The Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP) is a government-funded program for all permanent visa holders and some temporary visa holders who have less than a vocational level of English. Not all people who are eligible for the AMEP participate in it. The Department of Home Affairs commissioned BETA to evaluate the effectiveness of communication in participants’ home languages on increasing participation in the AMEP.
Trial 1: We will send text messages to speakers of Mandarin, Cantonese,…
Behavioural Insights Projects
Discover projects applying behavioural science to policy from around the world. Add your own projects, whether completed or still ongoing, to contribute knowledge on BI applications across different countries, policy areas, and topics of interest.
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BI Project
Social Multipliers at Work: Improving Children’s Outcomes Through Aspirations and Role Models
Every year, governments spend large amounts
of resources on development programs that aim
to change poor households’ behaviors and attitudes
toward investment in the education, health, and
nutrition of their children as a way to end the cycle
of poverty. One key mechanism that can achieve this
is working to raise aspirations. But how do you do
that in practice?
In this project, together with Karen Macours of the
Paris School of Economics and the Ministry of Family
in Nicaragua, we find that…
The purpose of this survey is to better understand Canadians’ perceptions, knowledge and decision-making related to home energy labels and to explore different design features and information presentations that may drive energy-efficient choices.
BI Project
Comparing the impact of positive, negative, and graded sustainability labels on purchase decisions
An online experiment with EU consumers was run to assess the relative effectiveness of three sustainability labelling approaches: (1) positive labels - only identifying products with the best sustainability performance, (2) negative labels - only identifying products with the worst sustainability performance, and (3) graded labels - conveying the relative sustainability of all products. Results suggest that graded labels are the most effective to steer consumer toward more sustainable purchase…
BETA Survey Series: Towards Net Zero – BETA will conduct a survey series to fill current information gaps and better understand barriers and enablers to making high impact household decisions that limit greenhouse gas emissions.
Regulators require lenders to display a subset of credit card features in summary tables before customers finalize a credit card choice. Some jurisdictions require some features to be displayed more prominently than others to help ensure that consumers are made aware of them. This approach could lead to untoward effects on choice, such that relevant but nonprominent product features do not factor in as significantly. To test this possibility, we instructed a random sample of 1615 adults to…
Challenge
Research suggests that some students—including low-income, underrepresented minority, and first generation students—avoid applying for financial aid due to a combination of psychological reasons. Some are overwhelmed by the complexity of the process, while others worry they’ll feel out of place in college or be stigmatized for their socio-economic background. These psychological factors can cause students to avoid applying for aid, or fail to complete their financial aid…
BI Project
Effective position of call-to-action: Is the response rate higher if the call-to-action appears the…
How can response rates to questionnaires be increased? In the first quarter of 2023, some of the participants in a CBS survey received a letter in which the call-to-action appeared as far as possible at the top of the letter. The other participants received standard letters. The analyses showed that the standard letters produced a significantly higher response rate than the letters in which the call-to-action was placed at the top.
Why this experiment was conducted: high response rate is…
An ever-increasing number of AI ethicists can enumerate the most prominent risks; yet startlingly few psychologists, or other experts in behavioral science, are working on the project of aligning AI outcomes with fundamental ethical and safety principles. This knowledge gap is striking given the extraordinary investments being channeled into the technology’s ability to master and influence human behavior. In neglecting more than a century of relevant behavioral research, the ethical AI…
Challenge
The City of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania offers a discount to low-income senior citizens living in the municipality on their water bills. Senior water and sewer customers can apply to receive 25 percent off their payments for water in an effort to reduce the financial burden on those elderly citizens with lesser means.
However, despite the fact that this would benefit the citizens in question, the City of Philadelphia noticed that many low-income seniors eligible for the discount were…