5 years of Behavioral Science
What we have done, what we have learnt, what we plan going forward
Back to the start
The Busara story starts in 2011, when Princeton professor Johannes Haushofer applies to the National Institute of Health (NIH) to study the relationship between stress and poverty in Kenya. Realizing the need for a local decision lab with appropriate infrastructure, the “Busara Center for Behavioral Economics” was founded, counting a team of 8 people (3 of whom are still working with us today: our exceptional Lab Managers Jennifer and Irene, and Consortium Coordinator Monica!).
Our vision: to build research infrastructure internationally and bring together a close group of behavioral scientists, supported by access to under-studied populations, proprietary data and the best available analytics and research methodologies. By 2015, we had conducted world-class research that has helped shape our thinking on the role of religiosity in politics, coethnic biases, and of work in welfare programs.
Behavioral science: applied
As our academic research grew, we found that practitioners and policy-makers were hungry for cutting edge research on behavioral science, but that the time lag between idea to publication was limiting their ability to apply the insights. We were supporting new evidence generation, but doing little to facilitate evidence adoption.
This marked the start of our applied work; a new business model aimed to bring cutting edge behavioral science research to practitioner problems. Our vision was the following:
- To develop a partnership of experienced advisors who can build relationships with socially-minded organizations, identify benefits from applying behavioral research and lead a team to reap those benefits.
- To make advisory services evidence-based, with access to the same advanced analytics and methodologies researchers use.
- To support organizations create positive social benefits by delivering value commensurate with our costs, but also meaningfully support others with high social impact but limited ability to afford our services.
What we did for the last 5 years
Both of these models have thrived over the last 5 years: we’ve grown from a team of 8 to a team of 120 across more than 5 markets.
Meeting demand has kept us busy and our work often reactive, responding and adapting as best we could to continue to grow and serve our partners. This July 2019, in our first attempt to pause and reflect on the body of our work to date, we decided to organise our experiments into case studies. These are filtered by stage of behavior change: the standard decision making journey we all undertake in adopting a new behavior, from contemplation to maintenance. Each client engagement targets one of these stages via a number of behavioral “interventions” (left column): the barriers or levers we can activate to influence or “nudge” specific populations towards a desired outcome. The case studies are mapped on our microsite here and visible below:
In doing this, we learnt a number of things. For example, we can see much of our work focuses on the final stages of the behavioral process, “Action” and “Maintenance”, although the highest impact at scale is usually when behavioral science is applied earlier, in the design stage. (Read more on this in our 5 learnings, below). We also realize how important it is to learn from our successes, as from our failures. Sharing these openly may help others addressing similar issues, which is why we communicate the effects of our experiments (green for positive effect, red for negative effect) transparently and consistently so the community can continue to learn and grow.
As we also work with a large variety of academic partners, we wanted to showcase the papers that have come from these collaborations. These experiments, all in pursuit of new scientific knowledge and academic publication, underwent rigorous lab or field testing. They are organised into “Evaluation”: papers which evaluate the impact of an intervention on a behavior of interest, and “Methods”: papers which explore a method or measurement that is of use to the scientific community. This library of work is also available on our website, and can be filtered by behavior, sector, affiliated institution and geography.
What we found
Five years down the line, we have launched Busara offices in 5 markets, built a global community of transparency and rigor in behavioral science and developed many exciting partnerships with private and public institutions. Having collated this body of work from, we uncovered 5 learnings, listed below:
1. Test for insights, apply for impact
Research done in behavioral development economics has produced impressive results in changing behavior. Yet even the most insightful studies with the strongest effect sizes were often dealing with absolute impact that would not justify implementing the results at scale by a firm. Organizations are, expectedly, tied to their desired business outcomes and must deliver against those ambitious goals, often within a short timeframe. Academic research identifies the mechanisms and levers that drive behavior and provides valuable theories, but these are not always applicable in a business context. We believe behavioral science should be programmed to run a series of experiments that progressively and concertedly move towards a set business outcome.
2. Impact starts early
In our experience, behavioral science is often brought in at the end of the behavior change process and implemented through tweaks to communications, packaging or messaging. Over the past 5 years, our work disproportionately focused on communications (78% of all tests run from 2014–2018), rather than on program or product features. This is the easiest way to get started, and communications interventions can have big impacts. But too often, top-level behavioral interventions are employed in an attempt to solve deeper design problems. The interventions that have had the biggest impact at scale typically involve more fundamental product / program change, the behavioral process starting earlier, in the design stage. We believe full impact comes from early, integrated behavioral design.
3. Biases are local
Behavioral Science teaches us that humans experience behavioral biases in many domains, and that we all share these “irrational” behaviors. This belief includes all humans, but we question how universal biases really are, and whether they are innate, or context-dependent.
Current research is fairly mixed, showing consistency in some domains (loss aversion, time inconsistency) but divergence in others (bargaining, altruism). Five years of practicing behavioral science in East Africa and our cross-cultural validation study from 2016 painted a similar picture to us, but with one critical addition: biases are far more likely to manifest when the stimulus is highly relevant and local.
4. Behavioral science is still WEIRD
The large majority of work in our field is conducted on Western samples, more specifically from a subject pool of individuals from Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies (and usually from the top echelons therein). With African samples accounting for a meagre 0.002% of academic research, the universality of these findings can and should be called into question. While Busara’s story is one of solving the “WEIRD problem”, 5 years later, we have to face the realization that our industry hasn’t progressed much. Research has expanded outside of the traditional academic centers, but it has yet to embrace the markets we care about most and operate in.
Nudge units, a primary measure of the supply side of behavioral science, have proliferated: from ~45 units in 2013 to 200+ in 2018, but with the vast majority in Europe, North America, and Australia.
We know that demand for behavioral science is increasingly global, but supply remains largely concentrated in high income countries: our science needs more focus on building behavioral policy units, research centers, and training programs in the Global South.
5. Lab research is becoming easier and faster
Over time within the academic community, we have seen decision labs (controlled environments to administer experiments) be deployed in a variety of settings and preserving the same level of scientific rigor, consequently enticing a new generation of researchers. In parallel, the industry-side is interested in A/B testing and live testing, but often face complex systems with bureaucratic review processes . Realizing it can often be more costly to test on the platform than off, demand for lab work has been increasing among our applied partners: it is cheaper and faster than other options. Indeed, since 2014 we have deployed 10+ lab environments across 15+ countries.
We believe that decision labs are a critical research tool to solving the WEIRD problem.
What’s next
For this next phase of our organization’s development, we want to focus on the most important challenges facing behavioral science. Our mission statement, which has guided Busara since its incorporation, remains:
To work with researchers and organizations to advance and apply behavioral science in pursuit of poverty alleviation.
In order to fulfill this mission, our strategy is to bridge the gap between research and application by becoming the world leader in deploying behavioral science teams within organizations.
When teams operate outside of an organization, they are inherently limited in the value they can generate for the organization, as well as the potential opportunities they can provide for the researchers. “Building teams”, as outlined in our strategy, can include a number of possibilities:
- Selecting, training and placing talented behavioral scientists into organizations who hire them,
- Embedding Busara team members within an organisation, training and capacity building full time staff to create an embedded unit,
- Setting up world-class decision labs in collaboration with academic institutions across the Global South.
In order to truly conduct behavioral science that is both academically rigorous and drives value for the organization, we will focus on deploying these teams with and for our partners.
