next for you guys, I mean, you said you wanted to conquer the world. Like in the next 12 to 18 months, what are you guys working on?

Jack: Yeah, yeah. So, the companys accelerating really quickly as you might imagine. Really great people want to work on this opportunity to bring something thats exciting to the market. Youve mentioned as well its horizontally scalable, we can take it to any vertical, any use case where theres digital interaction so next steps will be to continue to lockdown some of the biggest brands in the world across multiple verticals. But, were also be trying to democratize the technology and take it out so that everybody can use this technology, not just the largest corporations in the world.

Peter: Okay. Well, good luck, Jack, I think its fascinating what youve guys have done and its a real service to the industry, I think so. Thanks for coming on the show.

Jack: Thank you very much, Peter, appreciate it.

Peter: Okay, see you.

Jack: Bye, take care.

Peter: As I said, I am a big fan of what Neuro-ID is offering. I think its something that the industry needs and I think every industry needs if youre operating online. The one thing that I was really.one of the highlights, theyve got 100% retention rate since they started because once you see this.you go through a demo and you really see the insight. Once you seeyouve got access to this real-time data and you get to see how much real-time fraud is being detected that wasnt detected before.

I think that just shows you that people arent willing to fly blind and I think its a testament to what theyve done. I think, as I said, this is going to be standard offering online soon, certainly within five years and possibly a lot sooner. Its just something that, you know, you need to know everything you possibly can know about the person on the other end of the screen who is interacting with your website or your app so its really something that.Im very bullish on the whole idea.

Anyway on that note, I will sign off. I very much appreciate your listening and Ill catch you next time. Bye.

Todays episode was sponsored by Lendit Fintech USA, the worlds largest fintech event dedicated to lending and digital banking is going virtual. Its happening online September 29th through October 1st. This year, with everything thats been going on, therell be so much to talk about. It will likely be our most important show. So, join the fintech community online this year where you will meet the people who matter, learn from the experts and get business done. LendIt Fintech, lending and banking connected. Sign up today at lendit.com/usa.

You can subscribe to theLend Academy Podcast viaiTunesorStitcher. To listen to this podcast episode there is an audio player directly below or you candownload the MP3 file here.

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Podcast 262: Jack Alton of Neuro-ID - Lend Academy

Human Behavior

The longer we’re isolated, the less productive we get – Great Bend Tribune

COVID-19 is getting old - particularly for employees whove been working from home for months.

Thats the finding of a Wall Street Journal article, Companies Start to Think Remote Work Isnt So Great After All.

Early on, when millions stopped commuting and started working from home, many companies saw good results. Work was getting done. Most employees enjoyed it. Companies saw an opportunity to reduce future office overhead costs by making remote work part of their long-term strategy.

But that was before cracks began to emerge in the work-from-home model.

According to The Journal, initiatives now take longer. Hiring and integrating new staff is harder. Employees arent bonding or growing with each other. Efforts to collaborate online are going flat.

One CEO puts his finger on the problem: Its vital to have individuals in a room and see physique language and skim indicators that dont come by means of a display screen.

Hes exactly correct. Humans are social animals. Were at our best when we collaborate face to face. Communication theorist Nick Morgan explains why in Forbes:

(W)e share mirror neurons that allow us to match each others emotions unconsciously and immediately. We leak emotions to each other. We anticipate and mirror each others movements when were in sympathy or agreement with one another - when were on the same side. And we can mirror each others brain activity when were engaged in storytelling and listening - both halves of the communication conundrum.

As a freelance writer, working from home for years, I find myself climbing the walls many days. Too much home-office isolation makes getting things done harder.

Though online meetings are helpful, I long for face-to-face interaction. The best ideas come from in-person brainstorming - as one person jots ideas on a whiteboard and others shout out concepts. You just cant do that well in online meetings.

Furthermore, Ive worked for clients I never met in person. Such relationships are never as rich as those in which Im able to meet and work with clients in their offices over time.

In any event, as companies rediscover human natures limitations - that employees isolated at home arent as productive or as engaged with colleagues - they shed light on a growing problem in our society: Increasingly isolated inside our homes, particularly due to the virus, more people are interacting solely through social media and other online platforms.

And these detached means by which we now communicate enable our growing incivility.

This era of smartphones and social media - of nasty tweets and Facebook insults - is making rudeness, reports Psychology Today, our new normal.

The magazine cites research, published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, that finds technology-enabled anonymity and a lack of eye-contact are chief contributors to our growing incivility.

This prolonged virus is getting old, for sure, and our patience is running thin. But I hope we will learn from the lessons its teaching us.

