"The Power of a Public Commitment Device:" Steve Martin on Five Years of GAABS
The former Board Chair and Influence at Work founder reflects on the origins of the world’s leading association for applied behavioural scientists — and where the field is heading next.
Steve Martin needs little introduction to anyone working in the behavioural sciences. Co-author of the global bestseller Yes! and a behavioural science professional trained by Robert Cialdini, he has spent more than two decades applying the principles of social influence to some of the world’s most intractable people problems.
But his role in founding GAABS — the Global Association of Applied Behavioural Scientists — is perhaps less well known. We sat down with him to hear the story of how the organisation came to be, what its early years were really like, and why he believes the field of behavioural science is on the cusp of a significant second wind.
Q: Let’s start at the beginning. Tell me about the genesis of GAABS. How did the idea to launch an association come about?
The seeds were planted in two separate frustrations — a concern and a complaint, if you like. They also originated in two streams – from a network of leading practitioners around the globe and from participants on the Executive Master’s programme in Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics.
The concern shared in common was that people had invested a great deal of time, money, and effort in gaining a serious, world-class qualification through real degrees and real projects. Everybody was asking, quite legitimately: how do I now take this into the market? How do I demonstrate the value of what I know, and build a practice around it?
The complaint was this. Qualified practitioners and graduates alike were watching people read a book — Nudge, Influence, Yes!, take your pick — and essentially appoint themselves as behavioural scientists, leaders of behavioural science teams even, within their organisations and agencies. And the people who’d done the hard work of gaining a proper qualification were understandably frustrated.
Q: How did that frustration translate into an actual organisation?
A group of practitioners from Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, the US, the UK, and other countries started to gather around the complaint and ultimately began discussions around an idea–that of creating a network for qualified behavioural scientists. These conversations were well underway when, in 2020, the London School of Economics (LSE) hosted a conference at Temple, London (about 3 years after the LSE programme for executive masters degree students had started).
I was involved in those very early conversations and asked to lead a session, and it was there that the concerns came up again. People were talking about them quite animatedly. And the analogy occurred to us that, you wouldn’t let someone come into your home to repair your central heating because they’d watched a book or a YouTube video. You’d want to see their credentials. And, at that time, this simply didn’t exist for behavioural science.
“You wouldn’t let someone come into your home to repair your central heating just because they’d watched a YouTube video. You’d want to see their credentials. That simply didn’t exist for behavioural science.”
As we rallied around the discussion during the LSE programme, someone said aloud, “Well, what are we actually going to do about it?” And then … hands started to go up of different people offering support and action. Someone said they could help with a website. Someone else offered a different element of support. And, given the conversations that were well underway, I found myself leaning in as well with a verbal commitment to lean into whatever those next steps looked like.
Once you’ve said you’re going to do something in front of a hundred witnesses, that’s quite a commitment device, right? There’s rather a strong incentive not to let yourself down. Which, as any behavioural scientist will recognise, is a rather elegant deployment of the science to which we all subscribe. We didn’t plan it that way, but there it was. And we essentially just had to connect the motivation of the group of practitioners with the energy present in the room.
From that nucleus of people who had committed in the moment, and those two streams of conversations, GAABS began. It didn’t have a name yet. But it had a direction and people who had volunteered to help. And for those who had put their proverbial hands up at the LSE Conference, they had done so under the auspices of a commission by an academic institution with some standing on the topic. So it really felt, at that moment anyway, that we were heading in a direction that needed some follow-through.
Q: You described the early years as ‘bumpy;’ what did that actually mean in practice?
George Washington reportedly said the two things you never want to watch being made are laws and sausages. I’d add ‘organisations’ to that list. The challenge was partly the classic intention-action gap. When you frame something in terms of concerns and complaints and urgency, people are genuinely energised to act. But then life intervenes, and an entirely voluntary endeavour competes with everything else on people’s plates.
There was also a fascinating dynamic between the academics and the practitioners. The academics were tremendously supportive and provided essential institutional credibility — without them, GAABS would never have gotten off the proverbial ground. But the actual doing of all the things fell to the practitioners. There’s probably a lesson in there about the respective strengths of each group.
“There was a fascinating dynamic between the academics and the practitioners. The academics were tremendously supportive. But the actual ‘doing’ of creating GAABS fell to the practitioners.”
In addition to the actual logistics, there were some conversations with others in the field who had already formed representative bodies. We all believed, in principle, that a rising tide lifts all boats. But in practice, that sentiment needed to be given a bit of structural support. The language we eventually settled on in GAABS’s constitution — that the organisation exists to serve members working primarily in private practice and organisations — helped draw a line around GAABS with which everyone we knew to talk to in the behavioural science ecosystem could feel comfortable.
Q: Looking back, did GAABS apply its own principles to itself?
