About behavioural insights
Behavioural insights applies findings from the behavioural sciences – for example behavioural economics and experimental psychology – to public policy. Behavioural sciences seek to understand how people make decisions in practice; how their behaviour is influenced by context in which their decisions are made and how they are likely to respond to certain options. These insights enable you to design policies or interventions that can encourage, support and enable people to make better choices for themselves and society.
Behavioural insights in government
The UK government is at the forefront of behaviourally-informed policy, setting up the world’s first government behavioural insights team (BIT) within the Cabinet Office in 2010. BIT has since worked with many government departments in the UK, overseas governments and international non-governmental organisations such as the World Bank and the United Nations and helped to establish BIT teams across the world.
Best practice examples
Behavioural insights interventions are usually simple, highly cost-effective, and often yield surprising results. Civil servants have successfully used them in the following ways.
Home energy improvement
A generous government subsidy did not seem to be resulting in much uptake of loft insulation among homeowners. BIT research suggested the effort required to clear out their loft was discouraging people – a good example of a ‘friction cost’ or ‘hassle factor’. BIT offered a loft-clearing service (which customers had to pay for), greatly increasing the number of people taking up the subsidy.
Increasing tax payments
BIT worked with HMRC to tackle late payments for self-declared income tax. They made one small change to HMRC’s standard letter: including the sentence “9 out of 10 people have already paid their tax”. Highlighting the normative behaviour significantly increased prompt tax payments bringing forward £200 million in revenue. More specific norms (such as “9 people in your area with a debt like yours have paid their tax on time” were more effective than generic norms.
Encouraging people to become organ donors
Millions of people renew their tax disc on the DVLA website every year. BIT thought this would be a good opportunity to prompt people to join the organ donor register.
BIT trialled 8 different messages, based on various behavioural insights, including a call to action, emotional messaging (“3 people die each day because there are not enough organ donors”) and social norms (“Every day thousands who see this page decide to register”).
A message based upon reciprocity worked best (“If you needed an organ transplant would you have one? If so please help others”), adding 100,000 donors to the register in 1 year.
Read more case studies from BIT.
Start using behavioural insights
BIT has produced 2 reports to help you draw on the increasingly rich findings from the behavioural sciences: MINDSPACE and EAST. These provide simple frameworks to help policy makers apply behavioural insights.
Try it out in 5 minutes:
- read the EAST framework and discuss with your team whether it could help you solve some of your policy problems
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