ideas42

Boosting Student Voter Participation During a Pandemic

Thu, 22 Oct 2020 16:28:20 GMT

Nearly twice as many students voted in the 2018 midterm election as in 2014, raising turnout among student voters to a high-water mark. As recently as last fall, analysts confidently forecasted similarly record-breaking levels of participation in the 2020 presidential election. Fast forward 12 months and, needless to say, things have changed. The pandemic is impacting every part of the student experience, and civic participation is no different.

Back in 2016, ideas42 set out to investigate barriers to student voter participation by speaking to college students, faculty, and leadership across the country. Students intent on voting often face substantial structural barriers like restrictive ID laws, but we also identified behavioral obstacles that bear on student participation, many of which can be addressed through simple and proactive messages to help them navigate steps of the voting process like registering to vote or requesting a mail ballot for the first time. In the years since we published our initial findings, colleges and universities have made great progress helping students exercise their right to vote, but a pandemic that has thrust campuses nationwide into a chaotic fall semester now threatens that progress.

Understanding the Changed Landscape of Student Voting

To better understand how COVID-19 is impacting how students are thinking about the election — and what schools can do to support student voters — we conducted a national survey using Amazon’s MTurk platform over three weeks this August. Overall, we heard from just over 1,000 eligible voters between the ages of 18-25 years old who are enrolled at 2-year and 4-year colleges and universities across the United States.

The good news is that our survey indicated that most students report strong intentions of voting. The bad news is that even in the best of times the number of students who report that they intend to vote tends to outstrip the number who actually cast a ballot, and the pandemic has exacerbated many of the barriers that prevent civic-minded students from following through on their goal of participating in the election. Below we explore four such barriers that have taken on heightened resonance this year, along with concrete ways schools can help students overcome them:

1. Uncertainty about the process of voting

As new voters, students face a lot of uncertainty about the details and implications of registering to vote. Even in “normal” times, they lack the familiarity with the elections that helps more seasoned voters navigate the electoral process. As a deep literature from behavioral science demonstrates, when we experience uncertainty or ambiguity about a decision, we tend to shy away from it. While the pandemic has heightened ambiguity and confusion around how to participate for all voters, introducing a new dimension of uncertainty around the safety of different voting options. This is especially true for students, millions of whom are unsure where they’ll be living next month, let alone how they’ll vote in the election.

Over 90% of students reported that they intend to vote this fall, but if they have not considered how in-person options have changed in their states over the past few months they could confront unanticipated obstacles. Over 80% of surveyed students indicated that voting in person (either through early voting or on election day) is the voting method that feels most familiar or “normal,” but in-person voting is more complex and ambiguous this year than in previous elections due to changes in polling locations, new safety protocols, and new options in some states – such as early voting.

While some students are proactively considering other methods of voting besides in-person, this means that they’re even less familiar with the process. Nearly 33% of our survey respondents indicated that the way they intend to vote this fall is not what they consider normal. Students are already new to voting, and any knowledge they might have may not be applicable in a year when familiar options like the local polling place are no longer available, or no longer safe.

What students need:

Simple and clear information about the different voting options and processes from a source that they trust.

What schools can do:

Be prepared to answer common voter questions about registration, voter ID laws, mail ballot eligibility and relevant voting deadlines.

2. Indecision about where to register and vote

Students who choose to move away for college may be uneasy registering to vote at school. Some feel like they’re abandoning their hometowns — especially if they are connected to local issues that may affect their families and friends. Worse yet, many fear that registering in the wrong place could result in serious consequences like compromised financial aid.

Voting by mail is often a good option for students, and access has expanded even further this year, with nearly three quarters of Americans eligible to vote by mail. But with more options comes more opportunities for indecision, and students may be uniquely vulnerable to confusion over where and how to vote. Over half of the students we surveyed intended to register and vote using their campus address, but they may be unsure how to plan for sudden changes in their living arrangements between now and November 3 as a result of unanticipated COVID-19 spikes.

What students need:

Reassurance that students can register “at home” and still be part of the student community, regardless of whether or not they remain on campus.

What schools can do:

Deliver tailored registration and absentee ballot request information based on the requirements of student’s home states. In many states, students are eligible for absentee ballots, even without a COVID exception.

3. Low visibility of participation

During our initial research into student voting, we found that voting was not always visible or well-advertised on college campuses, and that schools rarely communicated an expectation that students should participate in elections. Over the last several years, colleges have made strides to make voting more salient, such as locating polling places in high-traffic campus locations, starting civic engagement initiatives, and using posters and in-person organizing to engage with students.

This year, with many students taking classes remotely, many of these efforts will be severely curtailed if not impossible. Students who, like the rest of us, look to the people around them for cues on what to do, might conclude that voting isn’t typical behavior. We know that social norms, or the perceived behavior of others, exert a powerful influence on whether or not students vote, and in an election where more people plan to vote by mail than ever before, there will be even fewer visible signals of student participation, such as the popular “I voted” stickers.

Our survey indicated that nearly half of surveyed students did not know whether or not their three closest friends intend to vote, and the fall semester’s absence of visible normative signals like tables at student centers, flyers on lampposts, or lines at campus polling places risks further undermining student participation and leaving many students in the dark on the voting behavior of their peers.

What students need:

Clear messages that voting is normal, and expected, behavior for students, and opportunities for students to publicly share voting plans.

What schools can do:

Participate in the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, where campuses commit to increasing student voting rates. Many resources already exist through this project that can help schools create a salient norm of student voting.

4. Psychological distance between voting and everyday life

Voting is one of the principal ways that citizens of a democracy act on their political conviction. For younger Americans, however, it is not always a natural form of political expression. Our initial research rejected the notion that students are underrepresented in the American electorate because they are disengaged – when it comes to other forms of political participation like protesting, they are just as engaged as other Americans, if not more. Instead, we found that students often fail to link their everyday experiences to voting.

Our survey revealed that while many students do view voting as an impactful way to drive change in their communities, a sizable minority see donating money to causes (such as mutual aid funds or community based organizing) or protesting as more important. Heightened activism around pressing social causes that began earlier this year presents an opportunity to transfer momentum into student voter turnout, but only if students see voting as a consistent extension of, and not a substitute for, other forms of political participation that may come more naturally to them.

What students need:

Support to think through the concrete details of voting for the first time, and an invitation to participate in the election to spark change around the issues they care about.

What schools can do:

Frame voting as a natural next step for anyone who has previously donated money or attended protests — keep the momentum going!

How Schools Can Help Their Student Voters

Heading into a critical election at the outset of a highly irregular academic year, schools have an opportunity, and an obligation, to proactively address heightened barriers to student voting — and it’s not too late for schools to make a difference, even with limited resources. A final insight from our survey suggests great potential for schools to make an impact: one in four students could not recall having ever been contacted by someone at their school about registering to vote. While registration deadlines have passed in many states across the country, over 20 allow voters to register and cast a ballot on the same day in-person. And beyond registering to vote, schools have a unique ability to help students throughout every step of the voting process.

Nurturing strong habits of civic engagement among students is an obligation that schools can’t push to the back burner, even as they deal with unprecedented challenges brought on by the pandemic. In our new context, schools need to leverage their entire communications toolbox — email, social media, direct text messages, and more — to help their students understand and exercise their right to vote, wherever they are.

The post Boosting Student Voter Participation During a Pandemic appeared first on ideas42.

De-biasing the Process to Drive Diversity in Tech Entrepreneurship with Ventures for Shared ...

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 17:08:02 GMT

Like so many of the world’s innovators, when Janica Alvarez became fed up with a terrible product, she invented a better one, in this case a breast pump. Her smart pump enables faster, more comfortable pumping, and allows mothers to track their output. Breast pumps hadn’t been improved in years, and there was strong demand for a better product. Yet Janica struggled to obtain the funding needed to grow her business.

Sadly, many people like Janica face steep barriers to entry into the world of tech entrepreneurship. Just 1-3% of venture capital funding goes to Black and Latino founders, and only 9% goes to women of any background. The lack of diversity in the tech-based entrepreneurial world across gender, race, orientation, and socio-economic status stems from unequal opportunity driven by biases and systemic racism. In our own new initiative, Ventures for Shared Prosperity, we aim to attract entrepreneurs who can reflect their lived experience in the products they develop, and who might not normally have the opportunities to do so because of exclusion from networks or resources. We’ve developed a thoughtful approach to recruiting, informed by behavioral science, that can be easily adopted by others.

As is the case in other sectors, those who decide who gets opportunities often claim that lack of diversity is driven by a lack of qualified talent. It’s a phenomenon John Rice has labeled “the Third Degree of Racism”, where the victim is essentially blamed for the structural systems reinforcing lack of opportunity in society. These existing structural barriers are significant and rooted in a long history of public policies. Additionally, most decisions about hiring and funding are made by humans, and we know from behavioral science that all humans have unintentional and unconscious biases. Those biases are at play in the common processes used to recruit, hire, promote, and fund.

Beyond limiting opportunities for innovators from underrepresented groups, the lack of diversity in entrepreneurship also creates a world that is designed for the few instead of the many. For better or worse, startup founders and entrepreneurs are responsible for many of the products, tools, apps, and resources we use in our day-to-day lives, and if they’re all inventing solutions to problems from a limited perspective, many problems go unsolved, and indeed many solutions on the market fail to work for many.

It’s no secret that entrepreneurs usually address problems that they directly understand or are facing themselves. It’s why Janica Alvarez created the Naya Smart Breast Pump. It’s why when Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick created Uber, it wasn’t because they wanted to revolutionize transportation, it was because they wanted to make it easier to get a taxi in San Francisco, something they found frustrating in their own lives. The solution is simple–if we want businesses and services that solve different types of problems, we need to recruit and fund people who understand and have experience with different types of problems.

The onus is on those offering opportunities to innovators to make sure they design efforts to find, support, and unleash the untapped talent that exists. It is also on those offering opportunities to both measure how they perform in such efforts, and hold themselves accountable to the outcomes. The ultimate aim is to adapt the entrepreneurship pipeline to fit new people, not reshape people to fit the pipeline.

With Ventures for Shared Prosperity, we’re seeking a cohort of entrepreneurs to build socially impactful software businesses that reduce the many excess costs faced by people with low incomes. Central to this work is an effort to recruit individuals typically shut out of the world of tech entrepreneurship, with program features designed specifically to support them. We know there are many talented people with innovative ideas or a passion for solving problems in their communities who are currently outside the world of tech entrepreneurship, facing complex barriers to accessing resources and opportunities.

We recognize that this statement stands in stark contrast to recent comments made by the CEO of our funder, Wells Fargo, around diversity and hiring. The goal of Ventures for Shared Prosperity is and has always been to improve lives and to de-bias unfair processes. It is simply the way we believe the problem needs to be solved. We hope our funder is also ready to do this same work internally, and to tackle the barriers that exist for underrepresented groups during hiring processes.

Drawing from research on bias in hiring, and building on the work done to improve our own recruiting efforts at ideas42 through a behavioral science lens, our aim in designing a bespoke approach to cohort recruitment is to cast a wider net at the outreach stage, de-bias the application process and establish structures that make participation possible for people of all backgrounds, and set concrete diversity goals for ourselves.

We’re sharing the barriers and strategies we’ve identified both to take our own recommendation to make our recruitment process more transparent, and in the hopes that others can use them in their own efforts. Following the onboarding of our first cohort of entrepreneurs, we’ll be sharing an update on what we’ve learned from this approach.

