Behavioural science aims to help people make better, more rational, choices. But decision-making is not just above-the-neck cognitive processing; it also occurs within a specific, embodied human form who experiences the world in a physical way. In this blog post, Ruth Schmidt argues that approaching behavioural challenges from a purely cognitive angle can result in treating them as “brain in a jar” problems. This does not reflect the full reality of how embodiment informs our calculus of risk toward decision-making, our interpretation of what good options or outcomes look like, and our perceived agency and autonomy to choose freely. Instead, we should consider the various ways that embodiment impacts judgment, decision-making, and behaviour when devising and implementing behavioural interventions.
Taking an embodiment lens to behaviour
Recognising embodiment’s relation to decision-making and behaviour is not altogether new: phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty recognised that human experience is shaped by a lifetime of embodied choice-making; ‘embodied cognition’ theorises on how bodies channel physical interactions into cognitive processing; and Barbara Tversky has explored how our physical interaction with the world infuses our sensibilities. Behavioural science itself has explored personal embodiment as a factor in high-arousal states and how this may impact judgment and behavior.
However, these approaches often overlook how everyday activities of navigating and accumulating embodied experiences in a particular physical body over time inform real-world judgment and decision-making. This can lead to developing tactics that focus on removing cognitive and motivational barriers for going to the gym (for example, temptation bundling or monetary incentives) but may overlook equally important issues related to embodiment that interfere with good behaviours (such as concerns about body-shaming).
When this occurs, embodiment can impact agency and autonomy by feeding self-regulatory impulses that reduce an individual’s ability to act in their own self-interest. For example, when people feel they must continually defend themselves against perceived norms, or fear judgment due to their embodied state, they may be reluctant to participate in activities where that dynamic may be encountered. This results in a kind of paradox, where asserting agency by deliberately removing themselves from unwelcome spaces also potentially limits their ability to achieve personal well-being by reducing the full set of options available to others.
Behavioural challenges of embodiment
Embodiment’s impact on judgment and behaviour is complex and varied, ranging from minor inconveniences, to skewed perceptions of potential options, to self-regulatory impulses that severely curtail an individual’s sense of agency. These can include, for example:
Physiological: Many of us are familiar with everyday aspects of embodied behavior that present as visceral or ‘hot states’, such as when shopping on an empty stomach leads us to make poor choices. But other physiological issues directly related to embodiment — such as those caused by physical or emotional trauma — can have persistent and significant effects on judgment and behaviour.
Access: Reduced mobility, sensory issues, or the physical inability to access resources represent embodied characteristics that can limit participation. Sometimes physical limitations represent legitimate safety concerns (such as receiving a driver’s license if you are legally blind). In other cases — having chronic pain, being a nursing mother — physical attributes may keep people from engaging in certain activities even if they are not actively barred from them.
Fear of Judgment: Concerns about potential negative reactions to one’s embodiment can lead to risk aversion, which may in turn result in inaction, narrowing what options are seen as desirable, or even removing oneself from certain situations altogether. For example, studies have shown that obese women may forego routine preventive checkups such as mammograms and timely pelvic exams due to fears of bodily judgment, risking negative downstream health outcomes and revealing how seemingly ‘rational’ choices become more complicated when embodiment is factored in.
Archetype: In some cases, embodiment may impact the perception of available options more systematically due to deeply embedded but narrow notions of what constitutes ‘normal’ bodily standards. For example, healthcare diagnoses and treatments often position middle-aged white men as the standard of care, despite the fact that the presentation and progression of health conditions such as heart attacks often vary by gender, ethnicity, and age.
Mischaracterization: Embodiment can contribute to others’ mischaracterizations or biases when individual people’s embodied form differs from their expectations. For example, women in leadership positions may be required to repeatedly reassert their role as decision-makers, and Black doctors are far more likely to be questioned on their role and status compared to white individuals. While individual instances may seem relatively inconsequential, continually justifying one’s status or presence can reduce individuals’ desire to engage at all.
