Can behavioural science nudge us into positive action?

An Applied Behavioural Science (ABS) event held at The London School of Economics (LSE) recently delved into how small behavioural changes can bring major benefits to our community. Here are the snapshots from the event:

Rajeev Budhiraja

Senior Advisor to Middle East Communications Network (MCN), and former founding equity partner and CEO of various McCann agencies in the region; Promoseven 360, MRM, McCann Health, and DRAFT

Rajeev Budhiraja, a Dubai-based veteran advertising professional, obtained a postgraduate degree in behavioural sciences from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) this summer and became a champion of bringing about changes to serve society.

During his 30 years in advertising, Budhiraja was overcome with a pertinent thought: what good is advertising doing for the wider community? And to what extent is it positively changing behaviour on critical issues like the environment, lifestyle diseases, religious and political extremism, gender inequality etc.?

A superficial investigation led him to conclude that information imparted through advertising raised awareness but was not enough to change long-term behaviour. To influence positive habit formation, information plus was required. The desire to seek this last mile led Budhiraja to pursue the study of Behavioural Sciences at LSE.

Unfortunately, due to Covid-19 and travel restrictions, the batchmates could not meet in person. Further, there was an interest to see how the academic principles could be applied in the real world, which was the germinal and seminal thought behind the inaugural edition of Applied Behavioural Science (ABS) held in London from July 18 to 21.

A group of student volunteers led by Budhiraja put the event together, and a gala dinner at the House of Commons was a fitting finale to the four-day symposium.

The event featured 26 eminent speakers, including renowned academics from LSE, Yale, University College London, Ashoka University, Cambridge & Warwick, civil servants, and private sector practitioners from banking, market research & consultancy.

There was a significant presence of speakers from the Middle East and our wider region.

The challenges tackled were diverse, such as reducing missed doctor appointments in Israel and litter woes in Qatar, improving infant nutrition in India, and increasing Covid-19 vaccine uptake in Lebanon. The opportunity to apply behaviour science is vast, but so are its challenges. The learnings from the inaugural event, which promises to be an annual affair, ignited several talking points by leading practitioners.

Hopefully, some of the domain specialists’ inputs will give you a deeper insight into this fast-growing field, whose impact is likely to have far-reaching consequences in this century and beyond.

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Dr Matteo Galizzi

Co-Director of the Executive MSc (EMSc) programme in Behavioural Science and Associate Professor at LSE

Behavioural science is about understanding how people think, feel, and behave and, as such, is continuously cross-fertilising insights and methods from economics, psychology, data science, and other disciplines.

Graduating from LSE’s flagship EMSc programme is just the beginning of a journey together, marking the access to a growing community of academics, alumni, and practitioners who are literally at the forefront of applying behavioural science to the real world: as our department’s motto states, “from the world to the lab and back”.

In line with the motto, the EMSc programme hosted a brilliant workshop on Applied Behavioural Science in July, organised by our graduating alumnus Rajeev Budhiraja and his peers.

The workshop brought to the LSE speakers and panellists applying behavioural science to various contexts, settings, and challenges in the real world, including our EMSc alumni Anna Meadows (Principal Consultant, Behavioural Science-IPSOS, UK) and Will Sandbrook (Executive Director of NEST Insight). The success of this event is making us consider establishing it as an annual feature in the future.

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Professor Nikos Nikiforakis

Co-Director, Center for Behavioural Institutional Design (C-BID) at New York University (NYU) Abu Dhabi

A sedentary lifestyle is a cause of many lifestyle diseases in the UAE. To combat this, Professor Nikiforakis led a team at the Center for Behavioral Institutional Design (C-BID), along with Professor Ernesto Reuben, to nudge senior citizens in Abu Dhabi to be more physically active. The intervention was branded the Forever Fit Program (FFP) and was developed in partnership with the Abu Dhabi Department of Community Development (DCD).

