Professor Katherine White: this award-winning researcher focuses on “nudging” consumers to make sustainable choices

UBC Sauder Professor Katherine White’s field of study, decision science, intersects the fields of psychology, behavioural economics, and marketing, and explores why and how people make decisions. Behavioural insights (BI) refers to an approach that draws on decision science to “nudge” people to make better choices, both for themselves and for the world.

How did Professor White find her passion and go on to produce award-winning research at UBC Sauder? The answer lies in her early influences and her desire to leave a positive mark in the world, which is a value that resonates with her students today.

Finding her inspiration, and behavioural study as a career path

Professor White believes her passion for behavioural study was largely influenced by the work of her parents. Her father held a senior position at the Bank of Montreal and her mother was an artist. From them, she developed both an analytical and creative mindset.

In her youth, Professor White’s aspirations were actually far from the business world. In high school, she took cues from her mother, was interested in art and had plans to go to graphic design school. Being offered a small scholarship for a different program, however, pushed her to enroll in university, with art becoming something she did in her spare time.

After sampling a wide variety of university courses, the dynamic instructor of an introductory psychology course at Simon Fraser University stood out to her. The instructor, Dr. Gary Poole (who subsequently joined UBC’s Faculty of Medicine) studied social psychology and health behaviour change, something that resonated with Professor White: “The idea of helping people engage in healthy behaviours and helping cope better – those were things I was interested in, and I got very excited about his research.”

Professor White completed her undergrad with honours at SFU, and her masters in psychology at Waterloo. Life brought her back to the Vancouver area, and she began pursuing her doctorate in psychology at UBC.

It was at UBC that Professor White began considering how the business world and social psychology intertwined: the UBC Faculty of Commerce, as it was known at the time, had just hired a social psychologist in consumer behaviour.

“What I found was that what a lot of social psychologists were studying were measurements and evaluations of how people reacted to scenarios that were ‘bottled in a lab,’ which I found to be somewhat artificial,” says Professor White. “When I began to take these consumer behaviour classes at UBC, I started to realize that we can actually study real behaviours that have real consequences. This was exciting for me, because it’s harder to do: it’s easier to get someone to switch their attitude in a lab session for five minutes, but could you actually get people to change a meaningful behaviour, and monitor that change over time? It gave me a different lens, and a different understanding of the breadth of what we could study in this field.”

It was the study of these real-world behaviours that fascinated UBC Sauder BCom alum Brittany Wagner in the BI field, and led her to work closely with Professor White during her time at UBC Sauder. “Working with Professor White as a research assistant was the perfect opportunity to witness consumer choices first-hand,” says Wagner. “Her research projects gave me market research experience and allowed me to directly see what I was learning in my classes in real life. It was cool to observe the outcomes of certain studies and to see how the behaviours matched up with hypotheses.”