I long for a time when pubs are fully operational and we can discuss politics civilly and with open minds over pints of Guinness, with renewed hope that well figure out how to maintain our humanity and civility in our increasingly nutty world when this virus is finally behind us.

Tom Purcell is a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review humor columnist. Send comments to Tom at Tom@TomPurcell.com.

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The longer we're isolated, the less productive we get - Great Bend Tribune

Human Behavior

Natural Lithium in Drinking Water Linked to Lower Suicide Rates – American Council on Science and Health

Lithium is quite an element.

Located in the first column of the Periodic Table, it is a metal so soft that it can be cut with a knife. Yet, add a little water and the metal becomes incredibly reactive. If you do it right, you can make it explode. This is because the reaction creates hydrogen gas, which is flammable. It also produces a strong base called lithium hydroxide, which consists of Li+ and OH-ions and is highly corrosive. It's a nasty reaction.

Lithium ions are incredibly useful. Perhaps the two most famous applications are lithium-ion batteries and psychiatric medication. In the former, the lithium ions shuttle positive charges between the two sides of the battery; in the latter, lithium is considered a miraculous drug, dubbed the "penicillin of psychiatry," since it works very well to stabilize mood swings in people with bipolar disorder.

We don't know exactly how it works. Biochemical studies indicate that lithium ions interfere with the inositol signaling pathway inside of nerve cells, ultimately helping to relieve the symptoms of the "manic" phase of bipolar, which is characterized by agitation and hyperactivity. Interestingly, it also helps relieve symptoms of depression, which (as the name "bipolar" implies) is the polar opposite of mania.

Lithium in the Water Supply Linked to Lower Suicide Rates

Because lithium is so reactive, it is never found as a pure metal in nature. Instead, it forms compounds with other elements, like oxygen and chlorine. Though it makes up a measly 0.0007% of the Earth's crust, this trace amount of lithium may have been secretly influencing human behavior for millennia. How so? Through its ability to ameliorate the symptoms of depression.

Since lithium is in the Earth's crust, tiny amounts of it can work its way into the water supply. And because lithiumisn't distributed equally around the planet, some places naturally have more lithium in the water than others. This has allowed epidemiologists to take advantage of this "natural experiment" to investigate if higher levels of lithium are linked to fewer suicides.

Indeed, that is precisely what a new meta-analysis has found. Published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, researchers determined that for every additional microgram per liter of lithium in the water, the suicide rate dropped by 0.27per 100,000 people per year. That's not a lot, but it certainly could have an effect. Consider that the suicide rate in the U.S. is roughly 14 per 100,000 people per year. If everybody had an additional 4g/L of lithium in their water, maybe the rate would be 13 per 100,000.

Public Health Implications

The authors' work has substantial implications. For one thing, we should devise dietary guidelines that ensure that people get enough lithium in their diets. Additionally, the authors suggest adding it directly to the water supply, but this may be too fraught with ethical problems to attempt.

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Natural Lithium in Drinking Water Linked to Lower Suicide Rates - American Council on Science and Health

Human Behavior

Why Your Teams Culture Is The Lengthened Shadow Of You – Forbes

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If you lead a team, listen up. In physics, we teach laws. In leadership, we teach patterns. Heres a pattern: Teams dont outperform their leaders. They reflect them. Sure, you can find brilliant performers on a poorly performing team or pockets of high performance in a failing organization. But show me a team that consistently outperforms its leader, and Ill show you a leader with an expiration date.

You set the tone, you create the vibe, and you shape the prevailing norms. By virtue of your position, you either lead the way or get in the way. Punctual leaders create punctual cultures. Put-down leaders create put-down cultures. Respectful leaders create respectful cultures.

But what if you dont want to be the architect of the culture? Well, thats not a choice you get to make. You cant abdicate that part of your role unless you abdicate all of your role. Its embedded in your stewardship; your positional power amplifies every word you speak and every move you make. You radiate influence and theres no switch to turn off that radiation. Its always on.

Your choice is to create culture by design or by default. Approach it intentionally or ignore it and see what happens.

The Two Levers of Influence

The single best synonym for leadership in the English language is the word influence. In its purest sense, leadership is influence directed toward worthy and meaningful goals. But how? There are many sources of influence, and yet two of those matter more than all the restmodeling and coaching. Everything else?strategy, structure, systems, roles, responsibilities, resources, policies, procedures, incentives, technology. Scaffolding. All of it.

The Two Levers of Influence

The First Lever: Modeling

The most important factor in the formation of team culture is the modeling behavior of the leader. This is Newtonian physics applied to organizational behavior. Its always true. The psychologist Albert Bandura said, Most human behavior is learned observationally through modelingfrom observing others.

