Brittany Shoots-Reinhard, Ohio State University & Ellen Peters, University of Oregon Communicators often use their intuitions to decide what information to present and don’t always use numbers. For example, federally required Vaccine Information Statements list common side effects, but provide no numbers about percentages of people expected to experience the side effects. Research in our lab (and others), however, has demonstrated that providing this information increases willingness to vaccinate and take medications while reducing overestimation of side ..read more

Jantsje Mol, Center for Research in Experimental Economics and Political Decision Making (CREED), University of Amsterdam In these times of unprecedented climate change, one critical question persists: how do we motivate homeowners to protect their homes and loved ones from the ever-looming threat of flooding? This question led to a captivating behavioral science study, born from a research visit to the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center in 2019 (currently the Wharton Climate Center). Co-founded and co-directed by the late Howard Kunreuther ..read more

Geoffrey Myers, School of Public Policy, LSE Many governments around the world have set up behavioural or ‘nudge’ units to develop public policies in response to people’s bounded rationality and cognitive biases. But if such features are a fact of human life, what are the implications of the inevitable behavioural biases of the decision-makers in public policy processes? My book makes a contribution to the developing field of behavioural public administration in the specific context of auctions to award licences providing rights to use specific frequency bands for cellular mobile ser ..read more

Joan Costa-Font & Tony Hockley, London School of Economics & Political Science (LSE) Caroline Rudisill, Arnold School of Public Health, University of South Carolina Our new textbook “Behavioural Incentive Design for Health Policy” has been in development a long time, mostly during the COVID-19 pandemic period. Much more important than a convivial three years of co-operation as authors has been the several decades long incremental shift in health analysis and policy discussions and practice.  Historic debates about economic incentives in health and health care, par ..read more

By Anne Pasek, Trent University & Ryan M Katz-Rosene, University of Ottawa “We’ve got to stop meeting like this” The line amends a pamphlet written recently by one of this blog’s authors. It was to be dropped in hotel corridors during a conference that had chosen to return to an exclusively in-person format after the years of pandemic restrictions. It is this particular way of meeting that the pamphlet seeks to draw into question: by excluding digital or hybrid formats, the conference organizers have ‘de facto’ required most participants to get on a plane. The author h ..read more

Michèle Belot, Department of Economics, Cornell University & Marina Schröder, Institute of Economic Policy, Leibniz University, Hannover Imagine you attend a social event and someone approaches you with a smile on their face. They clearly know who you are and are about to greet you. You, on the other hand, can’t really recall who they are. We have all been there. We often navigate such awkward social situations by attempting to pretend we remember. Because failing to remember someone feels like an insult. Systematic bias on race and gender Memory has always played an important role in ..read more

Tania Burchardt, Associate Professor, Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics & Political Science Have you done the Invisible Gorilla experiment on selective attention? You know that one where you are asked to watch a short video and count the number of times the players wearing white shirts pass the basketball? They throw it fast so you have to concentrate. At the end, much to your surprise, the question on the screen is not ‘How many times?’ but ‘Did you see the gorilla?’ In the original experiment, fully half of those who watched the video missed the person dressed as a ..read more

Sarah Watters, Wellth, New York As the holidays and New Year approach, a common theme that consistently surfaces is the balance (or lack thereof) between indulgence and healthy behaviors, particularly when it comes to healthy eating. While this is a topic that is acute at this time of year, beyond the holidays, excess energy intake is a key public health challenge in many countries.  How and what we eat has shifted recently – with the help of the COVID-19 pandemic . During the peak of the pandemic, we were eating at home more often and, by and large, individuals reported that th ..read more

Eugen Dimant (University of Pennsylvania & CESifo, Munich), and Shaul Shalvi (University of Amsterdam) We are constantly surrounded by temptations that are not in our best interest. That is, they are often neither in the best interest for us individually (e.g., succumbing to a sugar intake that is beyond healthy) nor collectively (e.g., throwing trash on the ground instead of a bin). How can we make better decisions? Nudging, a flourishing line of literature initially kickstarted by Thaler and Sunstein in their 2008 book ‘Nudge’, is concerned with exactly this challenge. A plethora of inte ..read more

Joseph Adu & Abe Oudshoorn Western University, Ontario, Canada) How might public policy facilitate intentional “social contact” between people with and without lived experience of mental illness in order to break the stigma and improve mental health outcomes?  The World Bank, OECD, and UN have each described how policies can be designed and redesigned to influence society positively through programs and interventions that target human behaviours based on the inclusion of important human and societal factors in decisions. As ‘social animals’ our desires may be insa ..read more