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considerations will outweigh other pressures and temptations.
Unsurprisingly, the passing of new laws is often a far from
perfect way of affecting behaviour. Citizens may be ‘required’ to
fill in their tax returns on time, but every year, millions fail to do
so. We’re not supposed to drop litter, but parks and public spaces
are often strewn with it. Even the very existence and scale of the
courts and judicial system can be argued to be testament to the
frequent failure of the law-based approach.
In contrast, sometimes behaviour changes with a surprising-
ly light touch. For example, over the last decade, many countries
have introduced bans on smoking in public places. There were
grave concerns that the new laws would be both unpopular and
unenforceable. However, in this case, they have proved highly
successful. The smoking ban, in the UK at least, has been subject
to almost no enforcement. In essence, smoking bans have been
self-policed, built around a new social norm — and tacit public
support — for smoke-free environments.
Subsidies and incentives have a similarly mixed success
rate. Sometimes, seemingly-small subsidies or taxes have had
rapid and dramatic impacts on behaviour. For example, the in-
troduction of a small difference in price between leaded and
unleaded fuels in the UK and elsewhere led to a rapid switch
to unleaded fuels. Similarly, requiring retailers to charge con-
sumers a tiny amount for a plastic bag has been shown to dra-
matically reduce their use. On the other hand, many much
larger subsidies and taxes, such as those intended to drive
savings or increase energy efficiency, have proven to have lim-
ited impact.
The fact is, nearly all government (and corporate) policies
have a behavioural component, and hence behavioural analyses
start to unpack what makes some policies/strategies work and
others flop. In so doing, they open the door to alternative and po-
tentially much more effective approaches. In recognition of this,
the UK government launched its very own ‘nudge unit’ in 2010,
and I was tasked with heading it up. The Behavioural Insights
Team (BIT) was born.
The study of human behaviour reveals that many of our
abilities as human beings rest on mental shortcuts or heuristics.
It also leads you to respect these heuristics. In our early days at
BIT, we leaned heavily on a framework called MINDSPACE to
help guide our work (see sidebar). But after the first year or so of
battle-hardened application — and many workshops and conver-
sations — we developed a simplified framework for day-to-day
use: EAST.
Like MINDSPACE, EAST is a mnemonic: If you want to en-
courage a particular behaviour, you should think about making it
Easy, Attractive, Social and Timely. The EAST framework does
not cover every nuance of the behavioural literature, but it does
offer a good starting point.
My colleagues and I have found that frameworks like EAST
enable rapid engagement of a new problem — a sort of mental
checklist that can be run through quickly to enable the identifica-
tion of some simple ideas for early testing. In this article I will
delve into the first principle of this framework.Advice for the Ages: Make it Easy
John was in his late twenties. He had decent grades at school
and a job he enjoyed. He was already an assistant manager, and
rising fast. His employer, a large retailer, offered good benefits,
including a great pension. He remembered the details from
when he first joined, and from a seminar they did for staff the
previous year: For every pound he put in, his employer would put
in the same amount, and the government added more on top. It
was a no-brainer, and he knew it. The only problem: John hadn’t
actually signed up.
Like many people, John knew that he should start saving
for his pension, and it was something he actually wanted to do.
He’d seen his grandparents struggle with money, and he knewSometimes, behaviour changes with
a surprisingly light touch.