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The problem is, policymakers are often looking for off-
the-shelf solutions, in the way that economists might ad-
vise them to ‘raise the price of something by five per cent’.
Done. They don’t quite realize that if you are going to walk
down this road of believing that decision making is highly
contextual, you need to take the time to make sure you get
your intervention right. Maybe someday we’ll be able to give
a quick prescription like, ‘Make this information 10 per cent
more salient’; but we’re not there yet.
Also, the target behaviour (step 2) needs to be very pre-
cise. It should not be decomposable into other constituent
behaviours. For example, ‘increasing retirement savings of a
household’ is general and could be decomposed into precise
behaviours such as ‘opening a new retirement account’, ‘set-
ting aside more money each month’, ‘reducing spending on
discretionary items’, etc. The behaviour should also be eas-
ily observable.Describe some of the complex issues you are currently
tackling.
We are finding that a richer understanding of why people
save, use preventive health care, work hard, learn and con-
serve energy can provide a basis for innovative and often
very cost-effective policies and development interventions.
At the moment, we have a few projects on increas-
ing women’s participation in economic and social life. In
Jordan, we’re doing a very long pilot. Rather than going right
to an intervention, we’re trying to understand how social
norms influence women’s decisions about whether to join
the labour force, participate in public life, and open a bank
account.
We started out with a survey that asks households —
men and women — about how they perceive social norms
in this area, what they think other people do and what they
think other people think they should do. We’re also looking
at implicit biases, to see whether these affect decision mak-
ing on the part of women as they decide whether or not to
join the workforce. We’re taking a long time to do this, be-
cause we want to really understand whether our interven-
tions should target social norms, the stories people tell about
themselves or implicit biases.Five Steps for Implementing Behavioural
Insights at the World Bank- The Framework
Define the development objective. - The Desired Behavioural Change
Identify a specific target behaviour that needs to
change to reach the development objective. - Context & Analysis
Identify the stages of the current and desired decision-
making process as well as potential bottlenecks that
keep people from behaving in a better way. - The Intervention
Describe the solution to reach your development
objective - Learning
Pilot and document the effectiveness of your
intervention.
Varun Gauri is Head of the Global Insights Initiative (GINI) and Senior
Economist in the Development Economics Vice Presidency of the
World Bank. He serves on the editorial boards of the journals Behavioural
Public Policy and Health and Human Rights, the World Economic Forum
Council on Behaviour and the Advisory Board of Academics
Stand Against Poverty.Nina Mažar is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the Rotman
School of Management and Co-Director of Behavioural Economics
in Action @ Rotman (BEAR). She is on leave from the School until
November of 2017 to serve as a Senior Behavioural Scientist for
the Global INsights Initiative (GINI) at the World Bank.Looking ahead, how do you see the GINI initiative evolving?
Our aim is to start using behavioural insights to address
some of the world’s biggest problems. What we need to do,
therefore, is remain relevant to policymakers by working
with them to enable ‘quick wins’. For example, we can help
them collect more revenues through taxes relatively quickly,
or reduce energy consumption with changes in messaging.
We are truly understanding more about influencing peoples’
behaviour every day.