Can Knowledge of Human Behavior Be a Competitive Advantage?

The Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable seeks to identify and to illuminate issues at the forefront of our nation’s science and technology enterprise. This brochure summarizes ideas exchanged at the February 1999 Roundtable Council meeting, which examined issues in moving social and behavioral sciences knowledge across government-university-industry boundaries. It does not, however, represent the views of individual participants nor a consensus view of the Roundtable Council. For information on the Roundtable, consult our homepage at: http:www.natioanal-acedemies.org. You may contact us directly at: GUIRR @nas.edu.

Industry in the past two decades has gotten better at applying research results in natural sciences and engineering. The gains to society (in better and cheaper products and services and more competitive companies) have been immense.

The social and behavioral sciences may offer benefits at least as great, in product and process design, marketing, forecasting, and planning. But business has found it harder to integrate the results and methods of these fields systematically in day-to-day operations. As a result, many of our technical systems and business practices fail to take advantage of knowledge of individual and social behavior and capacities. But business is increasingly demanding a more sophisticated approach to questions of demographics, human performance and learning, and the interactions of humans and machines, which can be addressed only through these disciplines.

The rewards of better utilizing such knowledge would be great and pervasive. Capturing them will require interactions of academic research, business, and government—an appropriate topic for the Roundtable. To explore the roots of this issue, and discuss the prospects for improvement, the Roundtable met February 23 and 24, 1999. It heard from leaders in the theory and application of knowledge from the social and behavioral sciences in the public and private sectors, including Donald A. Norman of the Nielsen Norman Group; Kenneth Prewitt, Director, U.S. Bureau of the Census; Lee Limbird, Associate Vice Chancellor for Research, Vanderbilt University Medical Center; David Woods, Director, Institute of Ergonomics, The Ohio State University; H. Clayton Foushee, Jr., Vice President for Regulatory Affairs, Northwest Airlines; Eugene Farber, Manager, IVHS Safety and Regulation, Ford Motor Company; and Mortimer Downey; Deputy Secretary, U.S. Department of Transportation.

TECHNOLOGIES OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR

Investments in social and behavioral sciences research have led to important product and process technologies that are easy to take for granted. Standardized education and intelligence testing, economic forecasting, political polling, psychotherapy, human-machine system design, programmed language instruction, consumer research tools, methods for pricing options and derivatives, cost-benefit analysis, and demographic projections—to name a few—have great economic and social value. Society’s responses to many great public policy problems, such as public health, international security, climate change, and population growth, depend on accurate estimates of political or economic incentives and cultural preferences, all of which are the domains of the social and behavioral sciences.

In the future, as business and government get better at taking human needs, capacities, and preferences into account, we may expect benefits such as:

-Vastly more accurate market forecasts, based on more detailed information about consumers and their needs and preferences

Understanding of the extent to which genes influence human behavior

-Educational techniques that work synergistically with human cognitive and learning capabilities (including human-machine interfaces that have training built in unobtrusively)

-Automated industrial systems that are more tolerant of human error and less susceptible to the effects of fatigue, stress, and boredom in operators

-Personal computers and communications devices that are inconspicuous or invisible until needed, and offer access to information tailored to the user’s cognitive and perceptual capabilities

-More advanced financial technologies that allow firms and investors to better manage risk and uncertainty

-Better pictures of how human populations interact with the natural environment (as in their responses to natural disasters)

-Better strategies for promoting public health through injury and disease prevention

-Improved public goods such as economic and population forecasts, better ways to measure the success of education, and better understanding of the ethical foundations of humanity’s interactions with technology.

Making Products Safer and Easier to Use

To succeed in the market, services and products must be designed explicitly to meet the needs of human users, no matter how excellent they may be in technical terms. The safety, utility, and ease of use (and thus marketability) of systems throughout the economy have improved greatly with applications of the behavioral sciences. The behavioral science-engineering discipline known as “human factors” is responsible for many of these applications.