Make no mistake: You are your teams clinical material. Youre the case study. Your modeling behavior is the curriculum. When the chief resident consistently washes her hands to prevent the spread of hospital-acquired infection, the other doctors do it too. No words. Just action.

The Second Lever: Coaching

The second most important factor in culture formation is your coaching behavior. Coaching is the way you guide your team members, give them feedback, and hold them accountable.

One manager I know touches base with her people only when theres a problem. She doesnt connect before she coaches and she has a didactic and intimidating style. Consequently, her people avoid her and shes bleeding out top talent.

A second manager I know checks in with each of her people several times a day. Her touch points are frequent and brief, her energy is contagious, and she has cultivated a habit of asking questions and listening with empathy and focus. Her people feel validated and listened to. They release their discretionary efforts.

Now What?

To assess the culture of your team and inform your modeling and coaching behavior, let me suggest one best practice that works across cultures and demographics: Stop conducting your own meetings and take on the role of cultural anthropologist. Hand the wheel to one of your team members and keep rotating the responsibility. This will give you the best possible opportunity to dual monitor the content and group dynamics of your team. Take notes on what you see. Monitor verbal and non-verbal cues. Pay close attention to the way team members respond to you versus the way they respond to each other. Pull out the patterns and then ponder the adjustments you need to makeand then make them. Remember, your teams culture is the lengthened shadow of you.

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Why Your Teams Culture Is The Lengthened Shadow Of You - Forbes

Human Behavior

Can a robot guess what you’re thinking? – Big Think

What on earth are you thinking? Other people think they know, and many could make a pretty decent guess, simply from observing your behavior for a short while.

We do this almost automatically, following convoluted cognitive trails with relative ease, like understanding that Zoe is convinced Yvonne believes Xavier ate the last avocado, although he didn't. Or how Wendy is pretending to ignore Victoria because she thinks Ursula intends to tell Terry about their affair.

Thinking about what other people are thinkingalso known as "mentalizing," "theory of mind," or "folk psychology"allows us to navigate complex social worlds and conceive of others' feelings, desires, beliefs, motivations, and knowledge.

It's a very human behaviorarguably one of the fundamentals that makes us us. But could a robot do it? Could C-3PO or HAL or your smartphone watch your expressions and intuit that you ate the avocado or had an affair?

A recent artificial intelligence study claims to have developed a neural networka computer program modeled on the brain and its connectionsthat can make decisions based not just on what it sees but on what another entity within the computer can or cannot see.

In other words, they created AI that can see things from another's perspective. And they were inspired by another species that may have theory of mind: chimps.

Chimpanzees live in troops with strict hierarchies of power, entitling the dominant male (and it always seems to be a male) to the best food and mates. But it's not easy being top dogor chimp. The dominant male must act tactically to maintain his position by jostling and hooting, forming alliances, grooming others, and sharing the best scraps of colobus monkey meat.

Implicit in all this politicking is a certain amount of cognitive perspective-taking, perhaps even a form of mentalizing. And subordinate chimps might use this ability to their advantage.

In 2000, primatologist Brian Hare and colleagues garnered experimental evidence suggesting that subordinate chimps know when a dominant male is not looking at a food source and when they can sneak in for a cheeky bite.

Now computer scientists at the University of Tartu in Estonia and the Humboldt University of Berlin claim to have developed an artificially intelligent chimpanzee-like computer program that behaves in the same way.

The sneaky subordinate chimp setup involved an arena containing one banana and two chimps. The dominant chimp didn't do much beyond sit around, and the subordinate had a neural network that tried to learn to make the best decisions (eat the food while avoiding a beating from the dominant chimp). The subordinate knew only three things: where the dominant was, where the food was, and in which direction the dominant was facing.

In addition, the subordinate chimp could perceive the world in one of two ways: egocentrically or allocentrically. Allocentric chimps had a bird's-eye view of proceedings, seeing everything at a remove, including themselves. Egocentric chimps, on the other hand, saw the world relative to their own position.

In the simplest experimental worldwhere the dominant chimp and the food always stayed in the same placesubordinate chimps behaved optimally, regardless of whether they were allocentric or egocentric. That is, they ate the food when the dominant wasn't looking and avoided a beating when it was.

When things became a little more complicated and the food and/or dominant chimp turned up in random places, the allocentric chimps edged closer to behaving optimally, while the egocentric chimps always performed suboptimallylanguishing away, hungry or bruised.

But the way the AI simulation was set up meant the egocentric chimp had to process 37 percent more information than the allocentric one and, at the same time, was constrained by its egocentric position to perceive less about the world. Perhaps the lesson is: Omniscience makes life easier.

