RATIOS FINANCIEROS

An example of the provision of information failing to produce behaviour change was a trial run with department store John Lewis, imitating one performed in Norway, that tested whether altering energy labels on washers and dryers to include the lifetime running costs changed purchasing choices (41). In this instance only washer-dryers saw a significant positive effect. Altering the style of communication has proven to be more effective than simply providing information. Personalisation was found to be effective if addressed to ethnic groups as well as

individuals. By changing the message received by applicants to become police officers to one cached in terms of benefits to themselves and their community, the BIT reduced the rate of failure by BME applicants at a troublesome stage of the application process (37).

Reducing the provision of information can also achieve an outcome. It was found that school students responded more to hearing the lifestyle benefits of university than career benefits (43), showing how the myopia of students could be used to their benefit. Appealing to authority bias was not effective in the latter period. An attempt to use trusted

messengers to advise people how to more effectively use their boilers and thermostats had a visibly negative effect (42). The BIT continued to experiment with different forms of communication, trialling what modes of communication are most effective to make employers rethink their decisions to employ migrants without leave to remain (38).

Often the old policies, especially the ones that use communication, were re-hashed for new audiences and purposes (28, 29, 30, 34, 35 & 39). Another example of choosing a salient moment to communicate a message that was not successful was an attempt to promote smoking

cessation to newly pregnant women. This failure prompted the BIT to note that it is “important to test and trial interventions before rolling them out” (BIT, 2015b, p. 15), and is reflective of failures to reach lower

socio-economic groups.

A conspicuous policy was the redesign of the government’s organ donation website (23). The BIT trialled eight different webpages designed to increase organ donation, each with a different message communicated. All but one of the seven designs performed better than the base, which simply stated “THANK YOU: Please join the NHS Organ Donation Register”. The webpage that underperformed featured a

picture of a crowd of people, while the BIT was surprised that any of the seven alternatives performed worse than the base. The two pages that performed best were the one that framed failure to donate as a loss (“three people die every day because there are not enough organ donors”), and one that emphasised the reciprocal nature of organ donation (“If you needed an organ transplant would you have one?”). One conclusion from this trial is that the aesthetics of the website was not significant, it was the incentives and social norms, the message itself, that motivated behaviour change, as the page that simply changed

visuals decreased the success rate. Something similar was done at a later date, during which it was found that a carousel decreased the efficacy of webpages (34). Therefore there are two examples of the BIT trying to make something more attractive, with the final effect opposite of what was expected.

Another insight from the BIT led to the reforming of the pupil premium from simply giving schools more funding depending on how many disadvantaged children they are responsible for educating, to one that distributes awards for improving the performance of disadvantaged

pupils (36). This changing of incentives is the result of no bias and uses no bias, strictly engages system 2, and shows the BIT converging on ‘normal’ government policies, actually just tweaking existing ones. One policy that the BIT advocated but was not adopted was lotteries with prizes to reward people who register to vote (Halpern, 2015). These policies appeal primarily to system two and constitute conventional government intervention, albeit more targeted and evidence-based. They impose costs on taxpayers (though perhaps for long-term savings) and show behavioural science not being used to shrink the level of state but to extend its reach.

The end of the sample shows the BIT increasingly working on changing the behaviour of government employees, often with heuristics to help them handle complicated tasks. This has been done for medical prescriptions to reduce the need for handwriting and resulting misunderstanding (31), and for social workers to improve their decision-making (24, 26 & 27). The BIT stopped policy

recommendations altogether, or sold replicas of policies to different countries. Eleven papers from this period (compared to one from the early period) feature no policy recommendations, and instead advise organisations about integrating psychology into their work, in a manner reminiscent of the ‘think pieces’ of the PMSU. The educative function the BIT has taken up involves educating people about their own cognitive biases, as well as educating NGOs about the ways biases affect their services. Frontline policies that have focussed on educating the general public have been rare for the BIT. One such paper was based on West Sussex, intended to to improve the parenting skills of foster parents, specifically their resilience, well-being, engagement with the community, and stress-handling ability..