Anyone who doubts the significance of a successful human-machine interface should consider the graphical World Wide Web, which by itself, with no technical breakthrough, has fueled extraordinary growth in Internet use. Automated databases—to choose another example— have become vastly simpler to use, despite their exploding complexity and scale, because designers have applied the insights of cognitive research.

In the extreme, systems that fail to take account of operators’ characteristics may expose users and the public to unnecessary risks. Commercial aircraft, automobiles, chemical plants, surgical and diagnostic procedures, and other complex systems have all become safer over the years as human limitations—notably in the ability to absorb information and maintain concentration—have been recognized and accommodated. This process is most effective when it is built into the design process, and not a later response.

But human beings are variable and hard to predict. Engineers are continually surprised by the behavior of operators and users, which can produce accidents with heavy costs. They tend to blame “human error” in such cases. Human factors experts say that most could be avoided by better integrating behavioral knowledge into engineering, operations, and training.

Taking Social Factors into Account

Besides tailoring its systems to individuals, business and government must shape their activities to suit a wide variety of human social and behavioral patterns, including distribution of wealth and income, attitudes, and educational backgrounds. Anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, economists, psychologists, and others have highly developed methods for measuring and predicting these complex social factors and dynamics. Over the decades the nation has amassed large sets of data on these patterns, much of it through federally funded research. These data, combined with new statistical models of dynamic systems such as human populations, offer important innovations in business and government planning.

But too little attention has been paid to putting the data in usable form. Dozens of government agencies and hundreds of companies maintain such data for their own purposes, with too little effort to coordinate or integrate. (For example, seldom do agencies agree in advance to ask consistent questions in surveys of similar topics.) The potential value of this information is correspondingly reduced, and the cost of obtaining it is increased. As the economy grows increasingly linked, demands will increase for coordination both nationally and internationally.

The social and behavioral sciences are the sources of such fundamental knowledge, which is built on data accumulated over long periods of time. Government agencies and private companies can cooperate to ensure that the appropriate data is gathered, and in the most usable form.

PLACING HUMAN BEHAVIOR IN THE DECISION LOOP

Social and behavioral scientists obviously have much to contribute to industry, and to society. But they are rarely in positions to influence design and business strategies. They tend to be called on instead as consultants—after major decisions have been made—to provide short-term fixes or explanations of what went wrong. The roots of this situation can be traced to a complex of weaknesses in the academic disciplines themselves and in the business and personnel practices of the private sector. Typical patterns of federal research funding in these fields of study may reinforce these divides.

Breaking Through the Disciplinary Divide

Some of the academic traditions of behavioral and social sciences are part of the problem, and movement in them must be part of the solution. Academic reward systems in these fields too often disdain applications while promoting narrow, specialized studies. Moreover, because so much social science is based on inference and probability, unqualified conclusions are and will continue to be unusual. Business planners and design engineers, on the other hand, need results that are quick, cheap, and easy to relate to a task. They tend to be generalists, able to draw from various fields of knowledge. Efforts at communication between the two communities are bound to be difficult.

But they can learn to speak the same language. Similar hurdles have been overcome over the years in forming corporate relationships with researchers in the natural sciences and engineering. Barriers to effective collaboration across disciplines and sectors are not inherently higher in the social and behavioral sciences than in other fields.

Promising efforts at synthesis are beginning to evolve. A few engineering research programs at schools such as Carnegie Mellon University successfully integrate the principles of behavioral science and human factors into their approaches to solving real-world problems. However, most engineering schools still provide only a sketchy exposure to ergonomics and human factors.

Academic tenure and promotion incentives in the social and behavioral sciences also need to be reexamined. Today they often undermine efforts to improve interdisciplinary communication. Young scholars who seek interdisciplinary research opportunities or corporate ties are too often penalized by their seniors and ignored by their peers. But the more adventurous persevere, and are increasingly seeing opportunities, in cooperative research centers sponsored by government and/or industry. The Aerospace Crew Research Project at the University of Texas, which is supported by NASA, is one example.

