Obama urges agencies to use behavioral science to become more effective.
Every fall, more than 20 percent of students from urban school districts who have been accepted to college fail to enroll because they don't complete such necessary tasks as filling out financial aid or course enrollment forms. But small reminders can make a difference. Researchers from a U.S. Department of Education-sponsored project sent a series of nine text messages to thousands of these students, reminding them to complete each necessary step to enrollment. Among the lowest-income students, the reminders raised enrollment rates from 66.4 to 72.1 percent compared with a control group.
That study is part of a report issued in September by the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team (SBST), a federal interagency research and advisory group dedicated to using social and behavioral science to make government programs work better.
The team, centered at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and led by cognitive scientist Maya Shankar, PhD, first convened last year. In September, it reported the results of 15 pilot studies, including the college enrollment study. Inspired by the team's success, on Sept. 15 President Obama signed an executive order urging all federal agencies to incorporate behavioral science insights into the government's work.
Two APA Fellows are key to the effort: Irina Feygina, PhD, a former APA Congressional Fellow, has been working with the team during her tenure at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and APA Executive Branch Science Fellow Matthew D. Johnson, PhD, is the National Institute of Justice's liaison to the team.
The team's work is inspired by the research of social and behavioral scientists, such as that popularized by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in their 2008 book "Nudge." That research has shown that small changes in how options are presented can help people make better decisions in areas as diverse as health, saving for retirement and paying taxes. The United Kingdom established a similar group, the Behavioral Insights Team (sometimes called the "nudge unit") in 2010.
Other pilot studies in the SBST report include one in which researchers nearly doubled the rate at which military service members opened retirement savings accounts by using behavioral principles to design more effective email messages. In another study, researchers raised the rate of double-sided printing among some USDA staff by 5.8 percent by adding a dialogue box that popped up each time an employee printed a single-sided document that asked them to change their default to double-sided printing, a change that over time will result in significant reductions in costs and waste.
"I think that this is a tremendous step forward for the government," says Wendy Wood, PhD, the 2016 president of Div. 8 (Society for Personality and Social Psychology). "It's a great innovation to actually use behavioral science to make policy initiatives more efficient, and to make sure they have the desired effects."
APA will track both the team's work and the impact of the executive order. "We will help federal agencies implement the President's order by identifying relevant behavioral science and suggesting how it can be applied to better meet the needs of citizens. The goal is to enable agencies to use science effectively and ethically," says Howard Kurtzman, PhD, acting executive director of APA's Science Directorate.
— Lea Winerman