Many successful behavioural policies are noteworthy for the impact they achieve with seemingly simple interventions. But complex behaviours and policy ecosystems require behavioural science practitioners to adapt their approaches. Here, Matthew Davies and Simon Ruda outline lessons in applying behavioural insights to crime reduction building on their recently published paper in Behavioural Public Policy.
A potentially valuable feature of AI applied in the legal field is identifying insightful patterns of how specific courts and judges operate that elude human cognition. However, we should never forget that the relationship between humans and algorithms is always reflexive, and we can easily corrupt our quantitative-based prediction algorithms with biases.
The world is becoming increasingly polarized, as is seen through evidence of “us” versus “them” mindsets. Divisions have evolved into partisanship across groups, highlighting the need to understand how we differ culturally and across groups, why we are becoming more polarized, and how we can begin to reduce the impact of these divides. Cross-cultural and other models provide insight into how individuals differ across groups, and how we can reconnect with those around us.
Mis- and disinformation about the U.S. electoral process has caused massive disruptions in voting behavior and reduced trust in American democracy. There have been a handful of attempts to combat the deleterious effects of misinformation on the public. Recent research suggests that online games, which teach players about strategies used by mis- and disinformation spreaders through a method called attitude inoculation, can help build resistance against manipulative news content.
Dark patterns, the “sludges” of the digital world, aim to distort consumers’ decision-making process. Dark patterns powered by machine learning represent an even higher threat, in that they don’t just trick users to do something, but alter human behavior in a durable, undetectable, and indefensible way. This article examines the main issues linked to machine learning powered dark patterns and seeks to outline possible solutions.
A majority of commuters in the US choose to drive alone. We aimed to understand the influence of monetary incentives and anchoring on the transportation choices of residents in Los Angeles, California. Our key results included willingness to accept values averaging around $7, a difference in acceptance rates between anchoring treatment groups, and a significant change in acceptance rates when shown double-digit compared to single-digit values. This presents an opportunity for transit-based companies to invest in monetary incentive schemes to boost sustainable mode use.
Trust in government and election confidence rates have continued to decline in the US. Research indicates that employing operational transparency could be a potential solution. Using these insights, we tested how transparency prompts impact trust in the mail-in voting election process. Higher-level transparency regarding the mail-in voting process was most effective and can be easily scaled by election administration to build trust in these processes.
In behavioural science, context is everything. Behavioural Science Aotearoa (BSA) works across the justice sector in New Zealand, where indigenous Māori people make up almost 17% of the population. We combined behavioural science with Māori cultural principles to encourage people to clear their Warrants to Arrest by voluntarily appearing at court. Working with New Zealand Police, we designed and tested a phone-based initiative and found promising evidence for its success.
Governments around the world proclaim their interest in evidence-based policymaking. However, before evidence can affect policies, it needs to be used by human decision-makers. New research shows that politicians, like their voters, are subject to psychological biases, leading them to misinterpret policy information if it challenges their existing attitudes and beliefs. Moreover, they are more resistant to efforts to reduce those biases, and more likely to double down on their political beliefs even when at odds with the evidence at hand.
Minor acts of dishonesty that range from cheating on one’s taxes to petty institutional corruption are very prevalent in everyday life social settings. How others behave in these settings or what they believe is the proper course of action may lead to minor or major acts of dishonesty. Our research finds that exposure to increased peer cheating promoted major dishonesty, while the presence of rule reminders reduced minor acts of dishonesty without influencing major dishonesty.
