Real Money, Real Experts

Understanding Human Behavior with Jonathan Walker

• AFCPE® • Season 4 • Episode 14

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Today’s guest, Jonathan Walker, has spent much of his career studying American households - to better understand human behavior and figure out how to create environments where people can succeed and thrive. Jonathan is a practitioner who understands the value of research and how these findings can be translated into practice. 

In this episode, Jonathan shares the three big components to how people function in their finances - numbers, behavior, and values. We discuss the importance of providing information that isn’t anchored in bias or judgment, and explore how values play a critical role in our financial lives.

Show Notes:
2:27 Into Jonathan's background
4:34 The industries he comes from
7:04 Importance of listening & sharing
10:40 Advice for fellow practitioners
17:28 Into Jonathan's tool for helping people identify their financial values
22:29 Tools available to practitioners working with clients
23:59 Why academia must inform practice
28:23 The need for his book
30:31 More about The Yukon Project
32:56 Jonathan's final 2 cents

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Speaker 1:

Today's episode is brought to you by Beyond Finance. Beyond Finance is on a mission to help everyday Americans escape the endless cycle of crippling debt and step into a brighter future through compassionate individualized care. They work with clients who have unsustainable debt levels, negotiating with their creditors to reduce their balances to reasonable amounts so that they can reset the relationship with the financial system. The Beyond Finance team is hiring accredited financial counselors to provide clients with one-on-one virtual financial counseling sessions in the areas of budgeting, credit building, and creating a values driven action plan. Positions are remote, offer flexible schedules and require an afc. You'll also receive training unique to areas of debt resolution and financial therapy. If you want to learn more, visit career center dot afc p.org or find the direct link in our show notes. Welcome to Real Money Real Experts, a podcast where leading financial counseling and coaching experts share their stories, their challenges, and their advice for helping people manage money and the real world . I'm your host, Rachel Deleon, executive director of the Association for Financial Counseling and Planning Education for A F C P E.

Speaker 2:

And I'm your co-host, Dr. Mary Bell Carlson , an accredited financial counselor, or a ffc , and the president of Financial Behavior Keynote Group. Every episode we're taking a deep dive in the topics that personal finance professionals care about, helping clients, building community, and your professional growth.

Speaker 1:

Today we are excited to welcome Jonathan Walker to the show. Much of Jonathan's career has focused on customer experience strategy for financial services and retail companies. He was the founding executive director of the Center for the New middle class where he studied the financial lives of America's middle class . In that role, he was able to interview hundreds of people on their personal finances and gathered tens of thousands of survey data responses. Today Jonathan is the managing consultant for the Financial Behavior Keynote group, and he is in the process of building a new kind of personal finance community called the Yukon Project, which helps people realize their financial potential. Welcome to the show, Jonathan.

Speaker 3:

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

Speaker 2:

Now, Jonathan , we have to back up. You and I first met a couple of years ago now at FinCon , and I remember we were just kind of chatting and got to talking and realized, and I will continue to say this to this day, I was like, you don't have a PhD. You should be the PhD between the two of us. Because you have done so much in this field in terms of research and data gathering, but you actually come from a really interesting background. Would you share that background with us?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, you know, it's interesting you say that cuz I, I think of myself as a practitioner and as a practitioner I've kind of had a slightly different focus than like trying to publish and whatnot. And so it's, it's one of those situations where I have deep respect for those who are in academia and the rigors at which people, you know, research and understand. My parents were both academics and, and so I, I kind of have infused a lot of that, but, but my personal career has really been in how do we get the rubber to hit the road when it comes to people's behavior and what's really going on in their lives? And trying to answer the questions in such a way that we can create environments where people can succeed and thrive. And probably the most relevant experience in my background has been in market research where I did some market research for two or three different industries. I cut my teeth in the retail industry and has done deep , uh, market research in the financial services sector. And, and part of that has been my working with a , uh, a lender and my experience with the Center for the New middle class , which has allowed me to just spend an enormous amount of time really thinking about what's going on in America's , uh, households when it comes to finances.

