Behavioural Insights (BI) Practitioners-in-training in UBC’s Advanced Professional Certificate in Behavioural Insights complete a capstone project to apply their developing BI knowledge and skills to real-world problems. Our first two cohorts of BI Practitioners worked in teams to complete an amazing 15 randomized controlled trials! As teams turn these projects into working papers, conference presentations, and journal articles, we’ll be posting them to the BI wiki at https://blogs.ubc.ca/biwiki/bi-at-ubc/. Our next featured project is:
I Saw the Sign! Using Behaviourally-Informed Signs to Encourage Parking Compliance
James Climenhage, Mandy Khoo, & Whitney Queisser
(Advisor: David Hardisty)
This project aimed to improve compliance with paid parking in the City of Vancouver. New “Behavioural Insights informed” parking signs incorporated salience by increasing sign and font size and adding more colour. Due to feasibility constraints, the control and BI-informed signs were compared in a quasi-experimental trial between two locations in the city. Although the BI-informed signs did not significantly increase parking compliance, the project team has several recommendations, including trialing in other locations and trialing signs incorporating other Behavioural Insights.
Keywords: behavioural insights, nudge, salience, loss aversion, compliance, signage, parking