How can we help people save enough for their retirement?  Complete tax returns on time?  Enroll in universities at which they’ve been accepted?  Behavioural psychologists have identified simple techniques – nudges – which make it more likely people will act on their best intentions.  The Behavioural Insights Team offer a handy framework for planning nudges: if you want people to do something, make it Easy, Attractive, Social and Timely – EAST (Service et al., 2014).  If we understand the underlying principles, we can apply them in schools.  This post shares evidence to illustrate four ways to make a desired behaviour easy; a future post will suggest ways to apply this in schools.

Four principles to make a behaviour easy

People retiring must choose how to use their pension, but the rules are complicated and they may be unable or unwilling to engage with their choices.  The Behavioural Insights Team supported a pension provider to condense a pack issued near retirement, usually over fifty pages, to a single page of key information, with the “personalised information a customer needs to access open-market retirement product options and a clear call to action to visit the Pension Wise website.”  The result: “Those receiving the new single-page Pension Passport were ten times more likely to visit the Pension Wise website compared with those receiving the usual wake-up pack (BIT, 2017, p.24).”  1) Simplify information and instructions.

Completing online tax forms is tedious but important; chasing people to complete their forms is expensive and time-consuming.  People often begin, but lose steam partway.  The Behavioural Insights Team changed a single link: instead of directing people to a webpage containing a form, it directed them straight to the form.  This makes responding only slightly easier, but it increased response rates from 19% to 23%.  Similarly, automating and streamlining aspects of university application in the United States increased university attendance by eight percentage points (Service et al., 2014).  2) Remove barriers.

Many American students who have been offered university places never enroll, because they fail to complete tasks like choosing courses and applying for financial support.  uAspire, an American charity, sent eight text messages reminding students about specific tasks their university required.  Those students were 3.1 percentage points more likely to enroll; the increase was almost twice as large among low-income students (SBST, 2015).  Likewise, when people were asked to attend flu vaccinations and given times and dates of future clinics, those invited to write down when and where they intended to receive the vaccination were 4 percentage points more likely to do receive vaccinations (Rogers et al., 2015).  3) Break actions into smaller steps.

Many people spend time waiting for organ donations because of a lack of suitable donors.  In European countries where one must opt to become an organ donor, donation rates are around 15%; in countries where one must opt out, they are around 98% (Bertrand, Mullainathan and Shafir, 2006): people tend to stick with the default.  The Save More Tomorrow programme applied this principle (and others) to encourage retirement saving.  Workers were invited to increase their pension contributions: some did.  Those who did not were invited to commit to increasing their contributions each time they received a pay rise.  Although the first group (who chose to increase contributions immediately) were perhaps more enthusiastic savers, the contributions the second group made soon exceeded theirs: a commitment to increasing pension contributions had become the default (Thaler and Benartzi, 2004).  4) Change the default.

Conclusion

If we want to make a behaviour easy, we can:

  1. Simplify information and instructions (cut fifty pages to one)
  2. Remove barriers (direct people to the page they need)
  3. Break actions into smaller steps (remind students about individual actions)
  4. Change the default (make increasing contributions the default)

We can deter undesirable actions too.  For example, people who overdosed on paracetamol often reported that this was impulsive, using drugs already stored at home.  The government restricted the size of packs sold over the counter.  Changing the default created a (fairly negligible) barrier to obtaining paracetamol.  Deaths from paracetamol poisoning fell by 43% (Hawton et al., 2013).

Future posts suggest ways to apply these principles in schools and discuss times when making desirable behaviour easy might be a mistake.  The first looks at how we can break actions into smaller steps for students, here, the second at how we can make the first step easy to take.

If you found this interesting, you might also like…

A description of my changing understanding of behaviour, here.

My initial response to discovering behavioural psychology, and ideas about how teachers could use it, here.

The guide I’m writing to using behavioural psychology for teachers.  To learn more, sign up here.

References

Behavioural Insights Team (2017). The Behavioural Insights Team Update Report 2016-17.

Bertrand, M., Mullainathan, S. and Shafir, E. (2006). Behavioral Economics and Marketing in Aid of Decision Making Among the Poor. Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 25(1), pp.8-23.

Hawton, K., Simkin, S., Dodd, S., Pocock, P., Bernal, W., Gunnell, D., and Kapur, N. (2013). Long term effect of reduced pack sizes of paracetamol on poisoning deaths and liver transplant activity in England and Wales: interrupted time series analyses. British Medical Journal, p.346.

Rogers, T., Milkman, K., John, L. and Norton, M. (2015). Beyond good intentions: Prompting people to make plans improves follow-through on important tasks. Behavioral Science & Policy, 1(2), pp.33-41.

Service, O., Hallsworth, M., Halpern, D., Algate, F., Gallagher, R., Nguyen, S., Ruda, S., Sanders, M. (2014). EAST: Four simple ways to apply behavioural insights. Behavioural Insights Team.

Social and Behavioral Sciences Team. (2015). Annual Report. Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Thaler, R., Benartzi, S. (2004) Save More Tomorrow: Using Behavioral Economics to Increase Employee Saving. Journal of Political Economy 112(1) 164-187.