Speaker 2:

That's what I think is so interesting about your background too, is one, you're in a very different world, a much larger umbrella, should I say, in terms of you've been in the banking industries and credit industries, which is quite large, so it's different than a lot of what we are seeing as a financial coach, counselor planner. But also you have this really unique niche of where you've talked to people directly about their money on stage in a very live audience way. So tell us more about one, the industries that you come from, but also what you've done in terms of having these discussions about money.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so that's what what's really interesting is a culture. We are so hesitant to talk about our own finances that, you know, we, we explored the different ways that you start a conversation with someone and how do you build that trust in a conversation so that they know that you won't be judgmental , that you're li there to learn and listen, that you're there to accept them for who they are. And you know, we, we did a lot of kind of focus groups and one-on-one discussions, and we started to understand that, you know, if you're really curious and you're really interested in people's experience and you're genuinely not judgmental about the decisions that they make, you can get people to talk pretty candidly about their finances. And once we started to realize that we, we had the hubris that we thought, well, maybe we're even able to get people to speak about their finances in front of other people. And a couple of times we recruited people to speak about their finances and we put them in on stage in front of three or 400 people. And we've done about a half a dozen events like that where we could explore people's finances and ask them follow up questions and even let the audience ask questions. And it becomes this powerful experience for people who are in financial services because they're used to seeing raw data about people's finances, but they're, they're not very, it's not very common for most financial services people to really sit down and without any obligation to solve any problems, to just really listen to people's experience.

Speaker 1:

You talk about the importance of listening, and I'm curious on the flip side, do you also feel like there's an importance in sharing? So when you're talking to those people, how do you build that trust in a way that makes them feel safe to share?

Speaker 3:

That's a really good question because one of the challenges to sharing is that in embedded in every one of our behavior towards money is the values that we hold. And one of the challenges to sharing is that you are sharing your values and too often people feel judged if there are values that come in, conflict, conflict with each other in terms of finances. And so one of the things that I did was I would share, but not in a very personal way, I would say things like, you know, if if I wanted to know how people manage a crisis, a financial crisis in their life, I would ask a question like, Hey, things come up in people's finances all the time and they happen to all of us. And when that kind of thing happens, how do you deal with the situation? Can you think of the last time you had a financial crisis? Can you describe that experience to me ? And so by framing the question as clearly, they're not unusual in experiencing some of those things. And yet I didn't share with them what my financial crisis was or how I managed it because I didn't want to anchor their exp experiences based on trying to satisfy or mirror back my, my values. I wanted them to be able to express their values without judgment and openly.

Speaker 1:

That's really interesting. And I think by framing it in that way, you opened it up to let them know they weren't alone in that, which gave them the space to be more vulnerable.

Speaker 3:

There are things that you can share. I would often share specific instances about, you know, my family life, that I've got four boys and you know, where I live. And, and that kind of gives them a sense that I am willing to be open with them, but I'm also, as a researcher, very careful not to bias the direction of the conversation

Speaker 2:

That's really good for people to hear is you're not alone. So many of us sit live in this, I call it the Instagram world where we see everyone else is perfect and we're the oddity, right ? That we don't have the perfect light , but everyone else around us does .

Speaker 3:

And that's one of the things that the Center for the New Middle class gave me visibility to that was truly eyeopening. We, we ran a , uh, what we called a tracker study where we were taking a snapshot of non-prime people with, with no, you know, non-prime credit and those with prime credit. And we were taking a snapshot of them every single month for five years. And what that allowed us to see is just how much and how common certain financial challenges and stressors are across the board in, in, in America. And, and knowing that also helped me to be able to empathize with people because I knew when I had someone sitting in front of me, they were often part of a majority or a plurality and, and not necessarily, you know, an exception to the rule even in their financial challenges.