1. Financial risk and insecurity

Entrepreneurship is inherently risky. It takes significant time and resources (when founders aren’t necessarily earning income) to generate a business idea. Individuals with personal wealth or with access to wealthy networks are among the few who have typically been able to take this type of risk. Such barriers likely prevent many people from entering, and perhaps even considering, tech entrepreneurship.

To create more diversity in our cohort, the first step we took with Ventures for Shared Prosperity was to mitigate these risks. Individuals engaged in Venture for Shared Prosperity will receive a full salary and health benefits for the first 18 months of the program, in addition to (and distinct from) startup capital. The program also includes time for ideation (as opposed to requiring a fully developed product idea at the application stage), and no specific tech skills are required. Cohort members will receive ample support from business advisors, software developers, and behavioral scientists to help with design, customer insights, and UX. Such support can make tech entrepreneurship more feasible for more people.

2. Networks skewed toward privilege

Tech is a small world. Funding tends to be spread through the same networks, among those with similar backgrounds and even in similar locations. This skews application pools toward more privileged individuals. A RateMyInvestor report found that over 25% of invested capital goes to founders who attended Ivy League schools (while by contrast fewer than 1% of 2019 college graduates overall obtained a degree from an Ivy League school), and 42% of VC-backed startups are physically located in Silicon Valley. In the U.S., 18.3% of the population is Black and 18.5% is Latino, and yet less than 3% of VC firms have Black or Latino investment partners.

That’s why it’s important to broadcast new opportunities beyond the typical networks and channels. In addition to a public launch at the Prosperity Now conference, we’re prioritizing outreach to community-based organizations and groups that specifically work to support diverse communities, rather than just to players already involved with existing tech and financial services networks.

3. Language that excludes

Language and framing in job postings can be, among other things, gendered, and perceptions of being qualified for an opportunity can differ by gender. In one study, the removal of qualifications that were optional and “superfluous adjectives” resulted in more qualified women applying for jobs. Of course, language can carry signifiers that exclude based on a wide range of identities and group membership including class, race, national origin, and ability.

While not a panacea, the gender decoder for job ads is a valuable tool for anyone designing outreach programs or hiring processes. We used it to improve sections of the Ventures for Shared Prosperity site and informational materials. Additionally, standard criteria for assessing candidates for more traditional jobs doesn’t necessarily translate to entrepreneurial success, so our materials emphasize a wider range of applicable skill sets, including lived and personal experiences outside a work environment.

4. Not enough transparency in evaluation processes

When seeking funding or other opportunities in the world of entrepreneurship, “the rules of the game seem opaque,” especially for underrepresented applicants. How do applicants know the process is fair?

To increase transparency, applications should provide an explanation about why every question is being asked, and how it corresponds to the evaluation process. These explanations might seem obvious to those who created the questions, but not to the applicants themselves. In our application, we’re also explaining how we see the questions connecting back to entrepreneurship by using short blurbs that help frame the questions. For instance, in questions where we ask about what motivates the candidate, we provide a link to information about our area of focus and explicitly ask candidates to connect their motivation to the topic area.

5. Implicit bias in screening applications

Women receive different types of questions from venture capital firms than men, and underrepresented minorities are more likely to receive additional probes during interviews than others.

Equalizing the evaluation process is crucial. Developing a set of fixed interview questions and scoring criteria that will be applied to all applicants reduces the potential for evaluators to default to unconscious biases when assessing candidates. Screening candidates in a slate, or comparing an individual’s qualifications to those of the other applicants rather than making judgement calls about each applicant individually, can also help to de-bias screening.

With Ventures for Shared Prosperity, to ensure that we’re incorporating a diversity of perspectives, multiple reviewers will evaluate each candidate independently. We will also track metrics around who is, and who is not, making it through each stage of our application process in order to further investigate whether there are features of our application process that unintentionally remain biased. At each stage we can then see if there are inequities before narrowing the candidate pool.

Where we go from here

After our first cohort of entrepreneurs has been selected, we’ll share what we’ve learned from this process in the hope that others find the insights useful. What worked? What was the experience like for applicants? What would we do differently? If widely adopted, insights like these can pave the way for innovative changes that make entrepreneurship (and hiring overall) more inclusive and support the development of groundbreaking products and services with the potential to drastically improve many lives, not just a few.

Interested in learning more about our approach to de-biasing recruitment and outreach? Get in touch at info@ideas42.org.

The post De-biasing the Process to Drive Diversity in Tech Entrepreneurship with Ventures for Shared Prosperity appeared first on ideas42.

Brain, Meet Modern Journalism

Wed, 07 Oct 2020 15:25:20 GMT

A lesson one of us (Elizabeth) learned in journalism school: The best first sentences, also known as the lead, are vacuums. Great journalists use them to demand a slice of readers’ limited cognitive bandwidth and suck them into a story. If the story is well-written and interesting enough, your audience will read and understand it, lectured journalism school professors back when Facebook was merely a platform for students to connect.

A lesson that both of us have learned as applied behavioral scientists: our psychology influences how and whether we read the news in ways that can render even the most powerful lead moot. For instance, we constantly make unconscious decisions about what to focus on and what to ignore – not necessarily based on what’s most important to us, but on small cues in our environment. As a journalist, you can help news consumers zero in on key information by changing those environmental cues and presenting it at moments when they’re primed to listen.

Understanding how our psychology interacts with the news we consume is more important than ever as journalists plan election coverage during a season rife with misinformation that threatens the integrity of our democracy. Perhaps the most important piece of information news consumers will need to understand over the next month: November 3rd is the first day of what will likely be a prolonged election results period – and that’s a sign of the system working properly.

We can apply proven behavioral principles to help the public navigate these unusual times and prepare for what’s to come in November. Below, we’ve pulled together four simple insights journalists can use when covering the election, each paired with easy-to-use solutions aimed at building understanding and confidence in the upcoming election results.

Insight #1: Reset people’s expectations early and often. It’s certainly not news that emotions around this election are in overdrive. But as we inch towards November, emotional states will only intensify, making people more likely to support interpretations of the results that favor their candidates – regardless of veracity. To account for this tendency, we can help people internalize how votes will be tallied far in advance of November 3rd while they are still receptive to objective information. Rather than using phrases like “delayed results,” journalists should frame longer count periods as a signal of an accurate and secure count.

More specifically, you can offer a clear framework for anticipating which states may need more time to count votes. This framework could be built around three objective indicators: 1) the expected proportion of mail ballots; 2) the rules determining when officials can start processing and counting mail ballots; and 3) the closeness of the races being contested.

Illustration:

Insight #2: Keep key information simple, consistent, and redundant. People have a limited supply of attention in an already noisy media environment. To break through the din, go back to basics: concise messages that reset basic expectations, delivered over and again. Reinforce in as many ways as possible that accurate results may take several weeks to be fully counted. Redundant messages will make the new expectations and vote count timelines feel intuitive and familiar, and therefore, more likely to be perceived as true.

One approach to consider is affixing standard language to all political coverage from now through November.

Insight #3: Deliver clear cues to orient people’s expectations in real time. People constantly make unconscious assessments of situations based on subtle cues in their environment. When Election Day arrives, visual markers and other signals can help your audience navigate a deluge of information and maintain the accurate expectations that have been set.

Returning to the message that election day will be the first of many, try labeling November 3rd as “Day 1” of an ongoing election period. You could also preview important milestones happening in the week (or weeks) after the election to set accurate expectations.

Illustration:

Insight #4: Empower people with concrete information at the right time. People tend to hold on to existing beliefs and rationalize evidence to support them while rejecting information that doesn’t. This can place a higher burden on journalists to present results in a way that can’t be easily misconstrued. When in doubt, we recommend over-explaining election processes so they’re concrete and transparent. As with our previous insights, providing real-time details on what factors are causing drawn-out (or initially skewed) results equips your audience with a credible understanding of what’s happening in each state. That, in turn, could make them less likely to fall for false claims of election rigging or other attempts to challenge the integrity of the process.

Combine early vote counts with information on the number of outstanding mail ballots and any ballot processing policies that may prolong the results (e.g., a state’s deadline for receiving ballots from the post office).

Illustration:

For the two of us, the longer we’ve worked together, the more we’ve realized that behavioral scientists and journalists have a lot in common – and a lot we can learn from each other. Both fields, after all, are interested in excavating the often hidden explanations for why people do what they do. Both fields care about communicating crucial information clearly and concisely.

Journalism is designed to capture attention, slice through noise and illuminate truth. But in an election season rife with confusion and misinformation, this job is harder than ever. Making small changes to how coverage is framed, explained, and disseminated could make a big difference in how the public understands what’s happening in the election. And with the precarious state our democracy is currently in, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

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How to Prevent the Minor Errors that Disqualify Mail-In Ballots

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 19:30:00 GMT

At first glance, mail-in ballot numbers seem to presage a coming disaster: during the primaries more than 550,000 mail ballots were rejected, many disqualified for seemingly small errors, like envelopes sealed with tape. But these numbers don’t signal an inevitable November Nightmare. In fact, the science of human behavior can help explain both why these rejection rates were so high and how state and local officials can reduce them in November.

The usual reasons for rejecting mail ballots are: they arrive too late, administrators can’t match a voter’s signature with the one on file, or the signature is missing altogether. Notably, rejection rates are typically higher in states where fewer people use mail ballots. With effective design and outreach, these problems can all be overcome.

Take first the problem of missed deadlines.

Voters often rely on past experiences of voting in-person, their mental model of how voting works, to set their expectations for the vote-by-mail process. For many, that mental model includes a reasonable assumption that Election Day is voting day – whether by mail or in-person. Unfortunately, more than half of all states require ballots to be received, not just postmarked, by Election Day–or in some cases the day before. Many people simply don’t know about this.

Even voters who know the deadline may procrastinate or don’t account for how long delivery may take. For example, in California’s March primary – where voters could mail their ballot on Election Day as long as it was received within three days – 70% of rejected ballots were due to late arrivals. The complexity of the mail system – both how long delivery takes and the nuances of postmarks – make it difficult for even the most enthusiastic voters to ensure their ballots are received on time.

A clear fix for this problem is to relax that delivery constraint while still letting people mail their ballot on Election Day–a day set firmly in many voters’ minds. Since the primaries, California and many other states, recognizing the new COVID voting reality, created more flexible deadlines for ballot return. As long as they are postmarked by Election Day, ballots in California now have up to 17 days after the election to arrive and still be counted. This takes the onus off of voters to calculate how long postal delivery takes, which may vary and is out of their control.

Another option is to institute more flexible ballot return options. While some states, such as Georgia, haven’t adjusted their deadline statutes, they have created dropboxes and other non-mail return methods where voters can return their ballots on or before Election Day. Dropboxes are already popular in universal vote-by-mail states like Colorado and Washington, and have blossomed across the U.S. with the rise in mail ballot demand.

Finally, just-in-time reminders, delivered across multiple channels (mail, text, email, and more), when voters have ballots in hand and are able to act, combined with simple heuristics about when voters should return can both help solve the problem. In Oregon and Arizona, both states with high or universal vote by mail usage and deadlines that required ballots to be received by Election Day, election officials and their partners widely publicize two different deadlines. The first deadline is the last day when voters can reliably return their ballot by mail and the second is Election Day, the deadline for voters to hand deliver their ballots to a dropbox or other return location.

