NPR – Owen Phillips
“What’s the tiniest change you can think of to create the biggest improvement in someone’s well-being? That’s the question at the heart of the first annual report by the new Social and Behavioral Sciences Team inside the White House. This group of scientists has found that simple, small tweaks to existing official messaging can create huge effects on everything from savings to sustainability to fraud. Governments around the world are increasingly getting interested in how insights from psychology can make policy more effective. As an NPR Ed intern last year, I wrote about a proposal to use text messages to nudge students to complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. Now I work for the U.K.’s Behavioural Sciences Team, a firm spun off from the government to apply behavioral insights to policy problems.”(more)