Speaker 2:

Jonathan, I wanna dig into your work as the executive director for the Center for the New Middle class . You had mentioned it a bit that you've got, you've had some data and some studies, so we have both researchers and practitioners that often listen to this podcast. So dig into this research a little bit, if you may, and tell us what our listeners can, might be able to learn to apply the , the work they're doing with their own clients.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so when we launched the Center for the New Middle class , our mission was to really start to understand what's going on in American households. And so for the first year or two we did studies that were delving into ethnicity or gender or age generational cohort. And, and we'd try to understand that. And then we started to branch off into things like situational, how do people engage , uh, in their finances during the holiday season and what are the pitfalls and that sort of thing. And then we started to realize that there's some true value in understanding the longitudinal nature of what's going on in America's, you know, households. And we, you know, full disclosure, we truly believed we were headed for a recession at some point because, you know, at that point we had been in the longest period of growth in the United States history without a recession. And we figured we needed to get a baseline before we started to see what would happen during a recession. And so we started this tracker study, which tracked more than 50 different measures of household finances. And it was different because we were tracking how household finances not just individual finances. Uh , and we tracked the studies over time so that when the pandemic hit man, things moved so quickly we quadrupled the number of surveys that we were gathering during 2020 so that we could see how quickly things were changing. But to your point about how do we, how do we measure that? One of the things that I was really careful about in measuring a lot of these metrics was to implement, again, this, this sense of, of no judgment. And that meant we had to structure the questions themselves in such a way that people would not feel shame selecting an answer. And that often meant being very specific about how we framed questions, because too often embedded in our sense of financial , uh, culture is the sense of anytime you take on debt, there's this shame related to it. And if we wanted to get honest responses, we had to make sure that the questions themselves didn't have any , uh, biases built into them.

Speaker 2:

You know, that's the hard part of being a researcher is figuring out how to not bias the question. And I think that as a researcher, many can appreciate that. Now let's switch over to the practitioner side. And I would love to hear, okay, so you have amazing amounts of data that you have collected throughout the pandemic, which is unique. Talk to me as a practitioner, how can that help me understand what people went through during the pandemic and how I should see this looking forward

Speaker 3:

As a practitioner, one of the things that, that we really focused on was how do we take the data that we're looking at and how do we translate that into customer experiences that would help , uh, our clients or our customers , uh, succeed in their finances and to, to thrive? And so some of the things that we would have to do is we would have to leverage, and I'm sure we'll talk about this a little bit more a little bit later, but this idea of behavioral science, knowing that there are really three big components to how people function in their finances, right? And the first one is just the hard science of finances, right? And that means everything from what is an A P R , how do you invest your money, what's the most effective way to do it? And and that's what financial advisors are so adept knowing because that's something that they've spent thousands of hours gaining that expertise. And that's really important, but it's only one of three of the components , uh, that are necessary for people to be able to succeed in their finances. The second one is this behavior sense. The , you know, we, we started to learn in the middle of the 20th century that human beings were not calculators on legs. That they weren't really adept at understanding how to calculate their best interest on every single calculation, and that they would often make mistakes , uh, that weren't often in their best interest. And they started to understand what was causing that the way we think. And if we don't understand how we think, we structure our decisions in such a way that we're gonna perpetually make mistakes. And then of course the third component of that is the values that people have. What things do we value in our lives? And if you don't take into account all three of those aspects, then you're gonna miss in terms of understanding how to get people to make good financial decisions.

Speaker 2:

And I guess therein lies the difference between finance and personal finance, right? Is that human aspect of it.

Speaker 3:

Oh yeah. And people are so messy and glorious at the same time. I think it's interesting that we are liable to fall into the trap of thinking that that humanness is a mistake, is somehow something we have to overcome. And if only we could be more like a computer and making our decisions, we would succeed. The problem with that is that actually is not really the way we should approach finances. Finances aren't a math equation that needs to be solved. Finances are an expression of who we are as human beings, and if we wanna succeed with our finances, they really ought to be an expression of who we are and what we value in life.

Speaker 1:

Jonathan, you help design and implement a tool that helps people identify their financial values and tailor's advice to meet them where they are instead of where we or they think they should be. Tell us a little more about this resource.