There are also predictable – and solvable– behavioral patterns at the root of the other most common reason ballots are rejected: voter signatures.

People can only take in so much information at once – and mail ballots tend to have a lot of information to sift through: long and confusing instructions, and sometimes dozens of different contests to vote on. It’s easy in this context for voters to hone in on the “big” pieces of the process – like marking our choices –without accounting for other nuanced features, like signing properly or at all.

Some will simply forget to sign. For others, their signature may not match their official signature on file (often the signature on their driver’s license or voter registration record) which can lead to rejection. People may not realize that the signatures need to match. Many of us sign our names without much conscious thought or concern about how it looks. But our “habitual” signature, the one we might use to quickly sign our names on digital pads at the grocery store or a restaurant may look different than the one we carefully signed on our drivers license several years ago.

Ballot design and accompanying outreach materials can provide timely guidance (on the envelope itself in the best cases) reminding voters they need to sign and making it hard to forget by using strategically redundant messaging. Officials and advocates can also offer heuristics, like “sign the ballot like you would an official contract, not how you would at the grocery store” to alert voters that the quality of their signature matters in order for their vote to be counted. Lastly, where possible, states should be transparent about the signature verification process and build in opportunities for voters to fix mistakes, or “cure” their ballots. These programs make it clear why following the rules is important, provide clear and easy paths to correct mistakes, and assure voters that ballot rejections are not arbitrary.

Even with Election Day fast approaching, it’s not too late for state officials to make simple adjustments to voter outreach messaging strategies and operational policies. Making evidence-based changes now can help prevent unnecessary ballot rejections and ensure everyone who intends to cast a ballot has their chance to have their voice heard.

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Empowering Girls as Agents of Change in Preventing Unplanned Pregnancy

Tue, 15 Sep 2020 15:44:08 GMT

An unplanned pregnancy during adolescence can dramatically impact a girl’s health and economic future, yet use of modern family planning (FP) services among adolescents remains low in many places. The challenge is particularly great in many countries in Africa, where despite a global rise in FP use among adolescents, adolescent fertility remains high and nearly two-thirds of sexually active girls who want to avoid pregnancy are not using a modern contraceptive method. Access to modern contraceptives is hindered by a variety of factors, including legal barriers like age of consent, affordability, method availability, and health workers’ willingness to provide sexual and reproductive health services to youth. But even when these obstacles are overcome, uptake of FP services often remains low.

Efforts to tackle the challenge often focus on improving the availability and ‘youth-friendliness’ of services, educating girls about FP and encouraging them to access services, and convincing communities that youth access to modern contraceptives is important. While programs sometimes work through peer educators to reach youth, these young people are often trained extensively and take on a more formal role, in contrast to the girls they seek to reach, who are approached as more passive recipients or beneficiaries of such a program rather than true peers. Historically, peer education programs have had limited success.

How, then, can we support girls who wish to avoid an unplanned pregnancy? One answer may lie in the role that girls are asked to play in programs that seek to reach them. Research has repeatedly shown that across many contexts, girls often don’t perceive themselves to have agency in matters concerning sex, family planning, and their reproductive futures. They might be physically able to visit a clinic and take up a family planning method, but they don’t feel confident making the choice for themselves or empowered to act on it. To enhance a sense of agency among girls, we drew from research in other contexts showing that giving advice to others can encourage action by building confidence and motivation. With this in mind, we sought to develop solutions which would put more girls in the role of advocates for family planning within their peer groups.

In Burkina Faso, we partnered with Pathfinder International as part of the (re)solve project to design a board game for high school students called La Chance. As they play, girls encounter real-life relationship scenarios, “experience” consequences, and are prompted to share advice. Going through this experience with their classmates, players can begin to understand that other girls like them are both at risk for unplanned pregnancy and can make the choice to access and use FP methods. Players may pick “advice” cards which ask them to provide guidance to other girls on how they should manage difficult relationship situations, or to educate friends that simply knowing and tracking your menstrual cycle may not protect you from pregnancy. We designed the game cards so that players read questions aloud to the rest of the group, and then reveal answers that are visible only with a pair of decoder glasses. This ensured that girls were being engaged as advisors, rather than only listening to messages from authoritative game facilitators. At the end of the game, girls are given multiple “passport” booklets to encourage them and their friends to visit health facilities.

La Chance board game

In Uganda, through a collaboration with Marie Stopes, teenage girls receive “Refer-a-Friend” cards from a community-based mobilizer or FP service provider, on which they mark their own motivations for using or learning about family planning. They are then prompted to give the card to a friend and suggest that she also learn more about family planning by visiting a Marie Stopes clinic. At the clinic, each card can be redeemed for two friendship wristbands – one for the girl visiting the clinic and the other for the friend who referred her. Girls are not required to take up an FP method either to give a Refer-a-Friend card or to receive the wristbands. This program offers girls an immediate motivation to talk to friends about family planning, share advice, and articulate reasons why girls like them may choose to use family planning. Girls who receive Refer-a-Friend cards get an endorsement from a trusted peer, while girls who give the cards have an opportunity to give advice that builds their confidence and solidifies their motivation to access FP services when they need them. When a girl visits a clinic to redeem a card, she receives a new card to give to another friend, becoming an advice-giver herself.

Back (left) and front (right) of Refer-A-Friend card.

Both of these novel programs were designed with girls’ agency in mind–placing them as both active participants in and as recipients of the program. Additionally, both interventions include changes to the facility environment, such as youth-friendly posters and provider training that aim to make health facilities more welcoming environments for girls who have decided to visit. Initial feedback – from girls and from those responsible for administering the programs – has been positive. Both programs are currently being evaluated to assess their impact on volume of adolescent clients at participating clinics (in both countries), intention to use FP (in Burkina Faso), and FP takeup (in Uganda), and we look forward to sharing results when they are available.

Stay tuned for more insights from our work to put every girl and woman in control of their own reproductive health. Questions? Reach out to us at GH@ideas42.org.

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Using Behavioral Insights to Make the Most of Emergency Social Protection Cash Transfers

Wed, 09 Sep 2020 16:52:58 GMT

Hafia village, prefecture of Dalaba, Guinea. A man receives money as part of a social net project. © Vincent Tremeau /World Bank

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, countries across the globe have been adapting social assistance policies to support their populations. In fact, since March 2020, 139 countries and territories have planned, implemented, or adapted cash transfers to support their citizens. Cash transfers specifically make up about half of the social protection programs implemented to address the pandemic. Now more than ever, it’s crucial that such programs are designed to maximize impacts. Behavioral insights can be mobilized as a cost-effective way to help beneficiaries make the most out of the available support. The World Bank and ideas42 partnership on behavioral designs for cash transfer programs is helping countries achieve this goal.

Cash transfers are a key response instrument in the social protection toolkit—and for good reason. Cash transfers have been shown to generate a wide variety of positive benefits, from helping families invest in their children to promoting gender equality. However, we know from our previous work that in order to make the most out of cash transfers, recipients of any program (already facing challenging circumstances that compete for their attention) must undertake complex decisions and actions with their cash. These challenges are only magnified by the global pandemic. COVID-19 has wrought increased uncertainty around future employment and income, which makes calculations and planning to use cash transfer benefits all the more complex.

To help practitioners design programs that account for the complex thought processes and potential barriers recipients face, we mapped out their journey to effectively spend emergency social protection cash transfers. We also created simple, actionable guidance for program designers to put to use in maximizing their programs to help recipients use their cash transfer benefit to most effectively support families and reduce mid- to long-term financial volatility.

For example, the first step is helping recipients understand what the transfer is for. For recipients who have not yet been impacted by financial instability, or indeed have never encountered a cash transfer before, such funds might seem like a gift or bonus, and recipients may spend it accordingly. Providing clear, simple framing or labelling the transfer may signal to recipients that they should use the cash not only for immediate needs, but also in ways that can help them protect investments in their family members’ human capital and jumpstart their livelihood after the crisis wanes.

After enrolling in the program, recipients must then plan how to spend their cash. In order to make a plan that effectively allocates cash for immediate needs and what might be needed in the future, recipients must think about when they might get more support (or when they might have income restored) in the future. Clearly communicating if and when future payments will come can help recipients manage and best allocate the cash they receive.

After completing all other steps in the journey—paying attention to and acting on any additional messages and receiving their cash—recipients must spend the cash according to their plan to help smooth consumption during the crisis and reduce long-term financial volatility.

Barriers can emerge that make it difficult for beneficiaries to stick to their plan. For example, they may look to the spending patterns of others, and decide to deviate from their original plan if it does not match what they see their peers doing. The stress of the crisis may also prompt them to focus on short-term issues, rather than longer-term plans. Simple designs—such as using posters, flyers, SMS or media posts—to communicate norms around productive spending or providing a tool that recipients can use to separate their cash immediately upon receipt—can help recipients stay on track with their own plans.

While suggestions should always be tailored to the context and cultural nuances of each program, and adjusted to minimize risks (health or otherwise) to beneficiaries, this guidance aims to provide principles that can be applied to a wide range of cash transfer programs with a variety of goals.

The current global pandemic and its ensuing economic crisis make it all the more important that cash transfer recipients use the income support as effectively as possible. Light-touch, low-cost tweaks, derived from evidence and a deep understanding of human behavior, can ensure programs are designed in a way that do just that—potentially improving countless lives.

To learn more, get the checklist and infographic that map out the journey to effectively spending cash transfers.

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8 Strategies for College Leaders Advancing Change Initiatives

Thu, 27 Aug 2020 14:40:15 GMT

Beyond the stress of actually living through the COVID-19 crisis themselves, college leaders are in the midst of having to make substantial changes to the higher education system in what feels like real time. From ongoing efforts to improve student services to the urgent need to transition courses online due to the pandemic, the entire post-secondary education field is confronting significant transformation.

Most people would likely agree that large-scale organizational change is incredibly challenging–even daunting. For example, schools looking to implement Guided Pathways (a set of reforms that streamlines the student journey through college) need to not only restructure degree requirements across every department, but also redesign student advising, course registration, first year experience programs, and course curricula. This is a campus-wide effort, but even seemingly smaller initiatives can be difficult to implement successfully.

Applying behavioral science to organizational change can help make transformation efforts easier, faster, and more effective. We’ve identified a set of strategies that school leaders can use to manage some of the most common behavioral barriers they’re likely to face when promoting change, from planning for needed changes through implementation of plans:

Unstick from the status quo – People prefer to avoid change, especially when there are many potential paths forward or these paths are hard to compare. School leaders can mitigate status quo bias by highlighting the benefits of change and prompting those affected to compare the current approach with the proposed new one.

Set a goal and get on the same page – When working on a change initiative, people may have different visions of the end goal without even realizing it. To address this, leaders should ensure that everyone’s mental models of the end goal are aligned through activities such as collaborative visioning exercises.

Connect identities to tasks – Change initiatives require people to take on new tasks. Team members may be reticent to take on a task if they feel it’s not part of their defined role. School leaders must therefore help people see a connection between their new responsibilities and their established role-based identity.

Work together from the start – When working through a significant change, people care not only about fair outcomes, but also about fair processes. To promote a sense of procedural justice among those who will be affected by any change, school leaders should create channels for meaningful input.

Simplify, simplify, simplify – Every change initiative involves many smaller steps, and little hassles along the way can have a disproportionately large impact on behavior. Leaders managing the change should simplify new tasks as much as possible, and keep an eye out for any steps on which people get stuck.