The Responsibility of Business

Business leaders, in turn, need a more sophisticated understanding of human behavior and human interactions than many of them currently demonstrate. Every business, after all, addresses its products and services to human users. A general knowledge of the methods and results of the social and behavioral sciences should be part of the tool kit of every senior manager.

Companies also need to develop continuing relationships with academic researchers in these fields, just as many have with natural scientists and engineers. Companies that need to draw on knowledge from the social and behavioral sciences might learn from successful models in other fields, such as semiconductors and data storage, where companies jointly support academic work aimed at solving longer-term problems. This is already occurring in areas such as opinion polling.

In order to capitalize on expanded collaboration in the social and behavioral sciences, industry will need to demand (and universities produce) a new breed of student. These might be behavioral and social scientists with significant exposure to industry problems and methods, or engineers with deep knowledge of psychology or other disciplines. A few outstanding individuals with such “bridging” expertise have become significant contributors and attained senior positions in industry. One prominent example is David Nagel, president of AT&T Laboratories. As the number and influence of these individuals expand, companies will be able to move beyond the current situation in which experts in fields like human factors are looked on as part-time resources providing “quick fixes.” One way businesses can help build this expertise is by providing students with internship opportunities, as Northwest Airlines did with students from Ohio State University’s Cognitive Systems Engineering Laboratory.

The Role of Government

Federal research funding, over the years, has catalyzed important advances in applied social and behavioral sciences research. NASA funds devoted to human cognition and performance and the human-machine interface, for example, are credited with improving the safety of commercial air transport in the 1970s and 1980s (largely by improving the presentation and communication of information for the crew). The U.S. Department of Transportation sponsors a system of university-based research centers; funding has risen rapidly, to nearly $200 million annually. The National Science Foundation funds broadly interdisciplinary research—including many university-based centers that focus on industrial problems with explicitly behavioral and social dimensions. The U.S. Department of Agriculture allocates 8.6 percent of its research budget to the social sciences, addressing areas such as food safety (over 90 percent of food-borne illness is attributed to human behavior). USDA also funds outreach extension and educational programs to bring information and technology based on social and behavioral sciences research to individuals and industry. The Department of Defense funds some basic studies of the psychology of human-machine interfaces.

Today, the social and behavioral sciences account for about 6 percent of academic research expenditures--$1.5 billion in 1997. But federal funding for fundamental studies in the social and behavioral sciences has declined over the past two decades by nearly 10% in real terms (although there are recent signs of a modest upturn). And there are few broad, general programs to promote applications of such knowledge, through incentives for academics to work more closely with industry or to encourage interdisciplinary cooperation.

A RENAISSANCE OF SUPPORT FROM THE PRIVATE SECTOR?

For the private sector, placing human behavior where it belongs—at the heart of the design process and of corporate strategies—will take many years, just as it took many years to build successful corporate relationships with natural scientists in the 1980s and 90s. The traditions and practices of entire academic disciplines will need to be revisited. Businesses will need to recruit and cultivate cadres of social and behavioral scientists, giving them the scope to participate seriously in forming plans and strategies. Already, over half of social and behavioral science research in universities is funded by non-federal sources, including industry, state and local governments, and institutions. Government will need to improve incentives for collaboration.

But the rewards will be great, and are increasingly obvious to leaders with foresight in industry, universities, and government. As change gathers momentum, and the benefits begin to be felt, we are likely to see growing demand for behavioral and social knowledge in industry. That demand could spur a broad renaissance of support for the social and behavioral sciences.

FURTHER READING

Gawande, Atul. Feb. 1, 1999. “Annals of Medicine: When Doctors Make Mistakes.” The New Yorker, pp. 44–54.