The computer scientists admit that their computer experiment "is a very simplified version of perspective-taking." How the AI-chimp perceives and processes information from its simplified digital world doesn't come close to capturing the complexity of real chimps eyeing up real bananas in the real world.

It's also unlikely that the AI-chimp's abilities would generalize beyond pilfering food to other situations requiring perspective-taking, such as building alliances or knowing when it's safe to sneak off into the virtual bushes for romantic escapades.

So, might artificially intelligent computers and robots one day develop theory of mind? The clue is in the term: They'd surely need minds of their own first. But then, what kind of mind?

Across the animal kingdom, a variety of minds have evolved to solve a swath of social problems. Chimpanzees are savvy in an aggressively political and competitive way. Crows are clever in their ability to fashion twig tools, attend funerals to figure out what killed a compatriot, and team up to bully cats.

Octopuses are intelligent in their skill at escaping from closed jars and armoring themselves with shells. Dogs are brainy in their knack for understanding human social gestures like pointing and acting so slavishly cute we'd do anything for them. Humans are smart in a landing-on-the-moon-but-occasionally-electing-fascists way.

When it comes to theory of mind, some evidence suggests that chimps, bonobos, and orangutans can guess what humans are thinking, that elephants feel empathy, and that ravens can predict the mental states of other birds.

Minds that have evolved very separately from our own, in wildly different bodies, have much to teach us about the nature of intelligence. Maybe we're missing a trick by assuming artificial intelligences with a theory of mind must be humanlike (or at least primate-like), as appears to be the case in much of the work to date.

Yet developers are certainly modeling artificial intelligence after human minds. This raises an unsettling question: If artificial, digital, sociable minds were to exist one day, would they be enough like a human mind for us to understand them and for them to understand us?

Humans readily anthropomorphize, projecting our emotions and intentions onto other creatures and even onto robots. (Just watch these poor machines and see how you feel.) So perhaps this wouldn't be much of an issue on our side. But there's no guarantee the AIs would be able to feel the same way.

This might not be so bad. Our relationship with AIs could end up mirroring our relationship with another famously antisocial creature. We shout at our cats to stop scratching the sofa when there's a perfectly good catnip-infused post nearby, as the baffled beasts vaingloriously meow back at us. We are servile to them and have delusions of our own dominance, while they remain objects of mysterious fascination to us. We look at them and wonder: What on earth are you thinking?

Reprinted with permission of Sapiens. Read the original article.

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Can a robot guess what you're thinking? - Big Think

Human Behavior

Decision-making and anxiety in the time of COVID-19 | Penn Today – Penn Today

While more than half of Americans surveyed say that they are somewhat or very concerned about the novel coronavirus, viral stories of pandemic parties and unsocially-distanced concerts highlight the wide-ranging perspectives about the ongoing pandemic. As society grapples with what a new normal should look like, at the same time that the U.S. is still reeling from a summer surge in cases, how do people decide which activities are safe, and why do some peoples choices look vastly different than others?

Penn Today spoke with three experts in behavioral science to learn more about the cognitive basis of decision-making, how anxiety and stress impacts behavior, and what strategies people can use for making informed decisions on how to safely and comfortably reengage with society.

Psychologist Sudeep Bhatia and his Computational Behavioral Science Lab study the cognitive basis of human judgement and decision-making. One of his groups areas of interest is risky decision-making, or how people make choices between options that have varying probabilities of payoff and risk.

While Bhatia says that economists and statisticians are interested in how these decisions can be made rationally, psychologists are interested in why the decisions that people make are not always rational. We try to observe human behavior in terms of the operations of the mind to explain why people are being irrational, to figure out how a cognitive system thats otherwise adapted to making good decisions still makes irrational decisions in certain cases, he says.

To make a good decision, Bhatia says, one needs to know the probabilities for each outcome as well as some measure of the payoff. While its often straightforward to do the math and come up with a strategy that maximizes reward in the long-run, this isnt what happens when, say, someone finds themselvesdeciding to bet all of their money on red fiveon a roulette table. Instead, people tend to overweigh small probabilities when assessing the probability of certain outcomes. If theres a 1% chance of something happening, be it winning a lottery or getting COVID, you are actually using a number than is bigger than it actually should be. This causes you to overestimate the probability of that low probability event, he says.

But theres an important caveat: When you learn about probabilities by experiencing things in the world, you tend not to overestimate small probabilities but can also even sometimes underestimate small probabilities, says Bhatia.