Build habits to make new tasks stick – Change initiatives, by definition, require people to do their jobs differently — but new one-off tasks are easy to forget. School leaders should help people develop new habits by integrating any new processes into existing routines, and timing the roll-out of changes with natural breaks in the school calendar.

Expect delays and build in buffer – People systematically underestimate how much time, money, and effort it will take to design and implement a change initiative. To address this planning fallacy, school leaders should help those managing the change process create concrete, detailed plans, and encourage them to add more slack to the schedule and budget than they think is necessary.

Leave time for integration – Responsibility for planning most change initiatives is typically split among different people or even different departments. Aligning separate workstreams at the end of the process takes more time and attention than people think. School leaders should budget extra time and attention for this coordination, and avoid tunnelling on small pieces at the expense of the bigger picture.

Our toolkit “Advancing Transformation with Behavioral Science” delves into the behavioral science principles that inform each recommendation as well as tips for putting the strategies into practice. You can also find a handy overview of these eight strategies here.

While we developed these strategies with higher education in mind, they are applicable for any organization facing large-scale change. By proactively designing for common behavioral barriers, we hope that readers will be able to bring about the organizational changes they seek faster and with less friction. Leaders at colleges, universities, and beyond have no shortage of good ideas—our goal is to deploy behavioral insights to help make planning for and implementing those ideas as effective as possible.

Interested in learning more about putting these strategies into practice? Reach out to Rachel Taylor at rtaylor@ideas42.org with questions or thoughts.

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The College Student Journey in the Time of COVID-19

Wed, 26 Aug 2020 14:29:48 GMT

We know there are often invisible behavioral barriers at every point in the college process. Unsurprisingly, the pandemic and its repercussions impact every point along a student’s college journey — exacerbating existing barriers and creating new ones for more than 25 million students across the U.S. All students, especially low-income and first-generation students who already face steeper barriers, will feel the impacts of COVID-19 for months and years to come.

In the first weeks of the pandemic, we shared evidence-based behavioral tips for creating positive and more effective online learning experiences, but it’s clear that the impact of COVID-19 on student life extends beyond merely transitioning course content from classrooms to Zoom. Here at ideas42, we’ve been working to identify how the COVID crisis is likely to exacerbate behavioral barriers students face along the college journey in order to facilitate new solutions that ease the burden on students and administrators in our new reality. Some of the new problems include:

1. Pre-Admissions: Prospective students recently shifted their preferences for institutions based on now-salient factors like proximity to home and lower tuition rather than long-term indicators like graduation rates and job placement statistics. Due to COVID-19, for example, 28% of enrolled students have an increased preference for staying closer to home.

Rapid changes in priority around school selection such as these may result in undermatching, the term for when students attend lower- resourced or lower-performing schools than they may have otherwise been able to attend. Additionally, limited in-person classes and uncertainty around what the traditional “college experience” can now look like reduces the perceived benefits of choosing selective residential campuses. With fewer evaluative resources available, such as campus tours and possibly even access to college counselors, students may continue to prioritize immediate, much more salient factors over the long-term benefits of attending higher-performing schools.

2. Affordability & Financial Aid: Applying for financial aid is already a hassle-filled process that results in funds being left on the table each year, and there is no reason to expect students and families who are under enormous added stress from the pandemic to have an easier time overcoming administrative burden than they did before the pandemic.

Now, applying for financial aid could be even more burdensome. More students, especially those whose financial situations have changed recently, will likely have an increased need for financial aid, and may not utilize available financial resources, as we’ve seen in the past.

Uncertainty around future college plans might cause students to put off filing the FAFSA, and poor academic performances during the height of the pandemic may negatively impact students’ aid eligibility. Students may also view their award as final, rather than something that they can appeal. Finally, the unmet, increased need for financial aid could lead students to transfer to cheaper but lower-performing institutions, accrue more debt, or drop out of college altogether, failing to reap the benefits of a degree while having to pay back their existing loans.

3. Connecting on Campus: It will be harder than ever to connect with peers in a virtual college setting, and we know that cultivating a sense of community, belonging, and identity are all essential for bolstering resilience when a student inevitably faces adversity in a new and challenging environment. These feelings of isolation will only be intensified by the mental strain of “Zoom fatigue” that comes from hours of video calls every day. Difficulties in forming meaningful relationships will likely extend to faculty-student connections as well. Professors who are transitioning to online teaching and adapting to their own new realities may not be able to offer traditional levels of mentorship and attention.

Excelling in college is challenging during normal times, but without the often-overlooked benefits that peers, faculty, and other support services can provide, students may feel more isolated and experience decreased resilience when adversity strikes, leading many to question their place in higher education, and some to drop out altogether.

4. Using Student Services: Tutoring, advising, and wraparound support services are essential for student persistence, and we already know that students don’t always take advantage of these programs. When these services transition online, we expect utilization to drop even further, especially among first-generation students, low-income students, and students of color who can be less likely to leverage them in the first place.

For example, students may miss communications from support services staff due to an overwhelming increase in information on fewer communication channels while they’re stressed and bandwidth constrained. Additionally, faculty and staff (who often proactively refer students to appropriate resources) may be less able to identify students who need help if struggling students are less noticeable online than in-person. Furthermore, we anticipate that services could become less effective, as many of them rely on in-person consultations and relationship building. To maintain effectiveness, colleges will need to redesign programs so that they can effectively cultivate these relationships remotely. Between lower uptake and lower efficacy, students will be less likely to receive the support they need to face a variety of academic, social, financial, or personal challenges.

5. Job Placement: COVID-19 has shaken the job market, and recent college graduates, who graduated during a recession, will be some of the most impacted. As in the years following the Great Recession, students across the country are struggling to find jobs, and employment challenges for recent graduates exacerbate inequalities and disproportionately harm students without strong professional networks.

But it isn’t just the economy. Students will have fewer opportunities to attend networking events, reduced access to career counselors, and curtailed internship and other experiential learning opportunities due to the pandemic. As a result, in the years to come, students’ breadth of career prospects may be limited to their own knowledge of career options that would otherwise be broadened through the exposure they get to other students, faculty, alumni, and people moving through a college campus. Students might also self-select into less ambitious career opportunities because of the uncertainty and fear brought about by COVID-19 and related economic downturn. And missed job opportunities, including internships and full-time jobs, may make it harder for students to fit the pre-qualifications of certain employers.

Behavioral science can be applied to these and many other barriers that students increasingly face along their college journey. It may seem daunting, but identifying critical challenges along the student journey is the first step to designing solutions that address them.

Following a decade of conducting research with schools and students, designing and testing solutions around the country, and conversations with stakeholders in the last few months, we are now taking what we know and adapting what works for educators and administrators to the new COVID-19 reality we’re all facing.

For example, we’re working to develop resources that help college administrators deliver behaviorally informed text message communications to students, which is a more important channel than ever now that students are largely remote. We’re also working to make it easier for adult students to enroll in postsecondary programs and creating new ways to improve the efficacy of workforce development programs.

There have always been hurdles on the path to college graduation. Unfortunately, these issues are not going away any time soon, and many of these barriers will continue to impact students for years to come. At a time when college communities won’t be “together” in the same sense as they have been in the past, it’s more important than ever for colleges to use a behavioral lens to support current and prospective students to and through college. Armed with a deep understanding of human behavior, schools can anticipate new barriers students will face and invest in addressing these new challenges to help more students obtain their degree.

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When Choices Don’t Match Preferences: Better Family Planning Through Behavioral Design

Tue, 25 Aug 2020 20:22:46 GMT

Women from the Young Mothers Group meeting and getting family planning information from a community health worker. The program is supported by Reproductive Health Uganda, with the goal to empower the women in the group, and provide them with family planning information. Credit: Jonathan Torgovnik/Getty Images/Images of Empowerment

This post originally appeared on the Breakthrough Action + Research blog.

Thanks to global efforts, family planning and reproductive health (FP/RH) services have made great strides. However, many people still do not use these services even when they currently want to avoid or delay pregnancy. Behavioral economics brings a unique perspective to the choices people make around having children and using FP. This field has generated new insight to help explain why women, their partners, and their families sometimes make choices that are not aligned with their own preferences. It sheds light on the reasons why even a strong intention to use FP services does not always translate into taking up a method or using it correctly and consistently. The behavioral economics approach also offers insight into the challenges health workers face in offering high-quality FP/RH services, even if they have the training and resources to do so.

Drawing on insights from behavioral economics and other disciplines, behavioral design offers a powerful tool for program designers that supports women and their families in achieving their reproductive goals. Behaviorally informed programs account for and reshape the environments in which people live and make decisions to positively influence behavior. For example:

Gamifying counseling on FP methods provides engagement that encourages women to actively choose the method that is best for them.
Benchmarking performance in clinics against other clinics encourages consistent counseling on long-acting methods for post-abortion clients.
Using an interactive game helps men see the benefits of child spacing and boosts their confidence to have open conversations about FP with their partners.
Instituting a behaviorally-optimized referral system that integrates FP with childhood immunizations to increase postpartum uptake of contraceptive methods.

In FP/RH, it is critical to support people in making the choice that is best for them and behavioral design offers a growing body of evidence for how to do just that.

To learn more about using behavioral economics and behavioral design in FP/RH, visit the new Trending Topics page.

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Now Is the Time to Improve the WIC Participant Experience

Wed, 19 Aug 2020 14:00:38 GMT

The ways in which participants experience public benefit programs like The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), often overlooked, is more relevant now than ever. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States is facing historic numbers of individuals who are out of work. Many find themselves in the position of needing public benefits programs such as WIC to make ends meet for the first time. With a rapid rise in eligibility for WIC, providing a good participant experience is crucial to ensure families are able to fully utilize benefits when they need them the most, for as long as they are eligible.

We know from earlier work that many participants don’t utilize the ample benefits available to them for as long as they are eligible—often leaving the program before their child’s fifth birthday, the traditional cutoff date for WIC. For new participants, appointment satisfaction has been found to be one of the most important factors in ongoing participation or drop off. Uncertainty during appointments—including the amount of time these appointments take, the number of steps, and what is required of participants—can deter participants from the program and cause them to drop out early.

Other previous research tells us that while WIC agencies are often interested in improving the participant experience, they operate with significant resource constraints—all the more true during the COVID-19 pandemic. Still, even in a resource-scarce environment, there are simple innovations that WIC agencies can adopt to improve their participants’ satisfaction.

Before the pandemic, in partnership with Texas WIC and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, we designed a printed Roadmap to be shared at the start of a participant’s appointment that walked them through the steps of their appointment, allowed participants to check off the steps as they completed them, and provided a space for staff to write down participants’ arrival time so they were clear on how much time they had waited.

When we evaluated the Roadmap, we found that although the sample size was small, there was a 14-percentage point increase in participant satisfaction. More participants knew what to expect at their appointments, were satisfied with how the appointment process was explained, and were ultimately more satisfied with the visit and their experience overall.

The COVID-19 crisis has inadvertently created an opportunity for program designers to make innovative changes to service provision and delivery in the face of public health and safety constraints. For example, state WIC agencies can take our Roadmap design and the lessons learned from our work and adapt it to improve the participant experience in an automated way to account for physical distancing measures. Instead of handing participants a piece of paper when they enter the clinic, clinics should consider providing participants with information about their upcoming appointment digitally, using text messages, email, a WIC smartphone app or other messaging options. This could include a reminder to attend the appointment, what to expect during the appointment, and any necessary paperwork to prepare ahead of their appointment. As with our in-person design, an automated adaptation could also include a second message upon check-in for the appointment that indicates a participant is ‘in line’ for their appointment and notes their check-in time.

