{"id":32,"date":"2017-07-14T08:45:52","date_gmt":"2017-07-14T08:45:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/behaviouralinsights\/?p=32"},"modified":"2018-04-27T08:33:12","modified_gmt":"2018-04-27T08:33:12","slug":"thinking-behaviourally-about-higher-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/behaviouralinsights\/2017\/07\/14\/thinking-behaviourally-about-higher-education\/","title":{"rendered":"Thinking behaviourally about higher education"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Susannah Hume, King’s College London & Behavioural Insights Team |\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Small things can have a big impact on our lives. A transport museum visit might change the course of a young person’s life by inspiring them\u00a0to become a train driver, while for another watching CSI <\/em>might spark the idea of a career in forensics. Psychologists have known this for a while–that the choices we make are influenced by a complex array of factors, many of which we might not even notice.<\/p>\n

However, when we\u2019re designing policies, we often don\u2019t consider these factors–we assume that the people we\u2019re trying to influence are \u2018rational\u2019 in the economic sense: they weigh up the pros and cons of all their options before choosing that which, on balance, is best for them. And if the choices made don\u2019t align with what we expect, then we look at the big levers for solutions: regulation, funding and fees, and information.<\/p>\n

We offer a bursary to the young person who wants to be a train driver to apply their skills to an engineering degree instead; or tell the young person who\u2019s applied to a forensic science course that studying chemistry will give them more flexibility.<\/p>\n

And nothing changes.<\/p>\n

What we\u2019ve assumed is an information gap is actually something else–not only about the information itself, but the way in which it was given, and often the context in which it was received. Difficult-to-imagine future financial benefits listed on a website cannot compete with the feeling of standing in the driver’s cab of a\u00a0museum train, imagining the horizon stretching out in front of you.<\/p>\n

Behavioural insights and BIT<\/strong><\/p>\n

Whilst our behaviour may not seem rational to an Econ<\/a>\u00a0(or policy-maker), these \u2018irrationalities\u2019 can be remarkably consistent across individuals. Often, they result from systematic rules of thumb–\u2018heuristics\u2019–that we use to simplify complicated decisions we face. The work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky systematised and quantified some of these systematic deviations from the predictions of standard microeconomic models, while the work of Thaler and Sunstein, which Anne-Marie has already mentioned<\/a>, started the work of bridging the gap between the academic insights and their practical applications.<\/p>\n

The Behavioural Insights Team<\/a>, which started life in 2010 inside No. 10 Downing Street, was the world\u2019s first government institution dedicated to systematically applying these insights from the behavioural sciences to improve public policy. We\u2019re now a social purpose company with offices around the world, working in almost every policy area, and with 20 governments worldwide. Our approach has two pillars:<\/p>\n

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  1. Thinking differently about how people interact with public services; and<\/li>\n
  2. Raising the standard of evaluation applied to policy or service changes, be they big or small. Our CEO, David Halpern, is also the government\u2019s chief advisor on the What Works programme<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    A case study on university aspirations<\/strong><\/p>\n

    The need to both think differently and test interventions was illustrated by a project we ran with the Somerset Challenge<\/a> in 2014, investigating ways to raise university aspirations among sixth form students in the county. Working with a collection of secondary schools in Somerset we ran a study to test three interventions:<\/p>\n