Interview with Tim Hogg
- Merle van den Akker
- 4 hours ago
- 6 min read
Tim is a behavioural scientist and Director at Fairer Finance - a consumer group in the UK with a mission to make financial services fairer for consumers and the businesses that serve them. Since earning his MSc in Behavioural Economics from the University of Nottingham, he has spent over 10 years working in financial services consultancy. Drawing on behavioural science, Tim advises policymakers on designing regulation, and firms on delivering good customer outcomes through pricing, product design, journeys, and communications. Tim is also an adviser to Christians Against Poverty, a charity providing free debt advice in the UK.
Who or what got you into behavioural science?
I studied economics at university and really enjoyed it, and then in my final year I discovered behavioural economics modules. I wasn’t quite ready for real life, so I did a master’s in behavioural economics. And that was the best year of my studies.
I just loved getting into biases, rationality, and how real people make decisions in the real world. Then I moved into consultancy and, over time, found myself doing more and more behavioural economics, particularly in financial services, where the stakes are just much higher.
At some point, like everyone else, I started calling myself a behavioural scientist; it’s better branding, and I was increasingly working with psychologists, linguists, and others, so the remit had broadened beyond economics.
What is the accomplishment you are proudest of as a behavioural scientist, and what do you still want to achieve?
There are a couple of advocacy projects I’m really proud of. One is recent work on housing wealth and retirement; thinking about how people use, or don’t use, the value in their homes to support their later-life living standards.
Another one from a previous role looked at why people don’t invest their cash savings. Instead of just asking people why, we were able to break it down behaviourally: separating things like risk aversion and loss aversion and actually getting to the underlying drivers.
I think what I’m proud of in both cases is bringing a proper behavioural lens to problems that are often approached more superficially, and helping to shift the conversation in a more meaningful direction.
Looking ahead, there are still huge areas of consumer detriment in financial services that have been known about for decades and haven’t really been solved. That’s where I’d like to focus; using behavioural science to properly analyse those problems and figure out what the right solutions are, even if those solutions aren’t nudges and are something quite different.
I don’t have one specific problem in mind. I actually enjoy the variety, but I’d like to feel like I’ve made a real dent in at least one of those big issues. That would be a good outcome for me.
What are the biggest challenges for behavioural science?
One challenge is that, in some areas, behavioural science is still not fully accepted, particularly within more traditional economics.
If you start questioning assumptions like market efficiency, you can encounter a lot of resistance, because those assumptions underpin a lot of how regulation and economics more broadly are structured. It’s not always a debate on the merits; you sometimes get a more emotional reaction because of what it would imply if those assumptions didn’t hold.
At the same time, when working with firms, banks, insurers, behavioural science is generally well received. People find it interesting and useful, even if they don’t always like the conclusions. The challenge there is more about trade-offs: being transparent with customers can conflict with commercial incentives.
There’s also a broader challenge around actually making change happen. Whether it’s questioning economic assumptions or rewriting something like legal language for customers, you’re often asking people to move away from long-established ways of doing things.
So a lot of the challenge isn’t the insights themselves; it’s winning hearts and minds and getting those insights adopted in practice.
How do you think behavioural science will develop (in the next 10 years)?
Ten years ago there was a huge focus on nudges, and I think there’s been some disappointment in how much impact they actually have. Often it’s marginal unless you’re changing defaults.
So I think we’ve moved, or are moving, towards a more mature view where behavioural science is used to understand markets and problems, but the solution doesn’t have to be a nudge. Sometimes it’s something much bigger.
At the same time, firms now have far more powerful tools: data, experimentation, digital choice architecture, so when behavioural science is applied at scale, it can have a huge impact.
Looking ahead, AI is likely to change how people make decisions. For example, if people start buying products through tools like ChatGPT, the behavioural problems are still there but the context changes.
I think we’ll still need behavioural science to understand how markets work and whether firms are competing in ways that lead to good outcomes, but some of the more mechanical parts of the work may be automated. Hopefully, we’ll also have a much stronger evidence base on what actually works.
What advice would you give to young behavioural scientists?
I think having a strong foundation in something like economics is really helpful; it gives you a structured way of thinking about markets and competition.
Whether you do behavioural science first and add that on, or the other way around, probably matters less than having that broader foundation.
That said, there are great behavioural scientists from lots of different backgrounds, so diversity of thinking is valuable. The key is having some kind of “home base” and then applying behavioural insights within that context.
What skills are needed to be a behavioural scientist?
This might sound a bit like a cliché, but I think the key skill is taking the essence of an academic insight and applying it to the real world. So taking something from a paper and translating it into a real customer journey or communication. By the time you’ve done that, it barely looks academic anymore, but that’s the value.
In practice, that means being quite applied and also quite well-rounded. You need to understand data, behaviour, and the commercial context, and be able to work with different specialists. You don’t need to be the best at everything, but you need to know enough to bring it all together.
What are your biggest frustrations with behavioural science?
I do roll my eyes a bit when I see new biases being named. A lot of them are just variations of existing ideas in very specific contexts, and I think that can actually be damaging. People latch onto these labels, and then when they realise it’s not that meaningful, they lose trust in the field.
Related to that, I find the word “bias” itself a bit frustrating. It feels quite judgmental. A lot of what we call biases are actually very reasonable ways for people to make decisions in everyday life. So I’d rather we focused less on labelling things as biases and more on understanding what drives behaviour, and how to help people make better decisions in context
If you weren’t a behavioural scientist, what would you be doing?
I’d probably still be an economist, just not a behavioural one. So likely something in applied economic consultancy, but without the behavioural angle, and probably not where I am now!
How do you apply behavioural science in your personal life?
It’s hard not to see financial decisions through a behavioural lens, so I often catch myself making decisions and then reflecting on them; why did I do that? What’s driving it?
I use commitment devices quite a lot in my work and on myself, but in my personal life I probably switch off a bit more. I don’t try to apply it everywhere. There are parts of life where I’d rather not bring that lens in.
Which other behavioural scientists would you love to read an interview by?
I’d love to read an interview with Harry Brignull, who coined the phrases ‘dark patterns’ and ‘deceptive patterns’ to describe how our choices can be manipulated by those who design the choice architecture. His book is fascinating – and he is great to follow on social media.
Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions Tim!
As I said before, this interview is part of a larger series which can also be found here on the blog. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss any of those, nor any of the upcoming interviews!