Benefits program administrators have begun embracing innovation in recent years. Given the influx of new participants due to the current crisis, the flexibilities around administration that many WIC programs currently have, the important benefits WIC provides to families, and the need for quick adaptation to the public health and safety requirements of our COVID-19 reality, now is the opportune time for governments to take WIC participant satisfaction and customer service into account when designing changes to program administration.

Although WIC staff are juggling even more demands on their already scarce time than usual, behavioral insights like our work with Texas WIC offer a promising low-resource solution that could greatly improve the satisfaction of participants with easy, small tweaks. Increasing participant satisfaction will help new participants access all the benefits they’re eligible for. During a time of unprecedented of economic instability and uncertainty for millions, these benefits represent crucial health and nutritional supports that can make a real difference in the lives of so many, and should be as easy to access as possible.

For more information about our economic justice work and collaborations with WIC, contact us at allison@ideas42.org.

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New Playbook Helps Officials Prepare People to #VoteSafe

Wed, 12 Aug 2020 14:18:17 GMT

In May 2020, we began hearing a pattern of concerns from Secretary of State offices across the country. One office told us they were worried about voters completing and signing their mail-in ballots incorrectly. Other offices agonized about how a steep decline in poll worker volunteers, many of whom were in populations most vulnerable to COVID-19, meant they had to shutter dozens of polling stations.

Though officials were actively trying to tackle the problems themselves, many admitted they were resource-strapped and overwhelmed. We realized all of their concerns boiled down to one big question: How can we make sure anyone who wants to vote can do so safely and securely, without compromising their health?

The Safe Voter Playbook is ideas42’s answer to that question, and it’s now available to everyone. The playbook uses the latest behavioral evidence to anticipate and design for the challenges that voters could face across every aspect of the voting process this November – from registration, to mail ballot requests and returns, to in-person voting. It’s geared toward providing clear, usable recommendations to take the burden off of election officials and other voting innovators who want to take action. As we update it in the coming weeks, it will even feature a repository of free resources, including customizable mailpieces and social media collateral, that are ready to download.

As COVID-19 cases continue to surge across the country, the stakes of this voting season couldn’t be higher. It has never been more important to get the processes, procedures, and messages right. Confusing, opaque, or messy systems could undermine the successful execution of the election and disenfranchise millions, including historically marginalized populations. Whether constituents decide to vote early, by mail, or in-person on Election Day, each step they take will require new tools and considerations. Below are a few of our recommendations to ensure all voters have a safe and secure experience.

1. To ensure that voters know where, when and how to vote, use simple, behaviorally informed messaging. COVID-19 has turned up the volume on an already noisy media environment, and carved out a hearty slice of voters’ already limited attention. We’ve developed an evidence-backed checklist to help officials craft messages to not only capture a voter’s attention, but increase the likelihood that they follow through on registering to vote, accurately completing a mail-in ballot, or more.
2. To encourage mail-in balloting, link it with public health behaviors. Since voting by mail is new to most voters, some may have an outdated impression that it’s only meant for certain populations. Officials can change that perception and encourage more mail balloting by clearly communicating that voting-by-mail is for them, and that it supports public health. Using channels where health is already top-of-mind for voters will make it even more effective: For example, when a voter visits a state COVID-19 information website, a message reminding them that mail-in ballots are the healthiest choice – to protect them, and their families – this election season, along with a clear and immediate call to action to request a ballot, would make the connection for them.
3. To register voters, meet them where they are (online). Many traditional in-person voter registration sites, like the DMV, are no longer accessible for voters. To make sure registration doesn’t plummet, officials should add prominent links for voter registration to websites their constituents are visiting right now, such as unemployment services, or invite people to register while they access or wait for other services online.

The Safe Voter Playbook reflects the recognition that all of us are new voters this year – that even the most seasoned voter will likely have to navigate a new process or procedure to cast a ballot. It also reminds us that applying a deep understanding of voter behavior to the design of voting systems will be an essential component of ensuring a safe and secure election, and a healthy democracy, in 2020 and beyond.

We invite you to check out the full playbook, which will be continuously updated over the next few weeks, and learn more about behavioral science and civic engagement.

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The Student Success Toolkit: From "Test” to "Scale” at CUNY and Beyond

Mon, 10 Aug 2020 18:36:56 GMT

Testing is one of the most exciting parts of implementing behavioral science interventions for us at ideas42. After months of research and interviews, and countless design iterations, we are finally able to gain insight into the extent of our impact. But what happens once we’ve run the regressions, printed the tables, and synthesized our key takeaways? Once we have evidence about what works—and what doesn’t work—how do we apply our findings in new contexts?

Among the many takeaways from the Student Persistence Initiative, ideas42’s five-year collaboration with The City University of New York (CUNY) and the New York City Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity (NYC Opportunity), is this: behavioral science interventions in post-secondary education, even those that are email and text based, are rarely plug-and-play. In order to scale successful interventions within a school network, or indeed to scale to other school systems, we need to put effective interventions in the hands of education experts and equip them with the tools they need to adapt the interventions for the realities of their own school contexts.

Making the leap from “test” to “scale” is the motivation behind the Student Success Toolkit, an actionable guide for education experts looking to scale and adapt the interventions that our rigorous research suggests can help students succeed. The toolkit distills insights and lessons learned from 13 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) conducted over five years across six CUNY community colleges, touching on challenges ranging from increasing the number of students who annually renew the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), to encouraging students to take enough course credits to graduate within two to three years.

As we set out to create this toolkit, we reflected on our own implementation experience. Between 2015 and 2020, as we iterated on behavioral interventions, we had to adapt our designs for new contexts. We learned that the individual colleges within the CUNY network, the nation’s largest urban university system, differ in many unexpected ways—some purely semantic (different monikers for their respective advising offices) and some more meaningful (different transfer office structures that support students planning to transfer to a bachelor’s program). Additionally, each academic year is different—sometimes in predictable ways (school events fall on different dates each year), and sometimes in less predictable ways (as instruction moved online this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we adjusted the timing of our intervention messages to make sure they’d still feel relevant).

With these experiences in mind, we created a resource that not only shares open-source versions of our intervention materials (like text messages and emails), but also describes the methods and tools we used to consistently adapt and improve our interventions over a five-year period.

We divided the toolkit into two sections in order to systematically guide readers through our behavioral diagnosis and design methodology. The first section describes the behavioral barriers—situational, psychological, or contextual features that prevent students from making optimal decisions or acting on their good intentions on their journey to academic success. These insights, generated from hundreds of conversations with students and staff across the CUNY system, as well as our own user testing (including as enrolled students), are the foundation for all of our intervention designs.

In the second section, we provide case studies on our five most successful interventions to demonstrate how we used behavioral design at CUNY to help students overcome the diagnosed barriers. Specifically, we outline strategies for effective communication, and illustrate how we applied those strategies through our designs. For example, we found that simple language and an urgent tone works well in emails and texts reminding students to renew FAFSA. Along with sample messages, we highlight why we used particular language and images. Students at CUNY who received our FAFSA messages were between 4 and 9 percentage points more likely to renew FAFSA compared to a control group; if scaled, the low-cost designs presented in the toolkit could help educators at CUNY and elsewhere bring millions of additional dollars in financial aid to students with minimal additional cost to the schools.

At ideas42, we are already using the Student Success Toolkit’s insights and designs to further promote student persistence and success beyond CUNY. For example, with support from the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, we’re currently working to deliver the content tested in the Student Success Toolkit to hundreds of new schools by integrating our behaviorally informed campaigns into a leading student communications platform. Through this multi-year project, we hope to facilitate a seamless experience for schools across the country to select, adjust, and implement messages that are relevant to their students’ needs.

As behavioral scientists, we constantly return to the question at the heart of our work: what drives human behavior? Testing is indeed exciting, but in order for evidence-based interventions to help students succeed across the country, we must continue to share foundational insights about human behavior along with best practices for behavioral design, including practical ways to translate research evidence to practice. With this in mind, we will continue to seek ways to make it as easy as possible for educators—the experts in their own contexts—to make the leap from knowing what works to making it work for their students.

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Street Smarts in the Field: Insights for Designing Public Housing Infrastructure

Tue, 04 Aug 2020 16:07:08 GMT

For several years, city governments across the world have been incorporating insights from behavioral science to help design new policies and programs to solve important problems. This entails behavioral experts designing interventions to support groups or communities they themselves may not belong to. In fact, a strength behavioral scientist bring to pervasive problems is an outside, fresh perspective, combined with evidence of what has been effective in other contexts. This outside perspective makes it crucial to listen to people with lived experience in communities when designing solutions. At ideas42, that is always our aim—we conduct interviews with people who will be impacted by our interventions in order to diagnose barriers and inform new designs. But that doesn’t mean we do it perfectly, or that we don’t have our own biases that cause us to overlook important details.

In a recent project my team worked on to improve public housing, we saw the benefits of listening to residents—and the limitations of not listening enough. With support from our partners at New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), John Jay College, and the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice (MOCJ), our team came together to address resident quality of life concerns arising from improper disposal of household trash, litter, and dog waste on NYCHA grounds. We created a robust set of interventions: we installed a set of large, moveable trash containers (tilt trucks) and trash cans in convenient locations and provided a package of communications posters to inform people of the new policy and encourage them to use the new infrastructure.

As a native NYCHA resident working on this project, I wanted to leverage my perspective to help the team better design and communicate our project to the NYCHA community. My experiences growing up in NYCHA and my position on our team gave me a special combination of formal expertise and tools from the behavioral sciences as well as a natural understanding of NYCHA community norms and values.

For anyone interested in project design in familiar and unfamiliar communities, these three insights showcase how highlighting and neglecting lived experience in design matters for the success of the overall project, and its impact on people’s lives:

Contextualize language choices

Our team’s package of communications posters was intended to inform NYCHA residents of new infrastructure installations for trash, litter, and dog waste. These posters were designed to speak to resident identities as NYCHA community members to create new social norms that would boost compliance with the new infrastructure installments. However, activating resident intentions to take care of their environment only works if we’re all on the same page about what that environment is.

When our team began drafting communications poster designs, we tailored each poster to the specific community where it would land. However, the signage included the formal, technical names of the NYCHA complexes that were used by NYCHA administration. What we needed instead were the informal, everyday names that residents used to refer to their specific NYCHA community.

Using the formal, administrative name for a NYCHA community on a poster that aims to introduce new social norms to a longstanding community only showcases the extent to which we are outsiders to these communities. As a NYCHA resident of what is formally known as Gouverneur Morris Houses I, I would have been totally unfamiliar with that term if I saw it on a poster; what I do know is that I live in the Morris community absent of any distinction between Gouverneur Morris Houses I and Gouverneur Morris Houses II. The same goes for the residents of what are formally known as Lower East Side Rehab (Group 5) and Seward Park Extension, better known as The Lower East Side and Seward Park. Because of my insight into the context of how naming works at NYCHA, I pushed our team to include the informal names of complexes on our posters in order to establish trust between the residents and our messaging, and ultimately the informal names are the ones we used.

