_This post is written by Shaun Cameron, Graduate, Australian Public Service _

  • The problem: Humans often do not make the best choices for themselves due to a range of biases, mental shortcuts, emotions, and other influences.
  • Why it matters: These decisions can have negative impacts on areas of public policy, such as health and the payment of government subsidies.
  • **The solution: **The implementation of psychological insights to ‘nudge’ people’s behaviour so that they will make better choices.

Behavioural insights, or behavioural economics, involve the application of psychological insights to help explain how humans make decisions. Basically, people do not always behave in perfectly rational ways and our behaviour can be easily influenced in subtle ways. If you’ve ever gone to the supermarket for milk and found yourself walking out with more items than you bargained for, you’ve likely fallen under the influence of behavioural insights.

From the bakery and fresh produce being strategically placed at the supermarket entrance to boost your mood and hunger with their sights and smells, down to the shade of yellow on your banana (Pantone 12-0752) and the increased size of your trolley, your shopping experience has been intentionally designed to maximise how much you buy. A similar level of thought and utilisation of behavioural insights has been applied to guiding behaviour in public policy.

Behavioural change can be attained by making policy engagement social, such as employing social networks and social norms

Influenced by the best-selling 2008 book ‘Nudge’, the United Kingdom (UK) government established their own ‘Nudge Unit’ in 2010. This Unit outlined a set of principles to assist policymakers under the acronym MINDSPACE, which included considerations of who presented information to the public, social norms and incentives, mental shortcuts and subconscious cues, as well as the effects of emotions on decision-making. This was later simplified into the EAST framework, which outlined that policy implementation and communication should be easy, attractive, social, and timely.

Four key principles

Policymakers can harness easy options using preferred choices as a default selection option on forms and reducing friction in the effort it takes for users to choose a preferred path. Examples include numbers of organ donations increasing after requiring users to opt-out of donation and the Australian Tax Office using pre-filled information to make completing tax returns easier. Other ways to guide public behaviour include adapting written communication to an eighth grade reading level, reducing jargon, sharing direct links to relevant web pages rather than requiring navigation from general homepages, and using personalised messaging tailored to the individual audience.

The Australian New South Wales (NSW) state government Nudge Unit has influenced public behaviour by modifying infringement notices to make them more attractive. Making government communication attractive can involve adjusting formatting, colours, personalisation, and the boldening of certain words (e.g. ‘Pay Now’ on a speeding fine) to draw attention to the desired behaviour. In NSW, adapting the design of their infringements using behavioural insights resulted in nearly 9,000 fewer people losing their driving licence and an extra $AUD10 million in fines being paid on time. Utilising positive incentives for compliance can be useful, as well as leveraging loss aversion in that the pain of losing something is far more powerful than the pleasure of gaining that exact same amount, i.e. losing $100 to an infringement compared to winning $100. Focusing on scarcity is another strategy in communication (e.g. ‘_limited time to act’, ‘limited _number of people’) that can further nudge people into action.

Behavioural change can be attained by making policy engagement social,**_ _**such as employing social networks and social norms. Information can sometimes be more effective if it comes from a peer or social network, with strategic selections of who delivers messages being used by the UK Government to target smoking and reduce the spread of HIV and AIDS. The Australian Department of Health used social norms in 2016 to address a 140% surge in claims for ‘urgent’ after-hours medical care over the previous decade, claims which were paid at double the value as that of ‘non-urgent’ after-hours care. Personalised letters sent to the 1,200 highest claiming doctors employing social norms in comparing their behaviour to their less-claiming peers resulted in a reduction in ‘urgent’ claims by 24% over the following six months, saving $AUD11 million.

Timely nudges can further include prompting people when they are at their most receptive, such as closer to a final infringement payment date as opposed to months before, and leveraging a natural bias for the present to make costs and benefits more immediate. Other options include pre-empting behaviour with a provided plan, for example offering an easy-to-use checklist of steps to take towards a desired outcome.

Taking behaviour into account

Behavioural insights are increasingly being used in public policy in the United States, UK, New Zealand, and by Australian federal and state-level governments, and further bases much of its results upon rigorous research methods, such as randomised controlled trials. Behavioural insights teams already exist within many government agencies and the lessons learnt from the application of psychology continue to yield examples of success in the implementation of public policy and the nudging of public behaviour.

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