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Discover the fascinating and surprising world of behavioural insights. Find out how understanding the ways people really think and behave through behavioral science can help deliver a fairer society for us all. Brought to you by The Behavioural Insights Team, The Nudge Unit.
Episodes
Friday Apr 23, 2021
A decade of 'nudge' - in conversation with the pioneers (part 1 of 2)
Friday Apr 23, 2021
Friday Apr 23, 2021
Part 1 of a very special episode of Inside the Nudge Unit, recorded to tie in with the recent 10 year anniversary of the Behavioural Insights Team. Join our CEO, Professor David Halpern, with the founders and pioneers of behavioural economics, Professor Richard Thaler, Professor Cass Sunstein and Google’s head behavioural scientist Dr Maya Shankar, discussing how ‘nudge’ has evolved over the last decade and where the science of human behaviour is headed next.
Richard Thaler is the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the 2017 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to behavioural economics. He has been at the forefront of research into psychology of decision-making and economics for over two decades and is the co-author of the international best seller Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness in which the concepts of behavioural economics are applied to tackle many of society’s biggest problems.
As well as being co-author of the best-seller Nudge, Cass Sunstein is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School and Chair of the World Health Organization’s technical advisory group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health. From 2009 to 2012, he was Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and served on President Barack Obama’s Review Board on Intelligence and Communications Technologies and on the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Board.
Maya Shankar is Google’s Global Director of Behavioral Economics and joined Cass Sunstein as a Senior Advisor within the Obama White House administration where she founded and served as Chair of the White House's Behavioral Science Team — a team of scientists charged with improving public policy using research insights about human behavior. Maya completed a post-doctoral fellowship in cognitive neuroscience at Stanford after receiving a Ph.D. from Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship and a B.A. from Yale in cognitive science.
To learn more about BIT's first and next 10 years, go to www.bi.team/bit10. You can find every other episodes of Inside The Nudge Unit at www.bi.team/our-work/podcast-inside-the-nudge-unit and keep up to date with all our latest insights on Twitter @B_I_Tweets.
Further reading
Nudge is available to buy as paperback or e-book on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nudge-Improving-Decisions-Health-Happiness/dp/0141040017
Read more about Maya Shankar’s work on behavioural science at her website https://mayashankar.com/bio
Check out Richard Thaler’s Nobel Prize winning work here https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2017/thaler/biographical/
Credits
Editing by Andy Hetherington
Music by Rich O’Brien
Thursday Apr 22, 2021
You can't read your way out of a complex policy problem
Thursday Apr 22, 2021
Thursday Apr 22, 2021
The Behavioural Insights Team have spent the last 10 years developing solutions that are informed by behavioural science. These insights do not emerge overnight. Instead, they are grounded in a firm understanding of the systems in which we operate.
Reading academic (or policy) papers is an important step to developing evidence based interventions, but it will only get you so far if you want to understand the context in which you want to implement an intervention. Instead, we argue that you need to leave the office and try to experience the context as closely as you can, either by directly experiencing it, or by directly speaking to the people that do.
To try to convince you that you should step away from your desk, we’ve created a podcast which we think will give you a much better sense of why you can’t read your way out of a complex policy problem. In this podcast, Alex Gyani and Rory Gallagher from BIT’s Sydney office speak to Zoe Powell, Saul Wodak, Allison Wong, Edwina Crawford and Sophie Munro about their experiences of going out into the field and some of the insights they took from that process. We’ll describe projects that have tackled domestic violence, unemployment and the health and safety of gig economy workers. If you want to know more about those specific projects, just follow the links posted in this description.
We cover lots of projects in this podcast. This work has been designed with and funded by a wide range of organisations.
In particular, we would like to acknowledge and thank:
- The NSW Behavioural Insights Unit, the NSW Aboriginal Services Unit within the NSW Department of Justice (for the work on reducing domestic work in NSW)
- The NSW Government’s Centre for Work Health and Safety (for the work on Food Delivery Workers in NSW)
- The JobCentre Plus teams in Essex, UK (for the work on employment in the UK)
- And the Customer Experience and Design, and Trial Design Evaluation teams in the NZ Ministry for Social Development (for our ongoing partnership)
We apologise to anyone we have omitted and thank all our partners who have helped inform and evolve our Explore work.