Be intentional about product placement

As part of our strategy to get the intervention materials to residents, our team gave NYCHA property managers guidelines for where to best install new posters, trash cans, and tilt trucks. Although property managers were given the final say about where to place all materials, our team wanted to suggest a consistent strategy for placement. Because of my lived experiences with moving through NYCHA buildings and interacting with their many nooks and crannies, I was able to suggest a variety of locations to place our materials in order to capture resident attention. More importantly, my lived experience in NYCHA communities gave me an understanding of where not to place those materials. For example, I know that elevators, staircase doors, and mailbox areas are important spaces for residents and that the lobby door area, the parking lot, and resident hallways are not given much attention. The difference between putting a poster in the elevator vs. lobby door may sound minor—but regardless of our intentions to make an impact in the NYCHA community and no matter how good the design or messaging was, if we put our hundreds of intervention materials someplace no one looks, they wouldn’t be effective.

Value lived experience as legitimate knowledge

During the product design phase of this project, I raised concerns about the tilt truck handle to my team. When using the tilt trucks, residents had to first lift the lid to throw their trash inside. I mentioned that, from my own experience, NYCHA residents don’t like touching the handle of the small trash compactor located in their hallways and that because of this, the handle would limit our impact. However, my team remained skeptical about whether such a tiny detail would make a significant difference. As the most junior member on the team at the time, I doubted my own critique because I couldn’t prove my claim with anything other than my intuition from my lived experiences. Although my team was not antagonistic in response to my critique, their doubt was enough to dissuade me from trusting my gut. Ultimately, the burden of proof from my lived experiences in this instance felt too complicated for me to navigate and overcome.

During the study, one main piece of feedback that our research assistants, who interviewed residents after we rolled out the intervention, received was that the presence of the handle on the tilt trucks we purchased were a barrier to properly throw out trash. This was an issue because residents did not want to touch the (often dirty) tilt truck handle because they thought it was gross and were often on their way to work or school. For elderly NYCHA residents, they reported the handle to be a barrier because it was a heavy lift. This is a behavioral barrier: The disgust from touching the handle was enough to prevent people from using the tilt truck. Although our team is made up of people who use behavioral science and design thinking daily, we collectively overlooked this element. Notably, even though I did foresee the problem, it wasn’t because of my behavioral science knowledge, but my lived experience. This underscores that behavioral insights and lived experience are both valuable when developing new designs for any community. While our team still saw statistically significant improvement in how residents disposed of trash using the tilt trucks, this may not be an accurate measurement of the full potential of our intervention because of the tilt truck handle.

For NYCHA sites that received the new infrastructure, the average number of household trash bags decreased by 25%, the average amount of litter observed decreased by 16%, and the average instances of dog waste spotted decreased by 11%. Providing easier access to trash disposal infrastructure, complemented by community-oriented and instructional communications, reduced the burden of trash disposal for residents and significantly reduced the amount of trash visible on NYCHA grounds, demonstrating that new structures and resources can effectively change behavior.

A key aspect of our team approach to problem solving is our emphasis on the insights we can gain from listening to stakeholder perspectives on their own community. Over the course of this project, we were able to leverage resident perspectives, including my own, to inform project design and implementation. Nevertheless, our team’s missed opportunities to improve key design elements illustrates our own biases. To put it clearly, community is an invaluable resource in designing new infrastructure. As we continue to design and tailor interventions to the communities we wish to serve, we must avoid privileging formal, scientific knowledge over informal, everyday know-how from community members.

The post Street Smarts in the Field: Insights for Designing Public Housing Infrastructure appeared first on ideas42.

Ethical Machine Learning

Thu, 23 Jul 2020 18:35:34 GMT

Applied together, it is fair to say that machine learning and behavioral science have the potential to significantly magnify social impact. Yet, as machine learning algorithms become more prevalent in the systems people use to make important decisions, there is deep, and not unfounded, concern that algorithms – even those designed with social impact in mind – will perpetuate bias. As we continue to integrate machine learning into our work at ideas42, we are approaching it with the same commitment to mitigating bias and intention to positively impact people’s lives that we use in all of our work.

The myriad ways in which machine learning and algorithmic decision aids can create or reinforce unfair outcomes have been well-documented in the academic literature [1]. Problematic applications of machine learning continue to make headlines and multiple non-profits, such as the AI Now Institute at New York University, have released in-depth reports on the ethical challenges that arise when using machine learning or artificial intelligence. In both the literature and the media, we see examples of bias across each stage of algorithm development and deployment.

In many (but not all) cases, biased outcomes originate from biased inputs. Like humans, machines learn from patterns in data, so when data is incomplete, unrepresentative, or reflects existing inequities, an algorithm will replicate those patterns in its predictions[2]. But the fact that algorithms can pick up on historical biases does not mean that we are powerless to design models we would consider fair. Rather, it means that as researchers, we are responsible for a series of important decisions – beginning with which data we use. Throughout projects, there are opportunities to identify and combat bias.

When designing and evaluating algorithms, we must:

Incorporate ethical principles and commitments into partner agreements to ensure accountability
Conduct “data ethnographies” to understand where our data originates from and who it represents; make sure datasets are as complete and representative of the full population as possible
Include key stakeholders and affected communities throughout the steps of model development, including: selecting a label (the variable a model will predict as its outcome)[3], defining accuracy criteria, and determining what constitutes “fair” outcomes in a particular context[4].
Pursue computational solutions (e.g. packages for R and python) that make machine learning models easier for humans to interpret
Carefully evaluate whether outcomes meet our clearly articulated social impact goals and fairness standards; where appropriate, use tools like Microsoft’s Fairlearn to assess how specific groups would be impacted by a model
Establish long-term plans for routine validation of machine learning models and make the process for appealing or correcting decisions clear

As behavioral scientists, we are also keenly aware of the problems that can arise beyond the development phase, when an algorithm is implemented in the real world. Algorithms are often used as “decision aids,” meaning a human consults an algorithmic tool for advice or information, and then makes a final decision themselves. If an algorithm produces recommendations that we consider fair, but a human decision-maker either ignores or systematically counters those recommendations, we might see null or biased results[5]. Knowing this, our responsibility extends beyond the creation of unbiased algorithms – we must also design decision aid systems that people will use, and then empirically test whether adoption matches our expectations. This is exactly how we approach the design and testing of all of our behavioral work– ensuring that things work for how people actually behave in the real world.

Underlying our approach to machine learning is an understanding that human decision-makers are also far from neutral: in some cases, it may be even harder to correct for human bias than for algorithmic bias[6]. We must contend with biased decision-making, ambiguous definitions of fairness, and a lack of transparency with or without algorithms – and we’re committed to tackling these problems in all of the work that we do.

Guiding Principles

Our five guiding principles for ethical machine learning at ideas42 are engagement, rigorous review, accountability, privacy, and transparency.

1) Engagement

Since we know the definition of “fair” is subjective, we make decisions in tandem with the people who know the context best and the people who will be affected by the pilot or project. We include these stakeholders throughout our process, and define “fair” outcomes in a way that is agreeable to community members.

2) Rigorous review

As researchers, our decision-making throughout a project matters a lot – from the partners we choose, to the data we collect, to the methods we use, to the way we evaluate outcomes. At each stage of the process, we are developing resources to help our teams think critically about these decisions.
We continue to stay informed about the latest updates in this evolving field. This means keeping track of academic papers, news articles, and the most up-to-date best practices for applied machine learning.
We evaluate (or ensure that our partners evaluate) outcomes using rigorous testing methods to assess both social welfare outcomes and whether outcomes meet the standard of fairness agreed upon by community stakeholders.

3) Accountability

We continuously evaluate (or ensure that systems are in place to continuously evaluate) the results of our model implementations and assess how impacts change over time, both for social welfare outcomes and for fairness of those outcomes. We create systems for ideas42 team members and stakeholders to raise concerns about or dispute decisions.

4) Privacy

We ensure that data is collected with consent and that all parties are practicing good data stewardship including data storage, management, security, access, and disposal.

5) Transparency

We keep careful documentation of decision-making throughout the process of creating and deploying algorithms. We share that documentation with community stakeholders as we gather their input. We opt for models that are more interpretable, where possible.

Best practices for fair, accountable and transparent machine learning are rapidly evolving, as are efforts to consolidate these principles [7]. As the field continues to develop, we are committed to iterating on our approach and learning from others. We encourage you to reach out to machinelearning@ideas42.org with any questions or thoughts.

[1] See for example:

Gillis and Spiess (2018). Big Data and Discrimination. Harvard Law School. Discussion Paper Series No. 84.

Kleinberg, J., Ludwig, J., Mullainathan, S., and Rambachan, A. (2018). Algorithmic Fairness. AEA Papers and Proceedings. 108: 22-27.

[2] For example:

Metz, C. (2019, Nov 11). We Teach A.I. Systems Everything, Including Our Biases. The New York Times.

Lohr, S. (2018, Feb 9) Facial Recognition Is Accurate, if You’re a White Guy. The New York Times.

[3] For an example of label selection gone wrong in a healthcare algorithm, see: Obermeyer, Z., Powers, B., Vogeli, C., and Mullainathan, S. (2019). Dissecting Racial Bias in an Algorithm Used to Manage the Health of Populations. Science. 366(6464): 447-453.

[4] To learn more about different ways to define “fairness,” see this interactive webpage from Google Research.

[5] Sendak, M.P., et al. (2020). A Path for Translation of Machine Learning Products into Healthcare Delivery. EMJ Innovations.

[6] Mullainathan, S. (2019, Dec 6). Biased Algorithms Are Easier to Fix Than Biased People. The New York Times.

[7] For example, this 2020 report from Harvard University analyzed 36 “principles documents” from across the world, and identified key themes and areas where these approaches converge.

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What’s it Like Applying Behavioral Insights to a Government Program?

Mon, 13 Jul 2020 15:14:02 GMT

A conversation with John Gachigi, Head of the Social Assistance Unit in the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection, Government of Kenya.

Jonathan Torgovnik/Getty Images/Images of Empowerment

Governments around the world have invested in behavioral science innovations to strengthen programs and services for their citizens, and this has proven to be an impactful investment. However, as more government agencies and units/departments consider using behavioral science strategies to enhance program outcomes, they are likely to face uncertainties and challenges.

To shed light on some of these uncertainties relating to applying this innovative approach to new contexts, we thought it would be best to get the perspective of someone who has faced such challenges and opportunities, and share what it’s really like successfully applying behavioral insights to a government program.

Over the last two years, ideas42 worked with the World Bank and the Social Assistance Unit (SAU) – a unit within the Government of Kenya’s Ministry of Labour and Social Protection’s State Department of Social Protection – to improve the efficiency of Inua Jamii, Kenya’s National Safety Net Program (NSNP). The SAU team participated in field research, contributed to the design of behavioral interventions, and took ownership of training and delivery of the interventions during pilot testing. Ultimately, the partnership yielded behavioral solutions that help beneficiaries of Kenya’s unconditional cash transfer make the most of cash assistance, including setting goals and making investments that can help them generate income in the future.

John Gachigi, the Head of SAU, offered to share his perspective on collaborating with a behavioral design firm and the process of creating innovative solutions to improve an existing program. It is our hope that the conversation offers insight into the experience of governments incorporating behavioral science into their programs and useful information for those in other countries considering applying behavioral science to their own work. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

ideas42: In what way has incorporating behavioral science changed what you do and how you do it?