Avoidance: Sometimes the potential unpredictability or messy reality of living in an embodied form may be enough to impact decision-making that seems “irrational” from the outside. Cancer patients deciding to take chemotherapy may face genuine distress weighing obvious therapeutic benefits with the loss of one’s hair. And social standards of physical attractiveness that disproportionately impact women can force young women to weigh health versus appearance when conditions such as polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) or Type 1 diabetes require treatments known for weight gain.
Stigma: Bodies are important cultural signifiers, which can encourage people to adopt unhealthy behaviors to achieve culturally idealized norms (e.g., conforming to cultural preferences for thin body types by depriving oneself of food) or to hide embarrassing yet natural bodily activities for fear of stigma, as when girls disengage from everyday activities due to negative perceptions of menstruation.
One way to characterise these behavioural implications of embodiment consists of situating how various kinds of dynamics and contexts — individual, relational, systemic, or combinations thereof — may be at play (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Individual, relational, and systemic aspects of behavioural embodiment
Source: Schmidt (forthcoming)
For example, where instances of physiology and avoidance are primarily individually oriented, access and stigma are often both individual and systemic given how individual decision-making is influenced by physical or socio-cultural systems. In contrast, mischaracterization often occurs relationally between an embodied individual and the person judging them, while archetype and judgment examples channel systemic or societal-level assumptions through interpersonal interactions, placing them at the intersection of all three.
Implications for practice
Behavioural public policy has a strong tradition of considering external contexts. Designing for embodiment may benefit from three additional lenses:
- Internal contextualisation: how might embodiment influence how different people perceive a situation or proposed intervention?
- System contextualisation: how do socio-cultural forces impact embodiment-related judgment and decision-making?
- Temporal contextualisation: how might someone’s history of embodied experiences impact their decision-making?
Internal contextualisation
Understanding what it is like to live in a particular body and its impact on judgment and decision-making may benefit from methods that augment behavioral science’s focus on behavior with approaches that surface how embodiment might interfere with seemingly desirable actions. For example, open-ended user research methods can help practitioners develop a broader understanding of what it is to be fully — not just cognitively — human can provide a better insight into the embodied aspects of health, self-image, and identity.
System contextualisation
Insights into the social and relational nature of behavior can help us identify how individuals harbor biases against others due to unfounded beliefs that discriminatory urges are broadly held, misguided perceptions about a population’s capabilities (like women being presumed to be poor leaders), or normative expectations that lead us to act according to others’ expectations. Inquiry into systems can help expose these dynamics, how they might manifest in particular contexts, and how systemic forces can contribute to judgment and decision-making.
Temporal contextualization
Examining how embodiment has historically impacted previous choices or (in)actions can contribute to more longitudinal and narratively rich form of insight. For example, in instances where an accumulation of small ‘taxes’ become cumulatively exhausting (such as Black doctors having to constantly correct others on their role or status), choosing to disengage may be prompted by the collective weight of many aggregated experiences rather than a singular one. Narrative design strategies can provide practitioners with more insight into how the past impacts present-tense decision-making and how to mitigate potential negative effects.
While cognition remains a primary concern and interest in behavioral public policy and other forms of behavioral design, humans are not just brains but full, embodied creatures. Critically examining how individuals’ lived and embodied experiences influence their perceived options, impact agency and autonomy, or in extreme situations may position participation as a non-starter altogether, can only help practitioners create better, more effective interventions.
Read more of Ruth’s research here. This blogpost draws on Ruth’s forthcoming work: “Exploring embodiment’s impact on autonomy and agency in behavioral design”. In Verhoven, A., Gray, C.M., Simeone, L. (eds.), Design Research Society (DRS2026), 1-14.
Ruth Schmidt is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Design (ID) at Illinois Tech, whose work and research sits at the intersection of behavioural science, humanity-centred design, and complex systems. Her work focuses on addressing private sector and public policy behavioral challenges more systematically and equitably through applied insights and conceptual models.