Behavioural science and policy: where are we now and where are we going?

Abstract

The use of behavioural sciences in government has expanded and matured in the last decade. Since the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) has been part of this movement, we sketch out the history of the team and the current state of behavioural public policy, recognising that other works have already told this story in detail. We then set out two clusters of issues that have emerged from our work at BIT. The first cluster concerns current challenges facing behavioural public policy: the long-term effects of interventions; repeated exposure effects; problems with proxy measures; spillovers and general equilibrium effects and unintended consequences; cultural variation; 'reverse impact'; and the replication crisis. The second cluster concerns opportunities: influencing the behaviour of government itself; scaling interventions; social diffusion; nudging organisations; and dealing with thorny problems. We conclude that the field will need to address these challenges and take these opportunities in order to realise the full potential of behavioural public policy.

Personalized nudging

“…Behavioural nudges have proven to be valuable tools for public policy-makers (Halpern, 2015;Sanders et al, 2018). However, nudges are often criticized for their one-size-fits-all approach (Carroll et al, 2009;Yeung, 2017;Peer et al, 2019).…”

Nudges for nudgers

“…Moreover, policy agendas and research programmes are created by people; no matter how benevolent or committed to "nudges for good" 4 , they are still subject to the same systematic cognitive barriers, biases and limits to rationality that nudges are meant to overcome in the first place. For instance, long-term studies of behavioural intervention policies are relatively rare because academic and political incentives discourage studies where the main outcome measure will only be reported far in the future 6 . This is consistent with the cognitive phenomenon known as delay discounting -the tendency to discount future rewards in favour of short-term gains.…”

Behavioural public policies and charitable giving

“…The latter seems more problematic than the former, even though we do end up in an equally good place. Sanders et al (2018) argue that behavioural public policy should take more of an interest in harnessing the power of social networks. The messenger effect plays an important role in social networks; that is, when trying to get others to adopt a certain behaviour, it matters very much who provides the information or offers the counsel.…”

“…For example, the Cabinet Office publication MINDSPACE (2010) describes cases in which high schools invite former studentsas opposed to professionalsto give talks discouraging teenage pregnancies and in which reformed ex-convicts are invited to mentor at-risk youth. Sanders et al (2018) cite two examples of experiments by the Behavioural Insights Team involving social networks in charitable giving. In an experiment in the London branch of Deutsche Bank, they found that personalised (rather than anonymous) messages from the CEO suggesting donations to particular charities were highly efficacious.…”