Behavioral Insights

Behavioral Insights

The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series

A complete list of the titles in this series appears at the back of this book.

Behavioral Insights

Michael Hallsworth and Elspeth Kirkman

The MIT Press | Cambridge, Massachusetts | London, England

© 2020 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hallsworth, Michael, author. | Kirkman, Elspeth, author.

Title: Behavioral insights / Michael Hallsworth and Elspeth Kirkman.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2020] | Series: The MIT press essential knowledge series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020000394 | ISBN 9780262539401 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Political planning—Psychological aspects. | Social planning—Psychological aspects. | Policy sciences—Psychological aspects. | Psychology, Industrial.

Classification: LCC HN28 .H28 2020 | DDC 361.1—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020000394

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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Contents

Series Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

1 Introducing Behavioral Insights

2 The History and Thought behind Behavioral Insights

3 Examples of Behavioral Insights in Practice

4 Applying Behavioral Insights

5 Criticisms, Considerations, and Limitations

6 The Future of Behavioral Insights

Glossary

Notes

Further Reading

Index

Series Foreword

The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers accessible, concise, beautifully produced pocket-size books on topics of current interest. Written by leading thinkers, the books in this series deliver expert overviews of subjects that range from the cultural and the historical to the scientific and the technical.

In today’s era of instant information gratification, we have ready access to opinions, rationalizations, and superficial descriptions. Much harder to come by is the foundational knowledge that informs a principled understanding of the world. Essential Knowledge books fill that need. Synthesizing specialized subject matter for nonspecialists and engaging critical topics through fundamentals, each of these compact volumes offers readers a point of access to complex ideas.

Preface

Many of us have suddenly stopped and asked ourselves, Why did I just do that? We may have paused, looked around, and realized that we made it halfway home while our thoughts were elsewhere. Or maybe we sat next to a purchase that we now wonder if we really want or need, having been guided toward it effortlessly by prompts and reassurances.

These instances highlight that our behavior is often influenced by factors that lie outside our conscious awareness. This is not necessarily a problem; we would find it very hard to function if we had to consciously register and approve every single thing we do. But often we tend to underestimate the importance of this automatic side of our behavior—and so do governments or other organizations. The result may be ineffective policies, products, or plans.

The behavioral insights approach tries to address this problem by taking the latest evidence on what influences behavior, and then applying these insights to practical issues. Since the approach also prioritizes evaluating the impact of its interventions, we can know exactly how it has made a difference to tangible problems. As a result, the use of behavioral insights by governments, businesses, and individuals has exploded over the last ten years.

But there have also been many questions about whether the behavioral insights approach is a reliable one, whether it can tackle the big issues facing society, and whether it poses serious ethical questions. There is also much confusion about what the term behavioral insights actually means. This book addresses these questions by presenting the history, current practice, and future directions of behavioral insights.

Chapter 1 outlines the core features of the approach: a concern with practical issues; the use of evidence about human behavior to develop solutions for these issues; and the use of experimentation to evaluate the impact of these solutions. We show that this approach is best understood as a lens that allows us to see policies, programs, and services in a new light. Chapter 2 charts the history of the behavioral insights approach, which was born when three strands of thought came together: behavioral economics, dual-process theories in psychology, and a shift in how governments think about behavior. We explain how and why the period since 2010 has seen explosive growth in the use of the approach. Chapter 3 gives five brief examples of behavioral insights in practice.

Chapter 4 gives an overview of how to apply behavioral insights by working through a real example of increasing attendance at recruitment fairs by those looking for work. We include ten steps that cover identifying the scope and relevant behaviors, implementing and evaluating the intervention, and considering next steps. Chapter 5 is devoted to questions and criticisms. We consider the limitations of what the approach delivers on a practical level, including the longevity of its effects and its impact on high-level policy. We look at limitations of the relevant theories, and weaknesses in the evidence base. Finally, we consider whether the behavioral insights approach is ethical or acceptable. Chapter 6 looks to the future. We argue that in order to endure, the behavioral insights approach needs to consolidate and strengthen its evidence base and to prioritize new techniques and applications. Finally, it needs to integrate itself into standard practices for organizations—ironically, true success may come when we stop talking about behavioral insights as a distinct idea.

Acknowledgments

We thank Owain Service, David Halpern, Luke Hydrick, and Adam Oliver for their comments on the manuscript for this book. We thank all our colleagues at the Behavioural Insights Team over the years. We thank Bob Prior for being a great editor, and the staff at the MIT Press for their production of the book.

Elspeth thanks Melanie Skipp-Kirkman for her patience and support while this book was being written (especially while she was heavily pregnant with our amazing daughter, Imogen, at the end!). She also takes this official opportunity to thank Sue, Alan, and Annie Kirkman for their lifelong support and love.

Michael thanks Ellen Hallsworth for all her guidance and encouragement, which were essential to the completion of the book, and Alice Hallsworth for being a welcome distraction from writing it. He also thanks Alan and Marion Hallsworth and Ceri Rahman for everything they’ve done for him over the years.

1

Introducing Behavioral Insights

The behavioral insights approach applies evidence about human behavior to practical problems. Behavioral insights can give a realistic account of how and why we act the way we do, allowing us to design or redesign policies, products, and services accordingly. The results of this approach have led to its adoption by governments, institutions, and businesses across the globe. This book explains the main principles of a behavioral insights approach, why it has proved so popular, and what it can achieve.

