Four Big Shifts: Moving BIT into a new era

For the past fifteen years, BIT has shown how using behavioural science can improve outcomes for individuals, governments, and businesses. We’ve made sure to run trials to back up our claims, and others who’ve analysed our data have come to the same conclusion. We can point to more tax paid, higher levels of savings, people back in work faster, less sugar consumed, and better prescribing of antibiotics. 

In order to spread the approach more widely, we’ve developed many of the leading frameworks in the field: Explore for exploring the context of decisions, EAST for designing solutions, and TESTS for evaluating and scaling those solutions. 

But, in truth, behavioural scientists have only scratched the surface of what can be achieved with these approaches. 

Vast ranges of public services are filled with “sludge” that undermines their core purpose. Nearly half of people who try to access unemployment insurance in the United States report difficulties with enrolling in the program, for example – contributing to $140bn of benefits going unclaimed. These failures hurt the vulnerable the most.

Many new policies and programs still rest on overconfident assumptions about how people will react. For example, educational leaders thought that parents’ uptake of a new school text message service would be 38 percentage points higher than it actually was. This is one reason why products make it to market without good testing or prototyping, despite millions spent on development. 

Or leaders fail to ‘design out’ likely errors in their organisations, despite evidence showing that well-designed processes improve safety (for example, getting patients the right drugs). Instead, they are effectively relying on employees always being able to make the right call – even when dealing with nuclear weapons.  

This reality means that BIT will always retain its core offer of carefully exploring the context for decisions, applying the most reliable findings from behavioural science, and testing the results. In fact, we are soon going to be launching an updated 10th anniversary edition of our popular EAST framework that gives a refreshed and cutting edge overview of the impact that behavioural science has had in the past decade. 

And yet we also need to be looking to the future. 

A broader offer

On the one hand, we will be using our partnership with Nesta to embed behavioural science within a broader offer that also uses approaches like systems thinking, design principles, and artificial intelligence. Based on our forays so far, we are enormously excited about the alchemy coming from focusing different lenses, disciplines, instincts, and experiences on the same problem.  

The reality is that BIT has always ranged wider than behavioural science, whether in terms of promoting deliberative democracy, the use of reliable evidence, or rapid and low-cost evaluations. Our goal is to improve outcomes in society, using rigour, pragmatism, and the best approaches available. We’re remaining true to that vision – but we’re giving it more firepower.

You can see this broader offer reflected in our new branding, which formally shifts us from “The Behavioural Insights Team” to “BIT”. Informally, our President Emeritus, David Halpern, has often suggested that this stands for “Behaviour, Innovation and Testing”.    

Four big shifts for behavioural science

At the same time, we want to create new ways of using behavioural science so it can fulfil its promise and deal with emerging challenges. Last year BIT set out its Manifesto for the future of behavioural science, which offered ten ambitions for the field as a whole. 

Since then, we’ve been gathering feedback and working out how BIT and Nesta can best contribute to the manifesto’s agenda itself. Today, we’re prioritising four Big Shifts in behavioural science. These are changes we want to realise in BIT and Nesta’s work work – but we also think they will resonate with others in our sector as well. 

A sneak peek 

Shift One: Be more capable of working with complexity and at the level of systems. Consider how behaviours play out in societies and other networks. 

Combining behavioural science with complex adaptive systems thinking will unlock new opportunities for specific changes to have widespread effects. It will also advance the cutting edge on how to anticipate and manage those changes. For example, see our podcast on how thinking about complex systems can improve the way cities and ecosystems are managed. 

Shift Two: Be more attentive to the social drivers of behaviour. Seek to understand how cultures, identities, and relationships underpin behaviour. 

Overly individualistic and cognitive explanations of behaviour can lead us astray. People are embedded in social relationships as they make decisions; culture and identity shape the choices available to us. Any successful change needs to take these factors into account. For example, our Grassroots programme tries to reduce bullying and conflict in schools by shifting pupils’ self-perceptions and helping them model desired behaviours. 

Shift Three: Be more iterative and adaptive. Aim for continual improvement, rather than taking a linear approach to one-off trials. Identify the factors that lead to successful scaling.

Often behavioural science has to cope with fluctuating or unpredictable situations. They can undermine approaches that try to find the best solution in advance and stick to it. Instead, success may come from sensitively assessing how things are developing, and having the tools to adjust accordingly. For example, check out our guide to running trials of complex interventions, like whole school evaluations. 

Shift Four: Be more participatory – involve people in behavioural science work, support them in shaping projects, and help them apply behavioural science themselves. 

BIT’s approach has always involved taking the perspective of those receiving or delivering a service. But now there are more opportunities to help people play a more central role in shaping offers themselves. For example, our work with Meta used deliberative methods to inform how digital environments are created. We believe that one of the main advantages of artificial intelligence will be to put ‘a behavioural scientist in your pocket,’ making tailored insights accessible to all.

We will be explaining these shifts in more detail in a series of thought leadership pieces over the next couple of months. We’ll show how the shifts have already been playing out in our own work. We’ll set out more concrete plans to embed them into our work. And we’ll explore how each of them can help achieve the social impact at the core of our mission.  

Sign up to our newsletter to be the first to receive updates on our work.