Speaker 3:

This was stemming from a lot of the things that we've been talking about. And after having talked with so many people, I started to realize that too many well-meaning financial advisors, both in popular culture and specific, you know, one-on-one advisors don't even realize that what they're doing is imposing their value system about money on the people that they are speaking to. And if those values align with the recipient of the advice, success happens almost immediately. They resonate, everything's going great, there's harmony between the advisor and the recipient, and the person almost certainly succeeds. The problem is when the recipient of the advice has different values and they don't even realize that they have different values. And so when they can't implement the advice given to them, they often blame themselves and they walk off thinking, well, I'm just not good with money. I can't tell you how many times I talked with people who said I'm just not good with money. And I realized that the problem wasn't that they were bad with money because they were absolutely engaged with their money on a day-to-day basis that exceeded even the way I deal with my money. So they clearly managed their money. The problem was what they valued was different. And so one of the things that we wanted to do was figure out how we could uncover those values and what that would mean to people. What kind of advice would we give them differently if we understood better their values? So we created research instrument survey where we would be able to ask people a list of value questions, both specific to finances and just general values in, in , in other aspects of their life. And we asked 40 or 50 or 60 of these statements and asked to what degree they agree or disagree with each statement. And then we used multivariate statistical analysis to identify how these values pooled together. And we were able to identify what I called orientations , uh, and, and I called them orientations because you could score high on more than one orientation. It wasn't just, you know, a a it wasn't just a matter of whether you were up or down on each one. And based on this information we part of the survey, we also asked things about how they do their finances and how they're successful with their finances. And what that allowed us to do is to see where the pitfalls are for different values and then we could tailor advice to people based on their values and what they wanted to accomplish. And if you , if you'd like, I can give you just a couple of examples of, of some of the orientations that we would find. Like one of them, one of them was we called an internal orientation and those were people who understood intuitively or felt intuitively they had to prioritize their own needs, that they needed to understand kind of that they were taken care of and that was important to them. And that was not at the expense of what we called outward orientation or something that made people realize that, or, or feel that their central purpose in life was to serve others or being involved with other people was in important to their , uh, life. And it gave them meaning. And you could have an internal orientation as well as an outward orientation. It just meant that you had goals and values and you created meaning in different ways and you created financial peace in in certain ways. And that's a great example of how we realize that if you have an internal orientation, it's really important for your wellbeing to be able to take care of yourself and know that you were, you were in a situation where you were stable, but that didn't mean that that's where you designed your, doesn't mean that's where you found your, your meaning in life. Your meaning in life could come from serving others, which means that it was important for us to understand that your finances was an expression of your service of others and not just an expression of your own self-worth.

Speaker 1:

Jonathan , is this a resource or a tool that's available to practitioners who are working with clients?

Speaker 3:

So right now you can access the tool on elevate.com and it's, the tool is called Money Mindfulness. And I no longer am am connected with Elevate as a company, so I'm not plugging anything per se, but what it allows you to do , someone can go on and answer 10 simple questions. And the reason we were able to narrow it to 10 questions is because we had all that data behind the questions. And so we knew that if you answer this particular question a certain way, you were likely to answer seven or eight other questions in a similar way. And once you get all that, it spits out report that gives you an idea of what your values are and some potential advice that that we would give you. And what was really interesting about that tool is it doesn't, it's not like a Buzzfeed article, which Muppet are you, right? It's actually far more complicated than that because the chances of two people , uh, answering all the questions the same are one in 46,000. And so every report is likely to be very different and distinct for people because we knew it was important that they understood that we were identifying their specific values and not putting them in a bucket.

Speaker 2:

You know, Jonathan, you'd walk an interesting line because you've got both academic background, but you've also got practice background and I've heard a lot of that come out in our discussion today. So I wanna ask maybe a , a couple part question here, but first off, why does academia need to inform practice but also practice need to inform academia? How do these two worlds, can they work better together?

Speaker 3:

That's a great question. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> , and I think it is a legitimate question. I personally, as a practitioner have studied a lot of academic papers and I know that's somewhat unusual for my circumstance, but I recognized especially on something like this, this goals and values study that I did. I didn't just make this stuff up or, and I didn't also just invent it based on the conversations I'd had in the past. I studied all sorts of different academic research about values both in finances and outside of finances. And then I weighed that against my experience with other people that I've heard talk and their values. And so from a practitioner standpoint, what I think is so valuable is having the humility of looking at those academic papers and just giving those, letting them give you ideas for the right way to do things or how to do things in such a way results can be replicatable On the academic side, because I'm not really an academic, I can only guess, but one of the things that to me is so important for an academic to recognize is the value of actually being in the trenches. And I think too often academics kind of dismiss a practitioner because a practitioner is almost always has an agenda, right? They're either trying to sell financial services or they're trying to push a brand or whatnot. But the value to an academic, at least seeing what a practitioner does is that a practitioner actually lives or breathes based on whether or not they're successful in implementing an idea with a consumer. Um, and it's not good enough for us to just publish a paper and, you know, walk away from, from a piece of research. We as practitioners really do value that, hey, this idea is causing people to change their behavior. And let me give you a really simple example. At one point when I was working at Elevate, one of my responsibilities was to develop a strategic customer communication , uh, program. And one of the things that we wanted to do was in our welcome journey with a customer or with our our normal communications, could we use what we've learned from academia to help people do things like make extra payments on loans, pay off early, be on time more regularly. And what we found was we actually could, and it meant that we were starting to take some of the advice and some of the insights that we were learning from academia and we're actually putting it into practice. And if academics could see the kinds of things that we were doing and look at it and say, well that's interesting because what we would do is we would take an idea and we would implement it and then we'd find that didn't quite work the way we thought. And so we would tweak it and we'd implement it again and we'd find that we'd get a much better response. And they were both based on the same academic insight, but one ended up being successful and one wasn't. And I would think academics would love to see that and say, oh, I wonder why that one triggered something. And it would lead to new insights or new areas of research. We

Speaker 2:

Both came together I more as an academic background and you as the practitioner background recently came together and wrote a book. I will give you full credit for the title of the book, which I think you need to share and then credit

Speaker 3:

Or blame, right, right credit or

Speaker 2:

Was pretty bland when from the academic side. But tell us why did you feel like this was an important to write and how do you talk each other's language, I guess is what I'm getting at?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so the book is called Anchors Ostriches and a Hot Pair of Scissors Navigating Human Behavior as as a financial professional. And I have deep respect for financial professionals understanding of the hard sciences of finances, a really deep respect and, and I feel like they are absolutely crucial to people being successful with their finances. One of the things that is often not really talked about is that human side of things and the really good financial advisors and financial professionals have an intuitive sense that people behave certain ways and how do you engage with that and have this sense that they can kind of resonate with people in, in a way that they can make sure to tailor their advice so that people are successful, but that doesn't mean that they intellectually understand what's often going on. And the, the field of behavioral psychology just exploded since the 1950s and there is just deep understanding about how people make decisions and those decisions are really, really focused in the world of fi personal finance. And so Mary, you and I when we were talking about this, we understood how valuable would it be to just give people kind of the first primer on what is behavioral psychology and how does it impact people and what kinds of pitfalls does it create in how people react with their finances that a financial professional could look at and recognize and have a couple of ideas for how to avoid those pitfalls so that their clients are making better and stronger financial decisions.

Speaker 1:

Jonathan, at A F C P E , we believe in the power of a strong and connected community and you're in the process of building a new kind of financial hub for consumers called the Yukon Project. Can you tell us a little more , can you tell us a little bit more about this?

Speaker 3:

We're really early on, but one of the things that we wanted to do was create a community where consumers can engage with financial in information, advice, insights in a non-judgmental way. And it stems from what I've experienced so often in my career where people are well-meaning about the financial advice they give them. But embedded in that financial advice is this sense of judgment in terms of if you don't do X, then you're clearly a failure and this is the only way to do things. And one of the things that we want to do differently is how do we provide information in such a way that it is not anchored in in biases of value, but rather helps to forefront that idea of value so that we can help people recognize even if they're not a aware that this is what's going on, that they have a value to bring to the decisions they make. And what that means is we will never kind of criticize people for the decisions that they make, but rather just help them understand the consequences of the decisions, why they might be making the kinds of decisions they're making and what other decisions might align with the values and the behavior that they have that could help them be successful. And so right now it's all about creating a way in which people can engage with a lot of the financial advice and information that is kind of insider information, but in such a way that empowers them. And it goes, kind of goes back to what Mary and I did with with the book, it's understanding that you're likely to make decision based on something like an anchoring bias. And if we can help forefront that idea that you anchor your decisions, then it kind of neutralizes that bias and helps you make a better decision. At

Speaker 2:

The end of each interview, we like to ask our guests to share their 2 cents. If you had one piece of advice to Lee with our listeners, what would it be?

