NAME: Dario Sidhu
ROLE: Associate Advisor
ORGANIZATION: Behavioral Insights Team
Perspectives: What is the Behavioral Insights Team (BIT)?
DS: The Behavioral Insights Team (BIT) began as a unit within the UK government and is now a social purpose company which uses insights from behavioral and experimental economics to address policy issues. Many of the behavioral insights we use revolve around the growing understanding that people don’t always make decisions in the way that traditional economics would predict. Peoples’ behavior is also influenced by the emotional, social, and cognitive context they’re in. BIT works with government agencies and nonprofits to help develop new policies that are informed by these insights and improve existing policies by evaluating them through randomized control trials (RCTs).
Perspectives: What does your day to day as an Associate Advisor look like?
DS: As an Associate Advisor in BIT’s newest office in Canada, I work on many aspects of our operations from liaising with our clients to conceptualizing, designing and running needed RCTs.
I also spend a reasonable amount of time on Twitter and other platforms to discover new findings and methods from the economic literature. On a day to day basis, I could be writing a literature review for a client, on a client call to understand the program or policy they want to improve, doing field work to understand how a program currently runs, designing RCT protocol, or presenting a workshop to potential and current clients on behavioral insights.
Perspectives: How did you get your current role?
DS: BIT has a rigorous hiring process, which they developed to mitigate many of the biases that come with traditional recruiting, called Applied. I applied through Applied, which consists of several anonymized assignments specific to the job you apply for. I was selected for an interview from amongst the 250ish applicants, after which I was hired. I did not know anyone at BIT beforehand and, in general, I would say organizations like BIT, J-Pal/IPA, and others in the field intentionally try to make hiring as meritocratic as possible. You do not need to network your way into an organization.
Perspectives: What soft and hard skills, then, are important to have to stand out in the experimental economics field?
DS: With respect to soft skills, as the target communities of many of the programs we work on are low-income or otherwise vulnerable, it is important to have empathy for and the ability to work with and understand others in a non-superficial way. With respect to hard skills, this field is fairly unique in that you need to have a fairly deep understanding of experimental research methods. It is also important to have enthusiasm for the field and to stay up to date on the current conversation in economics. Like I mentioned earlier, following economists and other smart people you admire on Twitter is a great way to stay up to date in that way.
Perspectives: Do you have any other advice for SAIS students?
DS: I would really invest in getting those hard skills, like understanding impact evaluations, and taking any courses that can bring you to the cutting edge of research while at SAIS. It can be hard to acquire those skills independently and I wish I had had more opportunity to take those kinds of courses when I was still in school.
As narrated to Yifan Powers, Senior Editor, SAIS Perspectives.
To learn about other recent graduates' work, visit this page.
PHOTO CREDIT: "Toronto" by jpkrone is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.