Selecting the right methodology for researching and exploring human behaviour can be a challenge. This article provides an overview of different applied behavioural science methodologies and offers some simple steps toward selecting the most suitable approach to gain insights into human behaviour.
Experiments (aka A/B tests) are the bread and butter of behavioral scientists. However, running experiments requires much more than knowing statistics, especially when you’re running “field” experiments and not purely digital ones. In this post, I’ll give you four recommendations to get your experiment right.
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 a massive international collaboration including more than 200 researchers, we examined the adoption of public health behaviors and support of public policy interventions during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. We found that individuals who identified more strongly with their nation reported greater engagement in public health behaviors and greater support for public health policies. This result was later replicated using aggregated behavioral data.
Do budgeting apps always improve consumers' financial decisions? Contrary to common beliefs, the use of budget apps can increase spending, especially at the end of the budget period. The authors of this article propose five interventions to mitigate the acceleration of spending and help FinTech apps better serve consumers' financial needs.
There is a growing concern that the academic literature, because of publication biases and other limitations of single-shot, lab-based studies, overstates the power of nudges in real life. We examined this issue in a 10-week RCT in 60 supermarkets comparing 4 front-of-pack simplified nutrition labels. The good news is that the ordering of the nutrition labels was the same as in published lab-based studies. The bad news is that our effect sizes were, on average, 17 times smaller than in the published literature.
With most of its attention captured by the global fervor around 'big data', the banking industry has failed to give behavioral science the attention it deserves. I argue that, considering today’s challenges to fully take advantage of big data, implementing insights from behavioral science is a more cost-effective approach to improve customer experience in banking.
By Nathan Maddix Can Nudging Overcome Physics Envy? As is now well-known, tremendous results have been found for nudges – behavioral interventions designed to facilitate choice for welfare-promoting outcomes. In my work over the last 5 years, I have sought not only to design and administer nudges, but also to understand how economists and [...]
By Benjamin Voyer Out of all the areas of public life that can benefit from the applications of behavioural economics (BE) principles, healthcare is probably the one where it can make the biggest societal contribution. There are two main reasons why the healthcare industry should welcome (more!) BE insights. The first reason is that many [...]
When it comes to behaviour, politics is never absent, argued Mike Kelly, at a UCL Centre for Behaviour Change seminar on policy and evidence.
