UBC-DIBS Behavioural Insights Seminar
Friday, Sept. 13, 1-2pm PT
Register to attend on Zoom at https://bit.ly/DIBS2425.
Lessons about Nudge Scalability
Hengchen Dai
University of California, Los Angelens
Behavioral science and experimentation have the potential to inform policy. However, behavioral interventions that are deemed effective in some evaluations often fail to work in others. If unexplained, such discrepancies in intervention effectiveness across evaluations can cause policymakers to question the value of behavioral insights and experimental research for informing policy solutions. And without theories that explain when, where, and for whom a given intervention is effective, policymakers may design ineffective or even counterproductive interventions for a given context. My recent research has sought to understand why similar behavioral interventions show different efficacies across evaluations. In this talk, I will share a few lessons about factors affecting the scalability of behavioral interventions as well as why strategies that are expected to motivate positive behavior based on prior research may fail to produce the desired outcomes.
The UBC-DIBS Behavioural Insights Seminar series features researchers and practitioners sharing their field and lab projects using the behavioural and decision sciences to “nudge for good”. Recordings of past seminars are available on the BI wiki here. To subscribe or unsubscribe, email dibs@sauder.ubc.ca.