Riyang Phang, PhD
Ex-Lead Behavioral Science Adviser for Union Bank of the Philippines and the Ex-Head of Behavioral Science at Aboitiz Data Innovation, Riyang is both GAABS (Behavioral Science) and SIOP (Organizational Psychology) registered with experience in leading end-to-end projects for the power distribution and financial sectors. He is multidisciplinary and believes in bridging the boundaries of academia and industry.
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His research domain covers organizational psychology (work motivation, leadership substitutes, customer and goal orientation, equity, workplace power and conflict), creativity and well-being, political psychology, social psychology, and complex systems. He uses both computer simulation, natural language processing, and survey methodologies, amongst other social science inference techniques.
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He has designed and led end-to-end projects to uncover household demographic and payer psychographic characteristics in Cebu, graduate and employee studies in Central Asia and Eastern Europe, designed interventions to nudge early bill payments, and provided advisory on program evaluation, loan product design, customer segmentation, and campaign to drive e-commerce platform usage.
Approach
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Three Principles underlie the approach to Behavioral Science industry engagements.
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Evidence-based. Use the (1) best available scientific insights, (2) information about the target population and problem, and (3) insights from key stakeholders (Satterfield et al., 2009). This means decisions and advisories are not solely reliant on the intuition and experience of "experts", but they must also incorporate a relevant scientific base and valid data/information about the issue at hand.
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Rigorous and Broad Definition of Behavioral Science. Modern day behavioral science as a professional advisory tends to focus on behavioral economics, nudges, biases, and social norms. This perspective is myopic and interventions based on nudges were shown to be limited or short-lived (Polman & Maglio, 2024; Szaszi et al., 2022). At Behavioral Factors, Behavioral Science is informed by the whole of behavioral sciences rather than just behavioral economics and psychology. Depending on the client issue and budget, our approach is to cast a broad net to cover relevant domains in the social (e.g., sociology, cultural psychology, evolutionary psychology, anthropology, communications, political science), computational and fundamental sciences (e.g., game theoretic and marketplace design) to ensure a holistic understanding of the problem and solution space. We focus on the "Science" to question assumptions and avoid stylized opinions. We evaluate claims and assess strength of evidence by asking the generalizability, mechanism of effect, measurement fidelity, and the equivalence of control to treatment group.
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Outcome and Contextual Focused. We work with the business problem and goal in mind, and form hypotheses using the mutually exclusive collectively exhaustive (MECE) principle to understand potential root causes and obtain contextual ground data to validate them. We assess the problem and context to select the potential solutions to be tested. We do not apply design or known behavioral effects as solution for a problem.