Meet the IIU's Behavioural Science Fellow: Sean Devine

Sean is a Behavioural Science Fellow embedded within the Public Health Agency of Canada. His work focuses on identifying, informing, and empowering Canadians’ immunization decisions, as well as reducing barriers to access across the country.

Before joining the Impact and Innovation Unit, Sean’s earned a PhD in Experimental Psychology (Cognitive Science) from McGill University, where he studied the computational and contextual mechanisms underpinning human decision-making. He also worked as a Behavioural Economist at Intact Insurance Corporation.

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

I have strong training in quantitative methods. These statistical skills enable me to extract meaningful and useful insights from the large resources available in the public service. A deeper understanding of the data we have about Canadians can help inform data-driven policies that most benefit them. I think my background in statistical methods in psychology ensures that our conclusions are rigorous and justified by the data.

What attracted you to apply to the Fellowship program?

I believe that the tools of behavioural science provide a historically unprecedented opportunity to better understand human behaviour. These insights, however, are only as good as the impacts they generate. The Fellowship program, to me, is an opportunity to harness my expertise in understanding why people behave as they do to improve the lives of my fellow Canadians, to enable people to make more informed and deliberate choices, and to, overall, improve society’s capacity for evidence-based collective decision-making.

In what way do you believe the application of behavioural science can effectively support Canada’s public health response?

Public health has, and will continue to be, a behavioural issue for Canadians. From exercise to social distancing measures, the habits we form in our daily lives are the health of our country. If Canada is the body, we are the cells, and it is the behaviour of the cells which determine the health of the body. At this scale, the tools of the behavioural sciences are unmatched in their ability to support Canadians to make healthy and informed choices, to combat mis- and disinformation, and to enable people to live their best, most prosperous, lives. So long as our bodies are affected by disease and decay, we will be faced with difficult, and persistent, choices about how best to stay these deleterious effects on our health. The behavioural sciences offer a lens through which we can both understand and buttress Canadians’ decisions.

Can you share an outcome from your past research(es) that has made you proud?

I was very happy to have my work on women’s perception of body image featured prominently in three online publications, including the popular Psychology Today. This was a first experience for me in seeing my work summarized for popular consumption. I was doubly happy to see that this increased attention generated multiple, simultaneous, replication attempts from the scientific community. It was truly rewarding to engage with the Open Science community in this way and to participate in projects aimed at independent replication – work which, so often in academia, is discounted.