Let’s start by discussing what is new about the approach: it offers a challenge to received wisdom about how decisions are made. Individuals, governments, and businesses often assume that our behavior is governed mostly by deliberate, considered reactions to the information and incentives we encounter. In this view, people take note of all relevant knowledge, carefully weigh up the costs and benefits of each available option, and make the choice that they think maximizes benefits to themselves (or those they care about).

In contrast, the key insight of behavioral insights is that much of our behavior is nonconscious, habitual, and driven by cues in our environment or the way in which choices are presented. We are capable of making decisions in a considered, deliberate way, but this happens less often than we assume. Instead, our actions are guided by mental shortcuts or simple rules of thumb—for example, do what everyone else is doing or take the middle option. These shortcuts are often triggered automatically—outside our conscious awareness—by features of the choices or situations that we encounter.

As a result, aspects of the context or the way a decision is presented may shape our behavior much more than we realize. Consider our eating behavior, which we use as an extended example throughout this first chapter. Since people use the presence of a salad as a shortcut for healthy when judging food options, adding a salad to a hamburger meal actually makes us think it has 12.6 percent fewer calories than the same meal with no salad.¹ The amount we eat is influenced in similar ways. Doubling a serving size means people eat one-third more, on average,² and the cues surrounding our food also matter: bigger food packages and larger serving utensils mean more food is eaten.³

Much of our behavior is nonconscious, habitual, and driven by cues in our environment or the way in which choices are presented.

While these automatic reactions take place outside our conscious awareness, often they have developed as efficient and powerful ways to accomplish our goals. Consider how much more difficult our lives would be if we had to focus deliberately on each element of tying our shoelaces every morning, or to carefully weigh up the pros and cons of absolutely every food purchase we ever made. This kind of fast thinking is what allows us to make thousands of successful judgments and decisions every day, without even realizing that we are doing so.

Nevertheless, our lack of awareness also has costs: it means that we usually do not recognize the way these processes are shaping our behavior. In one study, more than half of people who had been deliberately served between 500 g and 1,000 g of macaroni and cheese for lunch (over the course of a month) failed to notice that their portions had varied at all.⁴ Even if we do notice such things, we often come up with alternative explanations for our behavior. For example, we may claim that we ate more than usual because we happened to be particularly hungry. But the same studies show that’s not true: portion sizes, not hunger, cause the increased eating.

Whether we are examining food intake or any other kind of decision, the headline is this: if we do not understand our behavior accurately, then we are unlikely to adopt the best personal plans or public policies to achieve our goals. We will develop systems and strategies that depend on us pausing and deliberating when the evidence shows we will not. Behavioral insights can show us what is really driving our actions in these cases. In doing so, the approach provides explanations and predictions that guide us to more effective courses of action.

Having discussed the insights part of our topic, we now want to explain the importance of focusing on behavior. We are interested in what people actually do; changes in stated attitudes, beliefs, and intentions are important, but they may not go along with changes in behavior.⁵ And we emphasize direct observation because of the problems with people reporting their own behavior. People often do not correctly remember what they have done and inaccurately predict what they are going to do. This may be partly driven by the desire to maintain a positive self-image. Even if they have such knowledge, they may tailor their reports to reflect what they think is socially desirable or what a researcher wants to hear.⁶

For example, one national study asked adults to recall how much physical activity they had done over the previous month. A smaller group of those who responded also wore an accelerometer for the week following the survey. An accelerometer directly measures how much people move. When self-reporting, 39 percent of men and 29 percent of women said that they achieved the minimum recommended level of physical activity. But the data from the accelerometers showed that only 6 percent of men and 4 percent of women had done this in reality.⁷

In a nutshell, the behavioral insights approach brings together evidence of how conscious deliberation interacts with nonconscious processes to shape behavior. But it also builds on this evidence to propose new solutions, as we show in the following.

What Does the Behavioral Insights Approach Offer?

To show how behavioral insights can suggest new ways of doing things, let’s stay with the topic of eating. Suppose policymakers decided that overeating was a problem that required action. In this situation, behavioral insights can enhance the main policy options available to governments and citizens: information (telling people about how to perform or avoid a behavior and why they should do so), incentives (changing the costs or benefits resulting from a behavior), and legislation (preventing or requiring certain behaviors by law). We give a brief tour of each of these areas.

Information

In general terms, the traditional approach to providing information about eating has been to tell people about what foods they should or should not be consuming. However, since many of our food choices are driven by habits and take place outside our conscious awareness, an improved understanding of the risks and benefits of certain foods may only have limited impact on behavior. In fact, providing information can backfire. For example, one study found that people were actually more likely to take a drug when several possible side effects were presented to them, as opposed to a single one, because of the way we perceive risks.⁸

With these principles in mind, a behavioral insights approach might instead help people adopt new pragmatic rules of thumb that focus on creating new habits. For example, we can create simple plans to make it less likely that we are exposed to tempting food—like if a waiter asks if I’d like to see the dessert menu, then I will ask for a coffee.⁹ This kind of planning, which can end up creating new habits, has been shown to be effective across many studies.¹⁰ In other words, a behavioral insights approach would suggest that information should focus less on