Behavioural public policies for the social brain

Abstract

Behavioural public policy is increasingly interested in scaling-up experimental insights to deliver systemic changes. Recent evidence shows some forms of individual behaviour change, such as nudging, are limited in scale. We argue that we can scale-up individual behaviour change by accounting for nuanced social complexities in which human responses to behavioural public policies are situated. We introduce the idea of the ‘social brain’, as a construct to help practitioners and policymakers facilitate a greater social transmission of welfare-improving behaviours. The social brain is a collection of individual human brains, who are connected to other human brains through ‘social cues’, and who are affected by the material and immaterial properties of the physical environment in which they are situated (‘social complex’). Ignoring these cues and the social complex runs the risk of fostering localised behavioural changes, through individual actors, which are neither scalable nor lasting. We identify pathways to facilitate changes in the social brain: either through path dependencies or critical mass shifts in individual behaviours, moderated by the brain's property of social cohesion and multiplicity of situational and dispositional factors. In this way, behavioural changes stimulated in one part of the social brain can reach other parts and evolve dynamically. We recommend designing public policies that engage different parts of the social brain.

Harnessing heterogeneity in behavioural research using computational social science

“…One possible application is what we can call the ecological use of heterogeneity. This is in line with the recent discussions in the behavioural science community about the need to understand contextuality (Banerjee and Mitra, 2023), to address hidden heterogeneity in a population (Schimmelpfennig et al, 2021), to model personalised intervention based on individual models (Krpan et al, 2021;Mills, 2022).…”

Discovering the unknown unknowns of research cartography with high-throughput natural description

“…While mapping theoretical boundaries and engaging in meta-metatheoretical reflections, in applying integrative experimental approaches, can be valuable for understanding the generalisability of existing theories, this does not necessarily address underlying structural issues contributing to the lack of theoretical diversity (Haeffel & Cobb, 2022). Our critique speaks broadly to need for behavioural sciences to see and reason complex adaptive systems with diverse samples (see Banerjee & Mitra, 2023;Hallsworth, 2023).…”

It's Time We Put Agency into Behavioural Public Policy

“…Nudge has been criticised for relying too much on individual responses, which has been claimed to, in turn, lead BPP astray (Chater and Loewenstein, 2023). Even though BPP, such as over diet and food, had always taken a broad societal perspective, there is still a need for more system-focused interventions to take these social interactions between different parties (such as the citizen and the state) into account (Hallsworth, 2023;Banerjee and Mitra, 2023). Our agency-enhancing devices are better suited to this broader approach to behaviour change and public policy, partly because of the previous advantage, where it improves people's capacities to elicit and articulate true preferences (within bounds), but also because agency takes place in a given context and may change over time.…”