John Gachigi: Prior to implementing the behavioral intervention for the Inua Jamii cash transfer program, it was business as usual. The government was mostly concerned about availing the cash to targeted vulnerable communities in the most efficient and effective way. After taking note of how beneficiaries were spending their cash, we looked at the human side and examined their behavior, understood their aspirations and designed further support for beneficiaries.

This prompted us to adopt an innovative approach, taking cognizance of beneficiary behavior, and in line with the vision of the program. The set of behavioral nudges developed to do this are geared at helping beneficiaries reflect on their goals and plan how to achieve these goals by taking deliberate actions. This support prompts them to set goals, plan and utilize their money not purely for today’s needs, but also towards productive investments to uplift their livelihoods and enhance their resilience.

ideas42: Beyond our work together, are there examples of other areas where your teams have started using behavioral science?

JG: There are several. First, to institutionalize the behavioral sciences, we have made behavioral science part and parcel of our Annual Workplan and Budget. This has fostered acceptance and credibility of the impact of the behavioral sciences within the government. As an outcome, the nudge implementation is not a standalone activity but part and parcel of our overall work. The government uses a Beneficiary Outreach Strategy (BOS) as a vehicle to communicate with beneficiaries and deliver training within the Inua Jamii program. Behavioral nudges will be mainstreamed into the BOS capacity building mechanism for beneficiaries. The government is also using Beneficiary Welfare Committees (BWCs) as the vehicle for delivering BOS and behavioral nudges as these committee members have direct contact with the beneficiaries. BWCs also serve as the bridge linking beneficiaries to government officers and other stakeholders, hence a suitable mechanism for channeling the interventions.

In addition, we are building the capacity of government officers in the behavioral sciences: Informing officers about the approach and working together to create awareness and buy-in that will enable harnessing of behavioral science in other aspects of the government’s work. There are several key departments working on the Inua Jamii cash transfer: The Social Protection Secretariat (SPS), Department of Children Services (DCS), Department of Social Development (DSD), National Council for Persons Living with Disability (NCPWD) and the Hunger Safety Net Program (HSNP). These departments have been brought on board to learn about the behavioral sciences, contribute to the project and participate in the implementation. We are also including development partners such as UNICEF, and expect to further disseminate behavioral insights across the board in the future.

ideas42: What is your advice to other government teams considering applying behavioral science to their work?

JG: Governments are already actively occupied with many ongoing commitments, and it is important to identify viable entry points. The way it was done in Kenya was that we identified key drivers or champions for the behavioral science project (the Social Assistance Unit) within the government, then partnered with the World Bank. Government officers were trained, sensitized and involved in the entire process from diagnosis to design and testing, and this has helped them to own the process.

There is a need to have a core team of officers who can facilitate and train others for the knowledge to be cascaded to all levels. For proper intervention at grassroots levels, invest in capacity building of government officials and local officers.

Finally, as the government is planning for programs and interventions on social protection, they should consider allocating some funds towards implementation of behavioral interventions.

Our work in partnership with the Government of Kenya is a case study in how behavioral science can be applied at low cost for social good. It also demonstrates a path forward for countries and cities looking to begin applying behavioral insights to improve outcomes for their own residents and constituents. Like in Kenya, an initial collaboration on something like improving the effectiveness of cash transfers can, with a thoughtful approach by those within governments, lead to further innovation and the institutionalization of behavioral design across multiple government programs.

By applying the power of behavioral science, governments can design more effective policies and programs, and because governments touch people’s lives in countless ways, this can contribute to scaling social impact and improving millions of lives around the world. Interested in applying behavioral insights to your own government work? Reach out to us at info@ideas42.org.

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What Behavioral Science Can Teach us 4+ Months into the COVID-19 Pandemic

Thu, 09 Jul 2020 14:34:07 GMT

As economies enter various phases of ‘opening back up’ and countries gradually ease COVID-19-related lockdowns and restrictions, many people find themselves constantly navigating ambiguity and uncertainty around how this should affect their everyday decisions and actions.

Two ideas42 team members, based in different parts of the world, share their experiences and offer helpful insights based on behavioral science.

Mukta Joshi: In the suburban New Jersey neighborhood where I live with my family of four, the four months before July were characterized by a fear of the unknown related to COVID-19, compliance with local government regulations concerning strict stay-at-home orders, and a religious following of public health guidelines in the spirit of reciprocity toward the healthcare workers who were fighting at the frontline in tough circumstances.

Flash forward to July 2020, however, the social scene in my neighborhood is steadily changing. Families are hanging out together with an intention to stay physically distant that rarely translates into an action – particularly when children are involved. Pool parties and birthday celebrations are routinely organized and although held outdoors, they rarely comply with physical distancing and mask wearing guidelines.

Lois Aryee: Here in Accra, I have observed two categories of people. The first generally never adhered strictly to the physical distancing protocols in place due to real constraints, especially for those who are lower-income: more difficult living situations and a dependence on daily income for their livelihoods that prevents them from being able to safely distance.

The second group, largely middle and upper-income, sound more similar to what you’re describing in your New Jersey context, Mukta – gradually waning in their initial strict observance of recommended safety measures. Friends and families are now gathering again and organizing social events where recommended health guidelines are not observed. People feel overconfident around familiar faces, or in each other’s homes, as if somehow the virus can’t attack the people or places they know. Across the board, there’s an increasing weariness of all restrictions – people, no matter their situations, are itching to return to some semblance of normalcy.

How the changing context is leading to changes in behavior

Psychological quirks are having a powerful effect on our behaviors – it doesn’t matter if we’re in Accra, New Jersey, or elsewhere. For example, when otherwise rule-following people decide to go out more often than needed, without maintaining physical distance because they see others around them are doing so, that can be attributed to the power of social norms.

MJ: In my particular case, the feeling of helplessness has played an additional role in me giving up on preventing my children from playing with their friends living across the street. The only things I am particular about are that they play outdoors and do not touch each other – asking for anything more than that requires free time to pay constant attention (a luxury, particularly at present), or nagging them, which leads to unpleasant interactions that often prove to be futile.

It’s not uncommon these days to hear someone say some version of “I have been home for so many weeks, I think it’s okay to visit a relative or close friend at their home just once.” For the sacrifices they made by staying at home, people take the license to reward themselves with something like this, even when they are not making a safe choice given the ongoing, still spreading pandemic.

LA: Following one safety measure can create a false sense of security, leading to neglecting other equally important ones. In Accra, I’ve observed that people sometimes feel more protected than they should in crowded places like the market, because they are wearing a mask–and as a result, they fail to physically distance.

Recently, in many countries around the world, lockdowns have been relaxed and restaurants, malls, beaches, and parks have started to open up gradually. This has led many people to venture out to such places in large numbers, making it difficult to adequately adhere to physical distancing. People are taking such seemingly trivial actions because the consequences of these actions are not immediate. The ostrich effect, which causes people to simply avoid unpleasant realities, further encourages tendencies to engage in pre-COVID activities using pre-COVID norms. Others may also have the mental model that if things are opening up, the virus must not be as threatening any more, when that is not the case everywhere, like many areas in the United States.

Although the current severity of COVID-19 is arguably as strong as it was when it started, other timely topics have been the focus in the media. For example, the Black Lives Matter movement and racial justice protests in the United States, and military clashes on the India-China border in India. In Ghana, upcoming election activities and controversies have occupied media and public attention of late. With less information sharing and coverage (and subsequent social media chatter) circulating than in previous months, COVID-19 can feel less salient (and therefore less imminently dangerous), potentially creating a business-as-usual attitude among citizens.

The good news: behavioral science holds promise

We know from research in behavioral science that people respond to what they see, hear, and perceive. Whether real or imagined, the sense that everyone is going back to normal, or that everyone is lax on following health protocols, will only lead more people to do the same. This is often subconscious, especially given that there is little to no enforcement of positive behaviors or safety measures. If there was ever a time to leverage these same human tendencies in a way that promotes the health and well-being of people, the time is now.

Simple messaging can be used to change the narrative on what’s normal. People in leadership positions can communicate, signal, and exemplify the right behaviors. At the corporate level, this is already being modeled by many businesses closing offices until the fall, and in some cases until 2021. This gesture sends a signal to staff that physical distancing is still important, regardless of what it might seem like outside.

School principals, community leaders, religious leaders, and parents, can likewise signal positive behaviors within their spheres of influence. First, by walking the talk – observing physical distancing, wearing masks, etc. wherever they are spotted. By hearing and observing consistent messaging at multiple levels – government, corporate, community, and family, people are likely to do what we as humans do – model what we see.

To help counter the false optimism that may be created by easing restrictions, regular updates or reminders on COVID-19 should be resumed. These communications should highlight and affirm positive behaviors, showing that many people are still following the recommended guidelines.

The content of what’s communicated is just as important as the message itself. People are currently inundated with messages telling them what to do – wear masks, observe social distancing, etc., but less so with why and how. When messages feel overwhelming and difficult to follow, people are more likely to give up trying altogether.

Breaking down guidelines into practical steps, and demonstrating why it’s important, will help people follow through. Images and guidelines that give more concrete examples of what to do instead of visiting a loved one, or of other activities people can engage in to still feel close to each other, may be more helpful than telling them to stay home. Besides, for many, always staying home is simply not possible, and guidelines on what to do when you do go out are more useful.

Connecting positive behaviors to issues people care about is also more likely to get a response. For most people, the consequences of their actions aren’t immediate or direct, and they may never know who their behavior affected, or how.

Highlighting the fact that your decisions and actions have a direct effect on others will cause people to think twice about their behavior. Showing personal stories of people making sacrifices to protect their neighbors, loved ones, and other vulnerable people, will help make individual decisions feel more personal. People generally want to matter, but the pandemic can feel so big and overwhelming, countering the sense of individual agency.

By showing that a person can save the life of even one other person, who may be the breadwinner of their family, thereby keeping an entire family well and safe, following safety measures will feel more meaningful.

There are many people who want to do the right thing, but are afraid to stand out as the only ones doing so. By wearing a mask when you go out, or actively practicing physical distancing, your actions may empower another person to do the same. You can make a difference, even as a single person.

LA: A family member recently told me that he sometimes feels awkward wearing a mask in public spaces if he didn’t see anyone else doing the same, even though he knew it was one of the most caring things he could do for others, and for himself. If he saw even one other person also wearing a mask, however, he suddenly felt emboldened to continue to do the right thing. Imagine if we each decided to be that one example – what positive ripple effect this could have across our communities.

These are difficult times for everyone. Observing health protocols, especially when consequences feel distant, can seem costly. Even as we seek to promote desirable behaviors, let’s remember to practice empathy, knowing that we are imperfect humans, often with good intentions, struggling to act on them. With a little help from behavioral science, we can harness those good intentions to make a real difference, and create more positive impact.

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With 30+ Million People out of Work, it’s Time to Invest in College Completion

Thu, 11 Jun 2020 14:47:00 GMT

Less than half of adults in the United States have a postsecondary degree (an associate degree or higher). This trend creates significant consequences for people’s long-term economic security and well-being; college graduates are less likely to be underemployed and are more likely to have higher earnings than people without degrees. And as the unemployment rate continues to rise due to COVID-19, those without college degrees are likely to disproportionately suffer.

During the Great Recession, colleges, especially two-year institutions, experienced dramatic increases in enrollment as people faced bleak job prospects. However, college completion rates fell, particularly among adult students. Understanding the challenges that the millions of Americans now out of work face as they contemplate returning to college and completing a degree is imperative.

