How to measure behavior in research

Behavior is a general and universal thing. To state it simply: behavior is the way a person or animal acts in a particular situation/environment. As ways to behave are numerous and we are a curious species, people have been measuring behavior for centuries now. So, why is measuring behavior awesome? These 3 examples prove it.

Why measuring behavior is awesome

People have been measuring both animal and human behavior for a long time. Behavior is the actions and mannerisms made by individuals, organisms, systems or artificial entities in conjunction with themselves or their environment. It is the computed response of the system or organism to various stimuli or inputs, whether internal or external, conscious or subconscious, overt or covert, and voluntary or involuntary.[1]

Measuring these behaviors can give amazing insights. Some examples that show why it is so interesting to measure it.

1. It can change behavior for the good

Remember that movie clip of people taking the escalator instead of the stairs next to it, until they transformed the stairs into one giant piano? It led to an impressive 66% increase in people taking the stairs instead of the escalator that day. They changed their behavior for the better, because they were triggered by something fun, rather than alarming news articles on our declining health.

Although this experiment was not scientifically conducted, it does show that the changing human behavior and measuring the results is something everyone can relate to.

2. It can involve anything and anyone

Why one person behaves a certain way and someone else can act completely the opposite way has been the subject of studies for ages. It’s not just human behavior that is that scientists find worthwhile studying; the study of animal behavior – or ethology - goes back as far as Charles Darwin and American and German ornithologists of the late 19th and early 20th century. The modern discipline of ethology is generally considered to find its roots in the work of Dutch biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen.

Without behavioral research we would have never known the Pavlov effect, why wolves howl, or more recently, the “Science of the Resting Bitch Face”, where facial expression analysis made it possible to discover why so many people – especially women – seem to suffer from a social phenomenon that labels them as bitchy, solely based on their expression.

3. It can bring people from different disciplines together

One way for behavioral research to get its limelight are the numerous conferences dedicated to the measuring of behavior, with Measuring Behavior as the ultimate conference bringing it all together in one meeting. This unique conference focuses on methods, techniques and tools in behavioral research in the widest sense.

While most conferences focus on a specific scientific area, this conference tries to create bridges between disciplines by bringing together people who may otherwise be unlikely to meet each other, with measuring behavior as the binding factor. 

Meeting researchers from other disciplines teaches you to combine different perspectives and establish links as a way of analyzing problems. During the upcoming Measuring Behavior conference in Krakow, Poland (18-20 May 2022), you’ll see dozens of examples on measuring a multitude of behaviors. This could be shopper behavior at airports, cows in a stall, drivers in vehicles, and players on the field and online. Measuring Behavior includes discussion on observing all of those behaviors, and more, from both humans and animals.

Reference

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavior

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What are the best examples of measuring behavior you encountered?

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Approaches for identifying stereotyped movements. a Representation of all of the movements an animal could theoretically make. For instance, each line could be the dynamics of two joint angles, say, the bending of a knee and an ankle, or another set of postural variables over time. Although an animal could potentially move with any of these postural trajectories, many of the motions here would be only rarely performed. b How we observe most animals to move. Specifically, they use a relatively small portion of their potential behavioral repertoire (stereotyped behaviors, colored lines) along with a few instances of less-commonly-observed ones (non-stereotyped behaviors, black lines). c One way to isolate stereotyped behaviors is to break-up the observed trajectories into clusters (denoted by dashed lines). d An alternate means of identifying stereotyped behaviors is to transform the dynamics in such a way that, for instance, each time one of the trajectories in b is performed, a dot is placed using a low-dimensional embedding to a different space. Similar trajectories are mapped near each other (dots), and stereotyped behaviors could be identified as peaks in the density contours (lines) of this map