UTS Behavioural Lab Conference 2023

Descriptive transcript

I'm very happy to welcome you to this year's Behavioural Lab Conference, which is part of the UTS Centre for Behavioural Science and Design.

The theme of this year's conference is Behavioural Science for Sustainable Futures, nudging change in a changing climate.

So climate change is obviously one of the pressing issues of our time, and changing behaviour of consumers, organisations, and governments is key to addressing this issue.

We are at the UTS Behavioural Lab Conference, which is a gathering of academics and people from different disciplines and industries. We are sharing our knowledge from academia and industry, trying to find points of collaboration.

The goal of the Behavioural Lab is to bring together a group of interdisciplinary researchers—economists, psychologists, marketers—to really come together and understand human behaviour, and then use that knowledge to nudge better decisions and improve the outcomes of citizens.

We are a university of technology, and we want the ideas that are generated here to be applied out in the real world. Behavioural science has strong application almost anywhere; everywhere you look, people are making decisions, and we can help them make better decisions.

This event is a great opportunity for people in different areas and disciplines, both industry and academic, to meet, discuss, and share insights. The ultimate goal is to have these different groups collaborate in order to have social impact and make the world a better place.

When you look across the Business School here at UTS, it's full of people with really interesting ideas that have great applications out in the real world. Days like today are a fantastic chance to bring people together in a really short, sharp way, share those ideas, let people look through them, pick the bits that might be useful to them, and hopefully create connections that we can use to create better outcomes outside.

As a part of UTS Behavioural Lab, I wish to continue my research on examining AI and how it changes human behaviours. I think AI is a great topic to make a common area of interest for both academia and industry.

We've been looking at the effect of incentives to utilise mental health apps. It's important because low mental health is a known problem amongst young people. I think they're particularly vulnerable to anxiety and depression, and we need to think about ways to tackle that, and try to get policymakers to look at that research.

Currently, I'm doing research on how expectations affect patients. For me, UTS Behavioural Lab is, first of all, a community where a PhD student like me can always get help, support, or any kind of guidance.

UTS Behavioural Lab is one of those labs where economists, marketing people, researchers and teachers are collaborating together, and having this interdisciplinary focus of the lab is not unique, but rather unusual, I think, for experimental labs around the world.

Today's event is a great opportunity for researchers from both UTS and other universities, and also from industry and government sectors, to share our joint efforts to work towards better outcomes for people, which is reflected in our research. Events like this really elevate this community.