UTS-CBA Junior Hackathon: Replicating Behavioural Findings for the Digital Age.
In an innovative collaboration, the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) joined forces once again to host the highly anticipated UTS-CBA Junior Hackathon. This event marked the third edition of the hackathon, inviting Honours, Masters, and Graduate Diploma students from universities across Australia to delve into the realm of behavioural experiments for the digital age.
Unlike traditional hackathons that focus on ‘hacking’ away at a problem to generate novel solutions, this unique hackathon served as a research training experience for students. A series of replication experiments were meticulously designed, coded, and conducted by researchers from UTS and CBA. The students had the opportunity via Hackathon workshops to learn how to analyse data from these experiments, write industry research reports, and how to present results to industry stakeholders.
The objectives of the UTS-CBA Junior Hackathon were twofold: to replicate decision-making experiments conducted over a decade ago and to see whether these experiments replicate in an Australian population of participants. By revisiting these experiments in the context of today's digital age, we aimed to assess the impact of screens on decision-making processes and confirm the validity of previous findings.
The hackathon consisted of four experimental buckets, each containing a series of experiments that were primarily sourced from the book ‘The Smarter Screen’ by Shlomo Bernatzi:
- Perception: Students examined biases that influence decision-making, challenging the notion of visual accuracy. Biases such as the 'middle bias' and the 'top-left bias' were explored to understand their implications.
- Aesthetics: The role of personal visual preferences in decision-making was investigated. Participants explored the concept of the 'halo effect' and its impact on subsequent decisions.
- Attention: The relationship between decision-making and attention was explored, with a specific focus on text readability. The effect of screen-based information processing on reading comprehension and the potential benefits of making the text harder to read were examined.
- Choice Overload: Participants delved into the challenges posed by an abundance of choices. Strategies for breaking down options into manageable rounds were explored to facilitate optimal decision-making.
Two experiments from each bucket (8 experiments total) were assigned to Junior Hackathon students who worked in teams of two. Each team was tasked with analysing the data from their assigned experiment, writing up the results as a short report, and presenting the results to industry stakeholders. The students will work on these tasks for four weeks post-Hackathon with the guidance of UTS/CBA assigned mentors.
The 2023 UTS-CBA Junior Hackathon provided an invaluable learning experience for the students involved. Through workshops, mentorship, and hands-on research, students gained practical skills in experimental design, data analysis, and report writing. Furthermore, their contributions to the replication experiments may lead to co-authorship in a future publication compiling the results of each assigned experiment, recognising student involvement and impact in the field of behavioural science.
For further information or inquiries about future events, please contact Zoey Isherwood (zoey.isherwood@uts.edu.au ), Adjunct Fellow at the UTS Business School and Experimentation Manager of the Behavioural Science team at CommBank.