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  • Blog
  • 14th Mar 2013

Cass Sunstein visits BIT

Professor Cass Sunstein will be visiting the Behavioural Insights Team next week. Cass is the co-author of Nudge and previous head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under President Obama. This visit coincides with the publication of Cass’ new book, ‘Simpler: The Future of Government’, which…

  • Blog
  • 20th Mar 2013

Communicating best practice

This month the government announced plans to set up "What Works" centres to gather, review, and disseminate best practice across a number of policy areas.Dissemination of research findings, particularly in an age of devolution, is of critical importance. Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs), which are easy to understand (compared with other,…

  • Blog
  • 7th Apr 2013

BIT back-to-work trial covered by BBC PM.

We’ve been busy over the last few weeks and, if you listen to Radio 4’s BBC PM show, you may have heard about the ways in which we’re helping jobseekers across Essex to get back into work. If you missed it, or just want to listen again, you can do…

  • Blog
  • 15th Apr 2013

Reducing food waste

The Behavioural Insights Team recently met up with GreeNudge, a Norwegian organisation that researches behavioural approaches to encouraging environmentally friendly choices. Among other things, we discussed their latest study on food waste. GreeNudge conducted randomised controlled trials in hotel restaurants with food buffets. They found that reducing plate size and…

  • Blog
  • 28th May 2013

Behavioural Insights and Charitable Giving

Charity comes from the heart. Yet some influences, seemingly unrelated to our altruistic preferences, can significantly impact how much and how often we give. Applying Behavioural Insights to Charitable Giving In partnership with a number of organisations, including the Charities Trust and the Charities Aid Foundation, we’ve published a paper…

  • Blog
  • 4th Jul 2013

Policy Experiments at the 1st International Conference on Public Policy

Some of the team attended the first International Conference on Public Policy, held in Grenoble, France. In addition to presenting some of the team’s work on tax compliance and charitable giving to an academic audience, they also took the opportunity to view the interesting work of others. Of particular interest…

  • Blog
  • 24th Jul 2013

Policy school

Alongside the trials and policy advice that are our bread and butter, we’ve also been working with a group of Cabinet Office colleagues to design and run a totally new kind of training programme that incorporates insights from the behavioural sciences. Competing teams are set the goal of coming up…

  • Blog
  • 7th Aug 2013

Growth Vouchers

We’ve been working with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) on the £30 million business support programme which was announced at Budget. The announcement in the budget stipulated that the programme would be run as a randomised controlled trial (RCT), the first time that we know of where…

  • Blog
  • 8th Aug 2013

Partners in Washington to build on BIT work

Over the past week or two there has been lots of coverage of a new team in the White House that will look to apply lessons from behavioural sciene to public policy. The US team will be headed by Maya Shankar, who met members of BIT in Washington to discuss how we will exchange ideas…

  • Blog
  • 25th Sep 2013

Pensions policy shows the power of defaults

The past year has seen one of the biggest changes to pension schemes in recent times. Starting with the largest employers, workers are now being automatically enrolled in a scheme when they join a company. In other words, now people have to make a decision to leave their employer’s scheme,…