Meet the IIU’s Behavioural Science Fellow: Arvin Jagayat

What unique perspectives do you bring to this work, as someone entering the public service for the first time?

In both my personal life and academic career, I am fascinated by the intersection between technology and behaviour. Digital social spaces have evolved far faster than our physical ones, and our physical experiences seemingly integrate with our digital lives more and more by the day. From studying the ever-expanding ways that women and girls are targeted online to evaluating ways that social media platforms can be designed differently to reduce engagement with misinformation, I have become attuned to the affordances and pitfalls of digital social spaces. So much so that I led an interdisciplinary team to develop the Mock Social Media Website Tool: a method for researchers to simulate existing, modified, or propose completely new social media platforms and measure how participants engage with them. I believe that my experiences developing research software to be highly modular, accessible, and to meet the expressed needs of researchers all over the world has provided me with diverse perspectives on people’s digital lives that I hope I can bring to my work with Impact Canada.

What attracted you to apply to the Fellowship program?

Above all, the Fellowship program seemed like a rare opportunity to do conduct research that is simultaneously rigorous, meaningful, and has a clear pathway to policy through being a part of the public service. My research was always more applied, so the prospect of joining a team of researchers that are conducting actionable research was very attractive to me. The cherry on top was learning that these teams were interdisciplinary, and that I could have the opportunity to work alongside and learn from experts with completely different research backgrounds. Many of the biggest societal issues are cross-sector and cross-discipline, so applying was a no brainer when I discovered that Impact Canada was fundamentally committed to fostering these diverse perspectives.

In what way do you believe the application of behavioural science can effectively support the response to some of the challenges we face as a society?

All of us often wonder why people do the things they do, and it is easy to speculate what the underlying reasons might be. However, human behaviour is incredibly variable, messy, and often influenced by many dispositional and circumstantial factors simultaneously. However, speculation alone cannot tell us for certain which of these factors matter most. To be effective in combatting our biggest societal issues, a high degree of certainty is needed. Without that certainty, potential solutions to these societal issues can backfire and potentially make them worse. Behavioural science equips us with the tools we need to replace speculation with certainty to ultimately make the lives of people better.

"Behavioural science equips us with tools we need to replace speculation with certainty to ultimately make the lives of people better."