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- 22nd Oct 2015
Reducing missed appointments
One in ten hospital outpatient appointments is missed – people don’t turn up, and don’t cancel or rearrange in advance. That’s 5.5 million appointments every year in England alone. Missed appointments lead to people not getting the care they need, when they need it. They also lead to costs to…
- Blog
- 27th Oct 2015
Victoria’s Citizens’ Jury on Obesity
Wow! I'm writing this heading back from Australia, from the citizens’ jury VicHealth have just supported on obesity. It was a very powerful, and moving, process. Having seen the jury in action, it is hard to imagine a future of democracy – and the application of behavioural science to policy –…
- Blog
- 10th Nov 2015
Automatic Enrolment and Pensions: a behavioural success story
Last week, the National Audit Office (the Government’s financial watchdog) published a report on a major government programme. If its subject had been a programme with a big overspend or a lengthy delay, it might have got a lot of attention. But this report got next to no pick up in the…
- Blog
- 12th Nov 2015
Social trust is one of the most important measures that most people have never heard of – and it’s moving
Do you think most people can be trusted? This is a question first asked in the 1950s, and from the early 1980s incorporated into the World Values Surveys. It has since proven to be one of the most interesting and important indicators of the strength and quality of societies and…
- Blog
- 2nd Dec 2015
Can psychology help reduce the gap between the rich and poor kids?
Robert Putnam, Harvard Professor and author of Bowling Alone and several other important works, came in to BIT last week to discuss his new book - Our Kids. His latest work reflects on the growing gulf between the lives and expectancies of the rich and poor youth in today’s America.…
- Blog
- 22nd Dec 2015
Happy holidays to our stateside cousins - Inside the Nudge Unit is available in the USA!
We’ve known for some time that across countries labour productivity per hour is negatively correlated with hours worked. Just to check, we ran a seasonally festive correlation between labour productivity and average days of holiday taken by country, which also showed a modest negative correlation (about -0.12 in the data we…
- Blog
- 7th Jan 2016
Innovation in Policing: a guest blog from Chief Superintendent Alex Murray
Today we have a guest blog from Chief Superintendent Alex Murray of West Midlands Police – the second largest force in England and Wales – with whom we work closely on a range of criminal justice issues. Alex is Commander of Solihull Local Policing Unit. He is also the founder…
- Blog
- 22nd Jan 2016
Applying behavioural insights to improve life chances
A quiet moment in Davos, among the world’s elites, is a strange place to reflect on those whose accidents of birth make it hard to get to a place like this, even from a relatively affluent country like Britain. I’m here as Chair of the WEF group on behaviour, and…
- Blog
- 4th Feb 2016
Stories from the States
As part of BIT North America’s work with the Bloomberg Philanthropies What Works Cities initiative, we have launched ten randomized control trials in six cities from Kentucky to California in the last six months. While we wait for the results, we thought we’d share three stories that shed some light…
- Blog
- 19th Feb 2016
Reducing antibiotic prescribing: a new BIT study published in The Lancet
The growth of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the major health challenges of our time. The UK’s Review on Antimicrobial Resistance has forecast that AMR will result in 10 million deaths and $100 trillion in unachieved GDP a year by 2050. One of the main causes of resistance is…