Bhatia says that while there are likely numerous and complex factors that influence how people perceive the pandemic, from partisanship to misinformation on social media, the psychology of decision-making, especially how experience informs risk perception, can help explain some of the discrepancies seen in peoples behaviors.

At the start of the pandemic, there was less personal experience with COVID-19 but lots of statistics about new cases and death rates, which then became over-weighted in peoples minds. It means that the risk of COVID looms larger than it should, he says. But then, over time, people get experience, and when you get experience you start using your own behavior to inform what the risks are.

As people gained more personal experience living with the pandemic, activities that have a small probability of risk can also perpetuate peoples varying perceptions of what activities are risky or not. For example, say a person engages in an activity with a 5% risk of contracting COVID-19. This means that the majority, 95% of people who participated, wont get sick. For small probability events, such as getting sick with a 5% chance, it takes quite a lot of experiences for you to actually get sick, says Bhatia. It means theres a large number of people who have engaged in these activities who have not gotten sick and subsequently believe that the gamble is good. The remaining people, however, have gotten sick, they might think this is a pretty bad deal, and that can lead to a polarization.

Thea Gallagher, clinic director of the Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety (CTSA) clinic at Penns Perelman School of Medicine, says that after the initial shock of shifting into crisis mode, many who might not have experienced symptoms of anxiety might now find themselves feeling more worried than before. The core of anxiety is the intolerance of uncertainty and fear of the unknown, and I think nothing more exemplifies this time than those two phrases, says Gallagher.

Along with an inability to plan for the future, legitimate fears about safety, health, and job security and abrupt changes to peoples support systems and coping strategies, its also a time when people are increasingly on edge, which can make anxiety even worse. Everything is adding to peoples baseline level of stress and emotional reactivity, and the threshold for people to become emotionally upset is lower, says CTSA Director Lily Brown. Things that ordinarily might not affect them are much more impactful because everyone is at their wits end.

For patients with anxiety, Gallagher says, the tendency is often to try to eliminate all risks, which can lead some patients to be fearful of leaving their homes at all. The goal, she says, is helping patients find ways to reengage with society while making sure they are basing their decisions in facts over fear. We challenge our patients to do something, but we also to lean into the fact that that this virus is contagious, says Gallagher. I use the example of driving: We get in our cars, but we dont white knuckle it to the office. Instead, we live with that uncertainty, and we do our best.

Seeing people at the extremes of anxiety, from being too afraid to do anything to engaging in very risky behaviors, is something thats been observed in patients with PTSD, says Brown. Were seeing a lot of people bouncing back and forth, between excessive amount of concerns and then also somewhat unexpected risk-taking behavior, she says, adding that this phenomenon could also explain why some people rush out to crowded places as soon as restrictions are lifted. The goal here is to find that middle ground where you can be appropriately anxious where theres legitimate threat but not so anxious that its making you not function. We think both of those are almost equally problematic.

While its impossible to eliminate all risks of COVID without becoming completely isolated, Gallagher and Brown recommend that people experiencing any level of anxiety start figuring out what activities they are comfortable with based on guidance provided by public health organizations. For activities that people do decide to engage with, they also recommend creating a decision tree that includes considerations known to reduce coronavirus risk, such as being outside, wearing masks, and staying six feet apart from others.

They both caution against getting stuck in worry spirals, a common struggle for those with anxiety, where people try to make endless predictions about all of the hypothetical ways that something will happen and how they will deal with it. Often, when people are stuck in this worry spiral, they think that they are problem solving and being productive, but they are actually engaging in strategies which not only dont help them make effective decisions, it also worsens their anxiety in the long run, says Brown.

To avoid getting stuck in a worry spiral, Gallagher recommends anyone whos anxious to focus on controlling what they can in the moment without getting too far ahead. Im encouraging people to really hold loosely because outcomes are very unpredictable right now, she says. If theres anything that this pandemic has taught us, its that we really need to be radically present. Its really not worth trying to get out in front of it, people think that will bring them comfort and actually it just stresses them out.

While the pandemic will certainly be a source of stress in the months to come, living with uncertainty and risk is not in of itself a new phenomenon. Its about using your best judgement, making a decision and committing to it, and leaning into the fact that theres going to be risk everywhere, says Gallagher. Weve lived with a lot of uncertainty and risk leading up to this point, and we cant live our lives consumed by that fear and worry.

Sudeep Bhatia is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology in the School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.

Lily Brown is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and director of the Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Thea Gallagher is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and director of the outpatient clinic at the Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Additional information and resources on COVID-19 is available at https://coronavirus.upenn.edu/.

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Decision-making and anxiety in the time of COVID-19 | Penn Today - Penn Today