Behavioral Insight

By Rita Angelini and Isabella Caravaggio When Shamshad Akhtar was appointed as a gender desk officer in her hometown of Multan, Pakistan, she didn’t expect to face the challenges she did. The gender desk was established to address gender-based grievances by connecting women to specialized social services. Women were sometimes…

To start with, I’m grateful to my flatmates for yesterday night. If they wouldn’t have pushed me to abandon my shorts, dirty t-shirt and messy hair, I would have never got the opportunity to write this! :) Love you guys! Now giving you all the context, I went out with…

Towards understanding households’ values, beliefs, and attitude towards waste, and to help identify favorable attributes that will help nudge households to segregate waste at source. Three colored bins for waste segregation were tested in one of the core areas of Thimphu as part of an innovative trial of behavioral interventions…

Losing a job can affect the rest of your life. The early weeks of COVID-19 saw mass layoffs in BC. Our province lost nearly 400,000 jobs. Unemployment doubled. During this difficult time, the Ministry of Social Development and Poverty Reduction (SDPR) has played a major role. Through its WorkBC program…

A few days ago, I received a message on twitter from Bayo (not his real name). He had read about my innovation in infant health and the invention of the Crib A’glow Solar Phototherapy Units by Tiny Hearts and reached out to me. His message- “Hi Virtue, I came across…

Last weekend while making breakfast, I saw a blue jay out the window as it landed on the driveway. A tape instantly started playing in my head. “Blue jays are bad. Bluebirds are good. …

In late spring I started sharing some of my personal reflections on organizing virtual events for the first time in my public service career (you can find them here, here, and here). The virtual events are a part of a pilot project, the Behavioural Insights Applied Learning Pilot I’m helping…

It’s been a decade since the term “behavioral insights” entered the government innovation vocabulary. The idea was always simple: to devise public-sector programs, policies, and services based not on how we might wish people would behave, but rather, on what evidence shows us about how they actually do. Since then…

A member of the Saliksik Group (a Saliksiker!) posted about a webinar on behavioral insights of SMEs in the UK. Having technically no background in the field of behavioral science, I got curious and attended the webinar. It was fascinating! Below are 5 things that I learned. …