The experiment ran over four weeks and comprised over 200 participants. It involved the distribution of a booklet including age-appropriate, easy-to-perform exercises communicated in a fun and exciting manner, along with information on the long-run health benefits of physical activity, including incorporating simple movements into their daily lives. Regular phone surveys were used to assess whether physical activity had increased.

The results showed a 202 per cent increase in the daily time a senior adult spent on physical activity. Further, even amongst a group of previously inactive participants, the experiment showed a 145 per cent increase in daily physical activity. Additionally, the frequency of exercise increased in 63% of the participants. The experiment's success has led to an effort to extend this programme to all senior adults in Abu Dhabi.

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Adi Berliner

Head of AI for behavioural change at Clalit Innovation, Israel

A fundamental weakness in the standard approach to improving health-related behaviour is targeting people's knowledge instead of their decisions and actions. Consequently, there’s an urgent need to leverage behavioural insights into practical solutions in healthcare.

One behavioural challenge in Israel was reducing the no-show rates in outpatient clinics at Clalit (a not-for-profit that provides free healthcare for over 50 per cent of Israeli residents), estimated at 25 per cent. These no-shows cause increased wait time for an available appointment, inefficient clinical management, and high overbooking rates.

Nine appointment reminder SMS messages were tested as part of a solution (along with Professor Dan Ariely and the Ministry of Finance). Five of these resulted in lower no-show rates, the most influential being one using emotional guilt, which read, “Not showing up to your appointment without cancelling in advance delays hospital treatment for those who need medical aid”. This exercise reduced no-show rates by 33 per cent and improved advanced cancellation by 17 per cent compared to the previous reminder. Besides, an AI-driven reminder personalisation engine capable of analysing thousands of different patient parameters and tailoring a personalised reminder to each patient was developed. The mechanism achieved an additional six per cent reduction in no-show rates. The tech solution salvaged more than 200,000 appointments in a year, leading to more efficient clinical management and improved quality of care.

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Dr Fadi Makki

Director at B4Development, Qatar

Since its inception in 2016, B4Development in Qatar has conducted over 100 behavioural experiments, mainly focusing on social impact in the Arabian Gulf nation. The current focus is on the upcoming FIFA World Cup in Doha, Qatar, between November 20 and December 18. An estimated 1.2 million fans are expected to visit Qatar for the World Cup, posing various challenges such as traffic congestion and littering in stadiums and public venues. In preparation, multiple experiments were conducted to reduce littering, increase waste recycling in stadiums and encourage public transport during the recent Arab Cup and FIFA World Cup tournaments. These generated valuable learnings.

Using salient floor stickers effectively reminded spectators to take their garbage after a match. Highlighting the moral value of recycling with signs that read “Do good! Recycle right!” reduced the number of incorrect disposals in recycling bins by almost 36 per cent and increased the number of correct disposals by 11 per cent.  Updating people’s perceptions of current trends worked as an effective nudge to a discernible change in behavioural patterns.

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Neela A. Saldanha

Executive Director at the Yale Research Initiative on Innovation & Scale (Y-RISE)

Behavioural science is in an exciting phase: 14 years after “Nudge” was published, we can see its impact on health, education, financial inclusion, climate change and conflict resolution, among others. Importantly, it is going global: we see its footprint in the Global South — Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and the Caribbean, where 85 per cent of the world’s population lives.

In this next phase, more remains to be done. To scale solutions, every policymaker and implementer needs to think and act like a behavioural scientist. This means we need to sharply increase the number of people familiar with behavioural science in the Global South so they can implement behavioural solutions. We must invest in long-term collaborations between local organisations and experts to test interventions. We will need to get creative about building communities to share lessons about what works (and does not). The more we can think creatively about harnessing the power of the 85 per cent, the more we can ensure truly global impact!

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Josh Martin, Ex-Executive Director of Beyond Conflict and Managing Director at ideas42 & Saugato Datta, Managing Director, ideas42