That’s a wonderful question, and probably a slightly uncomfortable one to answer honestly. The cobbler’s children going barefoot is a very real phenomenon. I sat in rooms full of behavioural scientists and I cannot, hand on heart, say that we regularly stopped to ask: given that there are twelve experts in the psychology of influence sitting in this room, what would the optimal behavioural science approach look like?
What I can say is that the public commitment mechanism worked rather well for getting GAABS launched. And some of the early thinking on member motivation — understanding that people were joining both because they wanted community and because they wanted commercial support — did eventually sharpen our approach, even if it took us a little while to get there.
Q: Five years on — how has the field of behavioural science changed?
What the organisation is trying to do, and what applied behavioural scientists are trying to do, hasn’t changed enormously. But the context around it has shifted in ways that I find both challenging and, ultimately, exciting.
The challenge is this: behavioural science got rather strongly associated with ‘nudges’ — the small, costless, frictionless interventions that produce surprising results in homogeneous, high-volume transactional contexts. And to be clear, I was as responsible for that association as anyone. Those tax letters we worked on at Influence at Work with HMRC are a classic example — and they genuinely worked.
But that framing did us a disservice as well. It created the impression — among policymakers and organisational leaders especially — that behavioural science is essentially about tweaking, about finding clever little levers. And that is not, in fact, what the field offers at its best.
As behavioural science practitioners, what we actually understand is the full complexity of how human beings think, feel, and act. The inconsistencies, the conflicts, the messiness of the human condition. There is an enormous difference between influencing a behaviour in the moment — through an external nudge or prompt — and genuinely persuading someone to change: to update their beliefs, to internalise a new way of seeing things, to the point where they no longer need the artificial intervention in their environment because they are compelled to act.
The world is hungry for the latter, but behavioural science practitioners have not always positioned themselves as having this wider array of answers.
“There is an enormous difference between influencing a behaviour in the moment and genuinely persuading someone to change. The world is hungry for the latter.”
Q: You’ve talked about ‘a second wind’ for behavioural science. You’re optimistic then?
Genuinely, yes — and for reasons that go beyond self-interest, though I’d acknowledge that my perspective is not entirely without bias.
There’s an interesting pattern with ideas that have a first wave of enthusiasm and then a period of consolidation. Some of those ideas simply fade. But some come back, and when they come back, they come back with stronger roots. They’ve been tested, the hype has settled, and what remains is more substantive. I think behavioural science is in that second wave now.
Two things give me particular cause for optimism. The first is that we are running out of rational explanations for why things go wrong. The best economic models, the most sophisticated policies — they look beautiful on paper, and then you put people into the situation and things get complicated. There is a growing recognition that understanding human behaviour is not a soft add-on to strategic thinking; it is central to it. Workplace surveys consistently show that influence, persuasion, and communication remain among the most valued skills in organisations. Last year, they ranked number one–even above AI.
The second is artificial intelligence. There is much discussion about how organisations will integrate AI, and how people will adapt to working alongside it. Those are framed, correctly, as behavioural challenges. But there is also a more fundamental point: the workplace of the coming decade will demand higher, not lower, levels of human skill in precisely the areas where behavioural scientists have the deepest expertise. Influence, persuasion, communication, the repair of relationships and trust. AI is quite extraordinary at tasks. It is not yet good at judgement, and it is not yet good at repair.
“Workplace surveys consistently show that influence, persuasion, and communication remain among the most valued skills in organisations. Last year, they ranked number one — above AI.”
Q: Looking ahead over the next five years, what opportunities do you hope that GAABS addresses?
I’m excited about Torben Emmerling bringing new leadership as the Chair for the organisation. He will undoubtedly bring new energy, enthusiasm and direction for the organisation for several years to come. As far as what GAABS will seek to achieve in the coming years, I very much look forward to his direction in that regard.
As far as what I see as opportunities in the field … the challenges that organisations and societies are facing now are, at their core, human challenges. Distrust is rising — in many Western countries, roughly a third of the population now starts from a position of scepticism towards institutions, media, and expertise of any kind. That is not principally an economic problem or a communications problem. It is a behavioural one.
I like to think of this in terms of three primary inputs: What does the evidence say? What do the economics say? And what do the feelings say? Facts, finances, and feelings. The right combination is always contextual — it will vary enormously from one situation to the next. But dismissing any one of those three is a mistake.
Behavioural science is not the answer to everything. But we are an important part of the answer to these issues. And I think we’re just beginning to find the language to say so–effectively signaling that someone with an acute insight into the human condition–a behavioural science practitioner–has genuine and substantial value to bring. Not as the person who tweaks the wording on a letter, but as a serious partner in thinking through how change actually happens.
And my hope is that GAABS, in five years’ time under Torben’s capable leadership, emerges as an organisation that people think of when they want to understand how to bring that perspective to bear.