Norman, Donald A. 1998. The Invisible Computer: Why Good Products Can Fail, the Personal Computer is So Complex, and Information Appliances are the Solution. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Smith, Philip M., and Barbara Boyle Torrey. Feb. 2, 1996. “The Future of the Behavioral and Social Sciences.” Science, vol. 271, pp. 611–12.

Wickens, Christopher D., Anne S. Mavor, and Japes P. McGee, eds. 1997. Flight to the Future: Human Factors in Air Traffic Control. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.

Woods, David D. Aug. 1994. “Observations from Studying Cognitive Systems in Context.” Keynote address, Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable: Background and Purpose

The Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable was created almost two decades ago to provide a forum for dialogue on science and technology issues among top government, university, and industry leaders. The purpose is to facilitate working relationships and the exchange of ideas about emerging trends, problems, and promising opportunities facing those charged with developing and deploying scientific resources.

The Roundtable also seeks to stimulate new approaches to issues by disseminating the product of its deliberations, and by actively fostering contact and collaboration with other organizations able to build further on the ideas developed.

The Roundtable is sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine.

Funding

Core financial support for the Roundtable comes from federal R&D agencies and from our university-industry partnerships. Supplemental funding for specific activities comes from foundations, states, and other sources.

THE ROUNDTABLE COUNCIL

Members

JOE B. WYATT, Roundtable Co-Chairman, Chancellor, Vanderbilt University

WILLIAM H. JOYCE, Roundtable Co-Chairman, Chairman, President and CEO, Union Carbide Corporation

BRUCE ALBERTS, ex-officio, President, National Academy of Sciences

D. JAMES BAKER, Under Secretary for Oceans & Atmosphere, U.S. Department of Commerce

ROBERT BERDAHL, Chancellor, University of California-Berkeley

CAROL M. BROWNER, Administrator, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

RITA COLWELL, Director, National Science Foundation

MORTIMER L. DOWNEY, Deputy Secretary, U.S. Department of Transportation

ROBERT V. EDWARDS, Chairman, Computer Sciences & Engineering, Case Western Reserve University

BRAN FERREN, Executive Vice President, Creative Technology, Walt Disney Imagineering

CHARLES GESCHKE, President, Adobe Systems Incorporated

DANIEL GOLDIN, Administrator, National Aeronautics and Space Administration

STEPHEN JAY GOULD, Professor of Geology and Zoology, Harvard University

I. MILEY GONZALEZ, Under Secretary for Research, Education and Economics, U.S. Department of Agriculture

JEROME GROSSMAN, CEO, Lion Gate Management

PAUL HORN, Senior Vice President, Research, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center

FREEMAN A. HRABOWSKI, President, University of Maryland-Baltimore County

SHIRLEY ANN JACKSON, President, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

DEAN KAMEN, President, DEKA Research & Development Corporation

RAYMOND KAMMER, Director, National Institute of Standards and Technology
U.S. Department of Commerce

MARTHA KREBS, Director, Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy

NEAL LANE, President’s Science Advisor and Director, Office of Science & Technology Policy

THE HONORABLE HANS MARK, Director, Defense Research and Engineering,
U.S. Department of Defense

JAMES MCGRODDY, Vice President (Retired), IBM, Advanced Network & Services, Inc.

THE HONORABLE ZELL MILLER, Former Governor of Georgia, Koellmann USA

MAYNARD V. OLSEN, Professor, Department of Molecular Biotechnology, University of Washington

KENNETH SHINE, ex-officio, President, Institute of Medicine

HAROLD VARMUS, Director, National Institutes of Health

WM. A. WULF, ex-officio, President, National Academy of Engineering

Roundtable Staff

Thomas A. Moss, Executive Director

Thomas Arrison, Senior Program Officer

Anne-Marie Mazza, Senior Program Officer

Jocelyn Sands, Administrative Associate

Bianca Taylor, Project Assistant