10 / Rotman Management Spring 20 19
The website for this agency was also improved by using appro-
priate language to maximize engagement. For instance, making
sure that the negative connotations of words such as ‘hazards’,
‘risk’ or ‘unhealthy’ do not reduce attention by creating negative
emotions; and testing the balance between visual and text infor-
mation to minimize the risk of information overload. The results
were impressive and included increased traffic to the website; an
increase in public debate and discussions on the site; and greater
public reporting of marketplace frictions.
The following research findings indicate the breadth of op-
portunities in this domain:
- Telling people about positive, pro-social things that others
have done (as opposed to asking them to stop doing a certain
negative thing) can produce a fourfold increase in the num-
ber of people being more pro-social; - Showing people smiling or frowning faces — a small emo-
tional trigger — on their electricity bills improves resource
conservation by 25 per cent; and - Exchanging similarity-identifying information before a
negotiation can boost the successful outcome rate from 50
to 90 per cent, with an average 18 per cent increase in per-
ceived final value across parties.
The ABCD Framework for Using Behavioural Insights
A: ATTENTION– Make it relevant, seize attention and
plan for inattention
Attention is the window of the mind. However, attention is
scarce, easily distracted, quickly overwhelmed and subject to
switching costs. Practitioners will often find that attentional
issues have been overlooked in the design and implementation
of traditional public policies. For this reason, when practitioners
find a behavioural problem with attentional issues, it may prove
more effective to design policy interventions that are more
relevant, seize attention and, if this is not possible, think about
how to plan for inattention.B: BELIEF FORMATION– Guide search, make inferences
intuitive and support judgment
While there is no such thing as too much information in a tradi-
tional public policy perspective, information overload has be-
come a serious problem for the people inhabiting the real world.
For that reason, problems in belief-formation usually go hand in
hand with the vast amounts of information and possibilities that
are put on offer. In this perspective, it is not surprising to find
that some of the biggest companies today are companies built
around information search engines and consumer comparison
platforms. What is perhaps more surprising is that traditional
public policy interventions with regards to problems of belief-
formation have been slow in copying what these companies do,
but instead often try to approach problems in belief-formation
by offering even more information.C: CHOICE– Make it attractive, frame prospects and
make it social
When making a choice is difficult, people are likely to be influ-
enced by biases and heuristics in their decision-making. ABCDsuggests that researchers look into making preferable choices
more attractive, use framing of prospects and leverage social
identities and norms. The framing and arrangement of pros-
pects is perhaps the most famous, but also the most techni-
cal area of BI as applied to public policy. In facing a series of
choice-options, a person also faces a series of possible futures,
i.e. prospects. While making it attractive provides reasons for
choosing, the framing of prospects influences people to choose
one or another option in subtle ways independent of what is
chosen and why. That is, one option may be chosen over an-
other simply due to the way that choices are presented – either
as a matter of arrangement or as a matter of formulation.D: DETERMINATION– Work with friction, plans and
feedback and create commitments
Most people know that it is easy to form an intention of doing
something. It is much harder to get it done. However, we do
not always anticipate this and tend to systematically overesti-
mate our own ability in taking the small steps to accomplish
our goals. Thus, choosing to do something is not the same as
succeeding. The world is complex and when any one person
has to juggle multiple goals at once, even relatively small
obstacles may become a reason for postponing taking action.
As a result people tend to procrastinate leading to inertia and
staying with the status quo.-Courtesy of the OECD Behavioural Insights Toolkit