Note: that this podcast describes the court processes involved in domestic violence cases. While no acts of violence are described in the podcast, if you are affected by domestic violence or abuse, there are a number of services you can reach out to.
Australia: Call 000 if you are in immediate danger. To access 24/7 counselling and support call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732.
New Zealand: Call 111 if you are in immediate danger. Call 0800 456 450 free from any phone, 9am to 11pm every day.
UK: Call 000 if you are in immediate danger. For free and confidential advice, anytime call 0808 2000 247.
US: Call 911 if you are in immediate danger. For free and confidential advice, anytime call 1800 799 7233.
Credits:
Editing by Evan Sycamnias at Pixelife Studio
Production by Alex Gyani
Musical credits:
Intro: Next to you by Jessie Villa
Outro: Cassette Deck by Basketcase
Additional music by Enrize Studio
Thursday Apr 22, 2021
Creating evidence-based government
Thursday Apr 22, 2021
Thursday Apr 22, 2021
While the use of Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) in government has historically been low, over the last 10 years, the Behavioural Insights Team has aimed to popularise the use of the RCTs and support the work of the organisations like the Cochrane and Campbell Collaboration to get evidence into policy. During this time, a passionate debate has raged between the proponents of RCTs and also those who have argued that RCTs may even be overused or that they are not driven by theory enough.
However, this debate has not stopped action organisations like the Education Endowment Foundation supercharging the number of RCTs being funded, or organisations like Administrative Data Research UK or the UK Ministry of Justice’s Data Lab service finding new ways to support governments to be more effective.
In this podcast, Alex Gyani in Sydney and Alex Sutherland in London discuss what being a fully evidenced based government means and how we can get there. We’ll start by discussing what it means to be evidence based, then highlight how BIT has been able to run trials at scale and how ‘nudge’ trials compare to those run in academia. Finally, we look to the future and the promise of machine learning and how AI might be able to help human decision making.
If you would like to know more you can download Test, Learn, Adapt here and can also read our report on data science and behavioural insights here. If you would like to know more about the history of whey, you can go here.
Credits:
Editing by Evan Sycamnias at Pixelife Studio
Production by Alex Gyani
Musical credits:
Intro: Next to you by Jessie Villa
Outro: Cassette Deck by Basketcase
Thursday Apr 22, 2021
Creating better markets
Thursday Apr 22, 2021
Thursday Apr 22, 2021
In this episode, BIT's CEO, Professor David Halpern, speaks to the New South Wales Minister for Customer Service, Victor Dominello. David and Victor cover a wide range of topics, starting with why other governments should have a Minister for Customer Service, how behavioural insights can improve economic policy, how markets can be made more transparent and when governments should intervene in markets.
Victor has been the Member of Parliament for Ryde since 2008. He has held the position of Minister for Customer Service since April 2019. Prior to that Victor held the position of the Minister for Finance, Services and Property and was appointed the state’s first Minister for Innovation and Better Regulation in 2015. His earlier appointments include the Minister for Citizenship, Communities, the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, the Minister for Veterans Affairs and the Assistant Minister for Education. As mentioned on the podcast, the NSW Behavioural Insights Unit was established in 2012 and has been located in the Department of Customer Service since 2019.
You can keep up to date with the work that he has been doing through his website, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Further reading
- If you want to read some news coverage about the FuelCheck app, you can go here or head to the FuelCheck website here.
- If you want to learn more about the Comprehensive Third Party reforms, you can read about it here.
- You can also read more about the work that the New South Wales Behavioural Insights Unit are doing here.
Credits
Editing by Evan Sycamnias at Pixelife Studio
Music by Rich O’Brien
Thanks to Ellie Wood at the Minister’s Office, and Dave Trudinger, Eva Koromilas and the Behavioural Insights Unit.