Speaker 3:

My 2 cents is that personal finances are human endeavor and that means that it's filled with beauty and messiness and it's filled with values and the hopes of people that engage with it. And instead of lamenting this idea that human humans make a mess of their finances, I prefer to look at it in a way that says that personal finances are an expression of who we are as human beings. And to help people achieve their best financial selves is by extension, helping them achieve their best selves, achieve their goals and their hopes, and to live a better life. And to do that means embracing their humanity and not lamenting the fact that it causes problems.

Speaker 1:

Jonathan, thanks so much for coming on the show today. Can you tell listeners where they can connect with you?

Speaker 3:

You can reach me through my website@jonathanatwalker.com and you can also reach me through the financial behavior keynote group if you're interested in, in consulting related to financial behavior and evidence-based financial personal finance con consultation. But it's been a real pleasure to chat with you. This is something that as you probably can tell, I have great passion for and you know, if you, you gave me the right platform, I could probably talk forever <laugh>.

Speaker 2:

Well, we could listen forever. I love it. Love the dialogue and appreciate you coming on. Thanks for being on the show today.

Speaker 3:

Thanks Rachel. Thanks Mary.

Speaker 1:

Mary, it was so great having Jonathan on the show today. I really loved the question you asked about bridging the research and the prac into practice and you know, as you told Jonathan at the beginning, you know, he identifies as a practitioner, but he really has a research lens and I really resonated with the story . He story he told about taking the research and applying it to practice but then continuing to hone it. And I think too often we don't close the loop on that and there is so much value in in doing that. And that's something, you know, at A F C P E that we're really working on in terms of like we have this immense community of research and practice and how do we ensure that those can work together? Because just listening to Jonathan today, you can really see the value in a lot of that and how it can be applied into practice.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's one of the things that I resonated with so much when I first met Jonathan was just his ability to talk both worlds, right? And easily can speak academic speak, but it's very much can be translated to practice. And that's, that's so unique. I also take my hat off honestly to A F C P E because there are a lot of times that we stay in our own camps, academics go to their conferences, practitioners go to theirs, we talk to each other and we kind of resonate in our own fields. But this ability to connect with each other and not shove it down one person's throat or vice versa say, oh well you have to become an academic or you have to become a practitioner. But really just communication back and forth and having open dialogue with each other is so vital. Not just enhancing practice or enhancing research, it's actually a vital to the profession. So it sets a really good background if you have both academia and practice working together to improve the entire profession. It's kind of that concept of rising tides rise all boats. And that's absolutely this in this case. And I just think Jonathan is a very interesting person to talk with, given that he can speak both of those languages and it's great to have him on the show. We included all of the show notes, there were several mentions that he said today. And so we included all of those for further research in our show note links and where you can reach out to Jonathan for more information.

Speaker 1:

This idea of not imposing your own value system, I feel like as practitioners, that is the hardest thing to navigate because sometimes a lot of that is like, you don't even know you're doing it until you've done it. You think you're being authentic, but yet, depending on how it resonates or how it's taken. So I'm curious to if that, if your book goes

Speaker 2:

Into that . No, not this. Yeah , that's actually our next book. We both have talked a lot about it. In fact, as I was sitting there I was like, oh yeah, like my idea is the seven habits of financial, right? Like so bringing the seven habits or of what the five love languages to the finance side, because that's essentially what they did is boil it down, boil down research to make it very practical for people to implement. But ours is really gonna be based upon values and human belief systems and how your system may not resonate with your clients. But sometimes how we trample over the clients and dominate that conversation, it's a much deeper and longer book. <laugh>, the current book is the current book's all behavioral finance. So it literally breaks down the cognitive biases and says, here's how to apply 'em . Which it's a hot thing. I mean it's important, it's interesting. I think a lot of people are like really fascinated with it, but at the end of the day it's, it really is about humans and values and beliefs because that's what makes us human, right? Computers don't have values or beliefs unless we code it into 'em .

Speaker 1:

<laugh>. Absolutely. And for all of you who are listening, leave us a rating and review if you wanna be on the show. You know, our guest form is on our website, so fill that out. And we have lots of great episodes ahead this season. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time.