PB434      Half Unit
Behavioural Science in an Age of AI and New Technology

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

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When Psychology and Economics got "married", the product was Behavioural Science. Although this discipline has elevated theoretical and practical understanding of human behaviour to previously unseen heights, recent technological developments have produced new insights in understanding and predicting people's actions that not only supplement traditional tools of behavioural science but also go beyond them. The future of the discipline will therefore likely depend on how effectively behavioural scientists can harness new developments in technology to understand and change the way people act. 

The aim of this course is to a) Introduce major technological advancements that are relevant for predicting, influencing, and understanding human behaviour; b) Outline how they supplement and extend commonly used tools of behavioural change; and c) Examine how they can be used to propel behavioural science into the future. The course will tackle behavioural science in relation to artificial intelligence (AI), virtual environments, social robotics, gamification, behavioural informatics, social networks, and other relevant developments in information technology.

Example topics explored on the course:

Introduction to AI and its applications in behavioural science; Changing behaviour through gamification; Social robots: Our new friends?; Behavioural science in virtual worlds; Behavioural informatics; Change thyself: Using technology to influence our own behaviour; Digital footprints and human behaviour; Psychological targeting in digital age; The ethics of emerging technologies in the context of behavioural science.

10 hours of seminars and 10 hours of lectures in the Winter Term.

Students will be expected to produce 1 piece of coursework in the WT.

Formative coursework will serve as your preparation for the summative assignment. You will need to create a 5-minute presentation on the topic of the summative assignment: Propose an intervention that relies on technological tools that were either covered throughout the course or that you identified through personal search to create behavioural change in an applied setting of your choice (e.g. your organisation, personal life; you can select any setting you desire). In the presentation, you will need to a) Introduce the behaviour you want to tackle and argue why changing this behaviour would be important; b) Present your intervention that uses technological tools to change the behaviour and c) argue why this intervention would be effective based on your knowledge of behavioural science gained through the class material and personal literature search.

Similar to the summative assignment, the presentation will be delivered in a video format: you will be given a clear step-by-step guide describing how to produce the presentation in a video format (we will go through this guide during a seminar to make sure it is clear to everyone how the summative assignment should be produced). The main aim of the formative assignment is for me to evaluate your approach to tackling points a), b), and c) mentioned above so I can give you relevant feedback that will help you when preparing the summative presentation, and also for you to get comfortable with producing the video presentation.

• Krpan, D., & Urbaník, M. (2024). From libertarian paternalism to liberalism: behavioural science and policy in an age of new technology. Behavioural Public Policy, 8(2), 300-326.
• Shrestha, P., Krpan, D., Koaik, F., Schnider, R., Sayess, D., & Binbaz, M. S. (2025). Beyond WEIRD: Can synthetic survey participants substitute for humans in global policy research? Behavioral Science & Policy, 23794607241311793.
• Zarouali, B., Dobber, T., De Pauw, G., & de Vreese, C. (2022). Using a personality-profiling algorithm to investigate political microtargeting: assessing the persuasion effects of personality-tailored ads on social media. Communication Research, 49, 1066-1091.
• Bashkirova, A., & Krpan, D. (2024). Confirmation bias in AI-assisted decision-making: AI triage recommendations congruent with expert judgments increase psychologist trust and recommendation acceptance. Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans, 2(1), 100066.
• Yang, E., Garcia, T., Williams, H., Kumar, B., Ramé, M., Rivera, E., ... & Jia, Y. (2024). From Barriers to Tactics: A Behavioral Science-Informed Agentic Workflow for Personalized Nutrition Coaching. arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.14041.
• Peters, H., & Matz, S. C. (2024). Large language models can infer psychological dispositions of social media users. PNAS nexus, 3(6), pgae231.
• Krpan, D., Booth, J. E., & Damien, A. (2023). The positive–negative–competence (PNC) model of psychological responses to representations of robots. Nature Human Behaviour, 7(11), 1933-1954.
• Slattery, P., Saeri, A. K., Grundy, E. A., Graham, J., Noetel, M., Uuk, R., ... & Thompson, N. (2024). The ai risk repository: A comprehensive meta-review, database, and taxonomy of risks from artificial intelligence. arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.12622.

Presentation (100%)

The aim of the summative assessment will be to propose an intervention that relies on technological tools that were either covered throughout the course or that you identified through personal search to produce behavioural change in an applied setting of your choice (e.g. your organisation, personal life; you can select any setting you desire). This intervention will be conveyed in the form of a 15 minute presentation that will count as your summative assignment. More precisely, in the presentation, you will need to a) Introduce the behaviour you want to tackle and argue why changing this behaviour would be important; b) Present your intervention that uses technological tools to change the behaviour and c) argue why this intervention would be effective based on your knowledge of behavioural science gained through the class material and personal literature search.The presentation will be delivered in a video format: you will be given a clear step-by-step guide describing how to produce the presentation in a video format (we will go through this guide during a seminar to make sure it is clear to everyone how the summative assignment should be produced). Together with the video presentation, you will need to submit an annotated bibliography that contains a) a list of scientific references you used for the presentation; and b) a short text below each reference (1-2 sentences) describing why exactly the reference is important in the context of your presentation. The main purposes of the annotated bibliography will be to demonstrate the academic background upon which your presentation was built. Post-submission interviews will be randomly assigned.