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Rory Waisman, ‘25 PhD, who is set to graduate with a doctorate from the ¾ÅÐãÖ±²¥ School of Business, wants to learn more about the sometimes messy ways people make decisions. Before starting his degree at the U of A in 2017, he graduated from the University of Manitoba with a bachelors of arts (honours) in psychology.

While pursuing undergrad, the Winnipeg-born researcher took a third-year cognitive psychology course that inspired his curiosity about how people use past experience to make their decisions . It introduced him to the literature on biases and heuristics — how people deviate from rational choice. At the same time, he also volunteered as a research assistant in a cognitive science laboratory, where he was introduced to computational models of memory and decision making.

“It was my first introduction to the idea that — not only are people not rational most of the time — but that their lack of rationality is actually systematic in nature, that there are patterns to the way people make sometimes poor or maladaptive decisions,” he says. “And this idea really intrigued me.”

By the time he began at the U of A, Waisman wanted to apply these concepts to better understand how consumers make decisions. His thesis investigates choice architecture and its interventions, along with how these can impact consumer or user behaviour decision making later on. “So my thesis is what I consider to be the beginning stages of, let's call it, a very ambitious program of research,” he says.

Choice architecture is the design of how different options are presented such as through the number of options, how they’re arranged, whether or not one of them is preselected etc. The term ‘nudge’ is often used to label interventions that involve designing choice architecture to prompt a desired outcome — making a healthier option the default side dish in a restaurant, for instance.

According to Waisman, there are practical and theoretical gaps in the existing literature on how these interventions impact people after they’ve been presented with, for example, a default. “If we don't understand what's going to happen later, we might actually be implementing interventions that are going to be counterproductive in the long run,” he says.

Knowledge and nudges

Waisman ran a series of behavioral experiments for his thesis from 2018 to 2022. He and his colleagues recruited more than 5,000 participants — mostly from the United States and United Kingdom — using online crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk and presented them with a video platform with videos from two genres: science and comedy.

The participants made decisions about which video to watch across five different choice trials. Waisman varied the choice architecture in these trials across control and experimental groups. For instance, the control group watched videos on the platform and, once a video finished, they manually selected the next video from two choices. In other trials, participants were given a nudge toward a specific genre: After completing a video, another one would automatically play unless they deliberately chose to click the other presented option.

To gauge how this nudge impacted preference, the researchers asked them to indicate how much they like science and comedy videos before and after going through the choice trials. Participants were also asked to make playlists of videos on the platform. Waisman found that the nudges improved participants’ opinions of the genre that initially wasn’t their preference. For example, a person who initially preferred comedy videos would include more science videos in their playlist after having been nudged to watch some science videos in the choice trials.

According to Waisman, the findings suggest that a default nudge of this kind can have carryover effects. It’s important to study this more considering just how frequently choice architecture interventions appear in daily life. A better understanding of them could help the designers make more informed decisions and, potentially, help consumers make better choices, he says.

Two papers are slated to be published from Waisman’s PhD research. The first is a scoping review that proposes a framework for future research in this field. It has been invited for publication in Consumer Psychology Review. The second uses the experimental work, and will be submitted to the Journal of Consumer Research this fall.

‘The greatest support’

Waisman is planning to continue working on this program of research after graduation and he is currently preparing an application for an SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship. From his time at the U of A, the people he worked with stand out in Waisman’s mind.

“The people in the ¾ÅÐãÖ±²¥ School of Business were just the greatest support,” he says.

One of the key reasons he pursued his PhD at the ASB was his supervisor, Gerald Häubl. However throughout his studies, Waisman appreciated the dedication he saw across the faculty. He notes the associate deans of research he met while at the school provided “tremendous guidance for students coming into the program.”

They, along with the PhD office staff, helped him with grant and scholarship applications, to access resources and funding to and navigate the process of studying and performing research at the U of A. The research faculty in his department also provided “friendly reviews of papers and offered guidance wherever it's being sought,” he says.

He fondly recalls the senior students when he first arrived at the university, how helpful they were and how they took him under their wing. “And during the four years that I was on campus, I really tried to do the same for new students coming in, and to pass on what was so freely given to me,” he says.