sciences can be used to understand and change individual behaviour, which in turn can help meet current policy challenges, such as how to reduce crime, tackle obesity and ensure environmental sustainability. With that in mind, he sets out nine of the most robust (non-coercive) influences on human behaviour, captured in a simple mnemonic – MINDSPACE – which can be used as a quick checklist when making policy. These are:
- Messenger - we are heavily influenced by who communicates information
- Incentives - our responses to incentives are shaped by predictable mental shortcuts such as strongly avoiding losses
- Norms - we are strongly influenced by what others do
- Defaults - we „go with the flow‟ of pre-set options
- Salience - our attention is drawn to what is novel and seems relevant to us
- Priming - our acts are often influenced by sub-conscious cues
- Affect - our emotional associations can powerfully shape our actions
- Commitments - we seek to be consistent with our public promises, and reciprocate acts
- Ego - we act in ways that make us feel better about ourselves
He is working at the moment on one energy related project: “The use of online social norms in
influencing energy consumption: testing whether online information can change behaviour”. The project is an experiment on social tenants in Camden which sends out individual letters that ‘expose’ where the household’s energy consumption lies in comparison to its neighbours. The research found that the households receiving personalised letters have significantly reduced their
energy consumption (by 2%) when compared to the control group (exposed to traditional
campaigning for energy consumption reduction).
However, the research also finds that the ‘letter effect’ seems to wear off in time. Thus, one-off or
short-term changes in behaviour do not seem to trigger longer term changes in lifestyles. …and this is certainly supported by some of the evidence emerging from the CLUES case studies.
