The behavioral science revolution is officially underway. Nudge, one of the discipline’s most influential trade books, is now on more than 750,000 bookshelves worldwide, and its co-author Richard Thaler is a new Nobel laureate. The Behavioural Insight Team’s (BIT) successful effort to encourage Brits to pay £210 million in overdue taxes found its way into a popular episode of Freakonomics. “Nudge units” and efforts to experiment inside government agencies across the United States soon followed, set up by in-demand behavioral science consultancies like BIT and ideas42. Now, even the World Bank, OECD, and United Nations are hip to the idea that easy, low-cost tweaks to the decision-making environment can reap huge rewards for governments and citizens.
Yet for all of behavioral science’s successes, skeptics remain. Will behavioral interventions ever achieve more than incremental, context-specific change? Can the techniques of behavioral science really tackle the most pressing, life-threatening issues of our time?
This special series, Can Behavioral Science Save Humanity?, explores how behavioral scientists break down major social issues into solvable problems, with dedicated stories on disaster preparedness, chronic disease, and international conflict.
This series was conceived in partnership with the Behavioral Insights Student Group (BISG), which engages students across the Harvard community in behavioral science scholarship and practice. Click here to learn more about BISG or get involved.
- In the Face of Massive Social Challenge, Start Small by Marie Lawrence
- What Works to Increase Disaster Preparedness by Stephanie Chan
- The Life Saving Science of Avoiding Temptation by Koen van der Swaluw
- Undoing Tribalism: How Behavioral Science Can Sway Opinion and Reduce Conflict by Sylvie Stoloff and Anna Giannuzzi