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Who we are

We are the Behavioural Insights Team. Also known as The Nudge Unit.

We exist to improve people’s lives and communities. We work in partnership with national, regional and local governments, businesses, foundations and charities, to tackle major policy problems. Often through testing and implementing simple yet powerful changes.

Founded in 2010, the Team has grown from a seven-person unit at the heart of the UK government to a global social purpose company with offices around the world.

Explore more from BIT's first 10 years

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While expanding and being able to help support a growing network of partners around the world, our mission has never changed. We generate and apply behavioural insights to inform policy, improve public services and deliver results for citizens and society.

We have a track record of success across a range of policy areas, from healthcare to humanitarian aid, economic growth to early years, social capital to consumers. We also work to scale our successful interventions by sharing lessons and supporting wider adoption and spread of what works.

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We have run more than 1000 projects to date, including over 700 randomised controlled trials in dozens of countries.

In addition to our own interventions, we openly share expertise and help others build capacity and skills to apply behavioural science. Our staff have conducted over a thousand workshops and training courses for governments around the world, training 20,000 civil servants and practitioners in behavioural insights. We have also launched an Executive Education programme with Warwick Business School. We publish our work in regular policy reports, in peer-reviewed academic publications, and through regular blog posts on this website.

How did we get to where we are today? And what else was happening at the time?

See our history

Committed to social impact, we invest our own resources to remain at the cutting-edge. Our Impact Opportunity Fund allows us to sponsor programmes with great potential for public good, but no immediate alternative funding opportunities.

We translate the best of behavioural science into policy and practice. Our skilled and experienced staff comprise ex-civil servants, policy specialists and academics from disciplines including behavioural economics, social psychology, neuroscience and anthropology.

Our international panel of world-leading academic affiliates includes Professor Richard Thaler, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics, and Theresa Marteau, director of the Behaviour and Health Research Unit at the University of Cambridge. We also have a formal partnership with Harvard University’s Behavioral Insights Group (BIG) and close relationships with several universities, including Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, UCL and University of Pennsylvania.

In December 2021 we became wholly-owned by innovation charity Nesta.

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