Fortunately, many states had already started to prioritize increasing degree attainment in recent years. Because community college systems are the country’s largest provider of postsecondary education, much of states’ education policy and programs have been directed toward them. For example, Tennessee Reconnect, launched in 2018, is a scholarship that offers adults without a postsecondary degree the opportunity to attend a community college tuition-free. After its launch, adult enrollment at Tennessee community colleges increased by 18% over the prior year.

Inarguably, Tennessee Reconnect has made a difference for many students. At the same time, thousands of residents who were eligible for the scholarship didn’t apply. And only half of students who successfully received Reconnect funding in their first year reapplied for the funding and returned to college for their second year. Free college sounds like a no-brainer from the student perspective. So why didn’t more students take advantage of this opportunity?

Behavioral science sheds light on why free tuition may not be enough to help more people get a degree—and suggests solutions to strengthen state programs and initiatives so they can impact even more people. These additional supports may be more important now than ever given the myriad of COVID-related challenges students may confront as they work to finish college. To explore behaviorally informed solutions to increase adult college re-enrollment and completion, we partnered with the University of Virginia’s Nudge4 Solutions Lab and the community college systems of Virginia, Tennessee, and Indiana.

In our partnership with these state agencies, we’ve gathered valuable insights about how to help states leverage behavioral science to improve their residents’ postsecondary outcomes.

Change requires collaboration among multiple stakeholders. There are several layers of stakeholders within community college systems. The Virginia Community College System (VCCS), for example, oversees a network of 23 community colleges, but each one operates fairly autonomously. Therefore, it’s crucial to get buy-in from individual institutions in order to incorporate behavioral science into their processes. Further, these partners can help assess both the potential impact and feasibility of the behaviorally informed solutions we generate by providing information on what’s already been tried, what resources are available, and what upcoming initiatives may facilitate or hinder implementation.
Getting in touch with hard-to-reach potential students takes creativity and coordination. Improving states’ educational attainment rates necessitates reaching students who are not currently enrolled in college, which is tricky. For our work in Virginia, VCCS identified a list of students who met criteria we had outlined, and several colleges pulled the latest contact information for these students (who had left school before graduating) and conducted outreach. This enabled us to follow up with interviews to learn more about their educational experiences. It took a team effort to find and connect with students who could benefit most from behavioral interventions.
Behavioral science offers novel perspectives. Those who work in education–at colleges, or at the policy level–may immediately think of the financial and career benefits of a degree when they consider the benefits of pursuing higher education. However, we learned that to prospective students, such benefits are often ambiguous or unknown. Instead, we found that students seem to be motivated by more intrinsic reasons for completing their degree, such as the personal accomplishment it represents. This behavioral insight has the ability to affect education policy and programmatic implementation differently than how states might have approached this otherwise. For example, in encouraging students who have left college to re-enroll, especially in increasingly important programs like health care or emergency response, messaging could prompt students to think about how good it will feel to help their communities during this crisis.

This latest partnership builds on a strong history of collaboration between ideas42 and Nudge4 to employ behavioral science to improve postsecondary degree attainment. Beginning in 2015, we worked together with the Common Application to implement a national nudging campaign aimed at increasing FAFSA completion among prospective college students. Subsequently, we partnered again to develop a practitioner’s guide to developing evidence-based behavioral innovations to improve college access and success.

We hope these recent lessons will inform similar partnerships among community colleges and behavioral scientists in the future. We think behavioral insights can open up new avenues for states to address their policy objectives, such as Tennessee’s initiative Drive to 55, which aims to achieve a postsecondary degree attainment rate of 55% among its adult population by 2025.

Expect more insights from this collaboration: our work in these three states is ongoing. The goal for these partnerships is to pilot interventions based on behavioral insights during the 2020-2021 academic year. In the meantime, you can also read our guide on nudge strategies to support student success in online learning, and stay tuned for new results and insights about helping more people reach their postsecondary goals.

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Could Temporary, Behaviorally Informed Changes to WIC Be Program Fixtures?

Wed, 10 Jun 2020 18:07:52 GMT

Since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of people have lost their jobs or are finding it even harder to stretch their paycheck to meet their needs. Many are finding that they need social safety net programs to ensure the health and well-being of their families, often for the first time. One of these programs, the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), is a lifesaving, evidence-based safety net program for pregnant women and children from birth to age 5. To protect families’ health during the pandemic and support the many new participants, state WIC agencies have received waivers to enroll and issue benefits to participants remotely and offer more flexibility in food packages. But there’s likely another positive impact of these waivers, too: they may reduce hidden costs to participants’ time and attention.

In previous work exploring WIC programs, we learned that many participants appreciate the support from WIC, but occasionally miss out on their benefits or stop participating altogether when the program fails to align with constraints to their time and attention. Unfortunately, those who stand to benefit from WIC the most are the families who are the most temporally and cognitively taxed, as they’re forced to deal with urgent demands (e.g. paying this month’s rent, preparing tomorrow’s meals), at the expense of events further in the future, like finding a ride to next week’s WIC appointment. In a global pandemic environment fraught with health and economic issues, WIC participants are likely to be even more taxed as they are looking for new work in a job market with more limited opportunities, caring for family members affected by COVID-19, or consumed with worry about whether they will be infected.

Our recent work in California further affirms that service delivery, like those provided by WIC, must take into account the ‘bandwidth tax’ levied on participants living in the context of chronic scarcity—and dig deeper to understand even those costs which may seem small or invisible. Before the pandemic swept the country, we were working in California to design and test behaviorally informed interventions to help get participants to their recertification appointments, particularly at the one-year mark, a crucial drop-off point for many. We found that making preparation for appointments salient with timely text message reminders helped get more people to their WIC appointments. We also found that a Roadmap of the program, designed to highlight what to expect from WIC in the first two years of a child’s life, would benefit from tweaks to its delivery to better account for hidden costs to participants’ bandwith.

The pandemic created an opportunity for even larger changes to program policy and design that can account for and reduce costs to participants’ bandwith. Waivers allowing more flexibility in the food package and extended benefits issuance are changes to WIC service delivery in line with what we know works to improve access to and use of beneficial programs. More flexibility in the food package saves families from multiple trips to different grocery stores when they find that certain WIC products are sold out. Allowing families to receive four months of WIC benefits at a time reduces the number of times they must re-up their benefits at the WIC agency – giving them back time and attention, while keeping them connected to the program. Now is an opportune time for policymakers to explore the impact of current ‘temporary’ changes and consider the possibility of making them fixtures of the WIC program, as they may further benefit families who will continue to experience limitations and ‘taxes’ on their time and attention after the pandemic is over.

Our new report provides important lessons from our work with WIC agencies, as well as guidance for state and local agencies as they take on new initiatives like these and more, as they strive to serve families at this critical time and beyond.

For more information about our economic justice work, contact us at allison@ideas42.org.

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ideas42 Stands for Racial Justice

Tue, 09 Jun 2020 15:19:24 GMT

We are disgusted by the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. We are angry about the ongoing racism faced by Black people. This anger is not new in the US, as Black Americans have faced a long history of racist violence driven not by a few bad actors, but by systemic racism and a culture of white supremacy stretching back more than 400 years to its roots in slavery. This systemic racism permeates all aspects of our society, including our education system, financial industry, political and electoral process, labor markets, and healthcare system. We need to look no further than the current COVID-19 pandemic, which is infecting and killing Black Americans at a disproportionate rate, for evidence of the disparity in the American healthcare system and its outcomes.

The dismantling of systematic racism can seem overwhelming at times, and some throw up their hands and say “we can’t solve racism in America” or that it’s an intractable problem. The evidence suggests otherwise. There are proven approaches to reduce racism in almost all of the areas that propagate it. We don’t have all the answers. Where they exist we must work to get them adopted, and where they do not, ideas42 will work tirelessly to find them. We implore others to do the same.

These words of support and solidarity and the work that ideas42 has done thus far to combat inequities are not enough. We can, must, and will do more both internally and externally.

ideas42 commits to the following:

As a means of greater accountability, we will publicly report annually on the progress we have been making on our existing internal commitments to increase our team diversity, and specifically to have a senior team and board of directors that reflect the populations we serve, both in the United States and around the world
We will adopt a more race-conscious and anti-racist lens in project selection and project execution
We will increase by eightfold the number of Black scholars in our academic affiliate network
We will conduct more applied research in the service of designing anti-racist interventions in all of the policy areas in which we work
We will challenge our funders and our partners to adopt similar diversity and inclusion practices in their internal and external structures, and also to consult viewpoints that are more representative of the populations they serve when setting their research and development agendas
We commit to expanding our existing Safety & Justice work and place a greater focus on fighting racial injustice in the broken criminal justice system
We commit to partnering with more organizations on the front line of this battle. Please email us at racialjustice@ideas42.org or contact us on social media if you have ideas or opportunities to partner in the fight for racial justice

We know this is still not enough, and we acknowledge that we do not have all the answers. We know that this is not all that ideas42 can do to help in the fight to end racial injustice. We know that we will need to make additional commitments as we move forward as an ally in this fight. It is going to take all of us continuing to push for change to dismantle and rebuild our failing systems.

We know that behavioral science can help combat racism, empower people, challenge oppression, and fight injustice. With those tools at our disposal, as well as a deep sense of humility and determination we commit to working toward racial justice.

ideas42 stands in solidarity with the organizations and governments we partner with for change, everyone fighting for Black lives, and most importantly with Black people.

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ideas42 Seminar Series: A Talk with Stefano DellaVigna

Thu, 28 May 2020 14:00:54 GMT

With the ideas42 Seminar Series, we invite leading scholars to share their insights and what inspires their exploration into human behavior.

We were pleased to welcome Stefano DellaVigna, the Daniel Koshland, Sr. Distinguished Professor of Economics and Professor of Business Administration at the University of California, Berkeley. His recent paper, RCTs to Scale: Comprehensive Evidence from Two Nudge Units, compares behavioral science interventions in research studies versus field experiments. After giving a talk to the ideas42 team, Stefano was kind enough to share some of his thoughts on behavioral science:

What do you think researchers (or implementing organizations) need to do differently to incorporate behavioral science into programs and products more effectively?

One point suggested by our analysis is not about the exact design of the intervention, but making sure that the intervention is well powered statistically. Our results suggests that one should aim for a statistical power of 1.5 percentage point effects; in practice, many interventions are run with lower statistical power, which increases the chance that findings would not be replicable. This may mean running fewer treatment arms, or working hard to get a larger population.

In your view, how could we encourage researchers to share null or negative results?

A very important point. I think that journals should be open to precisely estimated null effects, but it is a path to get to that. I have two suggestions. One, it may be easier to publish null results as a bundle of interventions, some of which may be null, others maybe not. For example, Angela Duckworth and Katy Milkman have a great project on mega-studies that effectively does this, bundles a number of interventions, even by different authors in one setting and in one paper.

My second thought on this is very close to my heart — with Eva Vivalt we are launching a platform for people to get expert forecasts about the result of their interventions. In many cases, comparing to the average prediction of experts makes the finding not a null, but the rejection of the mean expert forecasts.

The United States recently expanded unemployment insurance dramatically. What can behavioral economics tell us about how to design unemployment insurance?

There are many dimensions to this, but I would keep in mind that we probably do not want a drastic drop-off of UI benefit level once the support legislated by Congress ends. That is a dimension to keep in mind. A good place to start is understanding how people actually approach job searches, which is actually different than standard models suggest.

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