Mind, Society, Behaviour (and Development?)

The mayor of Bogotá takes a shower on television to promote saving water, and water consumption drops; HIV patients in Kenya get text messages to remind them to take their medication and adherence rates rise by 13 percentage points; and a simple rewrite of letters from the UK tax office nets the government £200 million… These are among the successes attributed to ‘behavioural interventions’, which consider how psychological and social forces affect the implementation of public policy.

This approach – begun in academia, popularised with the 2008 best-selling book “Nudge,” and put into practice by the British Government’s Behavioural Insights Unit in 2010 – is now coming to the development sector, with the publication of the World Development Report 2015: Mind, Society, and Behavior. The World Development Report has been issued by the World Bank annually since 1978, though this is the first time it has considered a methodology rather than a subject area of development.

Vladimir Šucha, Director-General of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, labelled this year’s report “visionary” and “courageous” for its behavioural focus, which he said had previously been unfashionable.

Inspired by behavioural psychology, the idea is that humans (including both the designers and beneficiaries of development assistance) are less coldly calculating than we think.

The authors write: “The mind, unlike a computer, is psychological, not logical; malleable, not fixed. It is surely rational to treat identical problems identically, but often people do not; their choices change when the default option or the order of choices changes.”

The report argues we all think automatically, socially, and within mental models, and that this has big implications for development policy.

Thinking automatically

We think we think about things carefully, but often we don’t. With more information available than we can process, people use mental shortcuts that are “fast, automatic, effortless, and associative” rather than “slow, deliberative, effortful, serial, and reflective”.

One way for policy-makers to counteract this tendency is to pay attention to how a problem is presented. A US study found that telling people how the interest on their short-term (payday) loan would accumulate quicker than a standard credit card meant they were 11 % less likely to borrow using the former method.

Poor people are likely to rely on automatic decision-making because they exert more mental energy in the struggle for food and survival. In this sense, poverty is said to impose a “cognitive tax”.

One solution for developing countries proposed in the World Bank report is to make important items such as school fees or fertiliser payable at a time when farmers have just been reimbursed for their harvest.

Thinking socially

The report argues that the assumption that humans are autonomous decision-makers has skewed economic policy to focus on material incentives like prices. Yet social expectations, recognition and norms must also be taken into account.

When Bogotá faced a water shortage in 1997, the city’s first response of declaring a public emergency and communicating the pending crisis to citizens only led to more water consumption and hoarding. The World Bank report approvingly cites the way authorities quickly changed tack by:

• Sending volunteers to educate people about water conservation,
• Publicising daily consumption figures,
• Naming individuals who were cooperating with attempts to save water, as well as those who weren’t, and
• Screening a television advertisement in which the mayor appeared in the shower with his wife to champion showering in pairs.

Within two months, water consumption fell by 14 %, and seven years later it was 40 % less than before the shortage, as citizens realised they could save money as well.

The same mayor, Antanas Mockus, once famously hired hundreds of mime artists to follow and mock people they saw breaking road rules under the assumption that Colombians fear ridicule more than being fined.

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Antanas Mockus (Former mayor of Bogota, Colombia) Foto Stephan Röhl

Thinking with mental models

The concepts, categories, stereotypes and worldviews through which we make sense of the world are not our own, rather they are shaped and shared by the community around us.

“Many mental models are useful,” the authors write. “Others are not and contribute to the intergenerational transmission of poverty.”

In one study, Indian boys from a low-caste were just as good as their high-caste peers at solving puzzles when their caste was not revealed, but they performed noticeably worse after being told their relative “status”. In this case it was believed a negative model – about the boys’ inferior identity – was to blame.

Implications for development

Development practitioners are just as likely to fall into established models of thinking as anyone else. In particular, the WDR2015 warns they are susceptible to:

• the use of shortcuts (heuristics) in the face of complexity,
• confirmation bias and motivated reasoning,
• sunk cost bias (‘the tendency to continue a project once an initial investment has been made’), and,
• the effects of context and the social environment on group decision making.

The authors tested their hypothesis on the World Bank’s own staff: while 42 % of those surveyed predicted most poor people in Nairobi would say that vaccines are risky because they can cause sterilisation, in fact this was supported by only 11% of Nairobians.

“This finding suggests the presence of a shared mental model,” the reports says, “not tempered by direct exposure to poverty.”

Owain Service was one of the first members of the Behavioural Insights Unit, which began working at Number 10 Downing Street in 2010 to trial ways in which behavioural psychology could improve government policies. Similar groups have also been established in Germany, Denmark, Australia, Israel, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the Joint-Research Centre of the European Commission.

Mr Service admits the concepts may initially sound “voguish and whacky”, but he is optimistic about their potential application for development work.

“Telling people that most people pay their tax on time, for example, is a really good way of encouraging more people to pay their tax,” he said at the recent Brussels launch of the WDR2015.

One of the most well-known successes of his team – also dubbed the “Nudge Unit” – was rewriting tax department reminder letters to include the fact that nine out of ten people in the area had already paid. Mr Service said these changes typically see a three to four percentage point increase in payments.

“And interestingly we have tried that not just in the UK but in Australia and in Singapore and with the World Bank in Guatemala, and we find very, very similar results."

Now managing director of Behavioural Insights – the company created from the former Nudge Unit and owned by its employees, the UK government and innovation charity Nesta – Mr Service said even small interventions must be trialled and their effectiveness tested.

“The important thing I think is to be able to start with a degree of humility. Sometimes things that we introduce don't work and that's why we need to test them in the first instance. The good news though is that in this area there is so much opportunity for small changes that do have a big impact.”

Klaus Rudischhauser, Deputy Director General of DEVCO, said the challenge now is to draw “operational conclusions” from the report to ensure development programmes consider the subtleties of how to effect behavioural change.

As an example, he said “the question of culture and cultural diversity is something that I see not really very well reflected in our development programmes. We have much more a tendency to do one-size-fits-all across the board - please excuse me if I'm a bit self-critical, but just as the World Bank is self-critical and puts itself really under scrutiny with this kind of report, I think we have to do that as well.”

This collaborative piece was drafted with input from Alessandro Villa (DEVCO) and Emanuele Ciriolo (JRC), with support from the capacity4dev.eu Coordination Team.