Dilip Soman is the Canada Research Chair in Behavioural Science and Economics, and serves as a Director of the Behavioural Economics in Action Research Centre at Rotman (BEAR). His research is in the area of behavioural science and its applications to consumer wellbeing, marketing and policy. He is the author of "The Last Mile" and teaches an open online course "BE101X: Behavioural Economics in Action" on EdX. We spoke to Dilip about his views on the role of behavioural insights in the Global South, its challenges and whether the Global South and North can share lessons learned.
Since its inception, the BI community in the Global North turned to scientific rigour and evidence to justify its value in response to the climate of deep scepticism towards the field. Albeit a hard armour, this uniformity across the tools, methodologies, and areas of focus in the field resulted in the emergence of what Dilip refers to as a ‘BI box’ of standard practices. Among other examples, randomised control trials (RCTs) hold the gold standard of evaluation methods. Dilip talked to us about the various examples around the world where alternative methods were employed instead of RCTs as a go-to method of evaluation and, therefore, challenges the role of the BI practitioners and gold standard methodologies.
BI4GOV is thrilled to share our conversation with Dilip as the first of a series of conversations held with leaders across the BI world.
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM WITH TRADITIONAL APPROACHES?
The scarcity of resources in the Global South prevent BI work from flourishing, especially when BI is held to strict standards and rigid methodologies more suited to the Global North
Considering the first nudge units were set up in the UK, US, Australia, Canada, Netherlands, and Germany, these standards were built with the Global North in mind. Largely missing from this development though, is that the Global South, characterised by mainly developing countries, is contextually different—with a backdrop of issues ranging from resource scarcity to political unrest. Applying a carbon copy of Global North BI practices into the Global South is unlikely to work very well. For example, a cognitive behavioural therapy intervention carried out successfully in UK schools may not be so easily implemented in certain towns of South Africa due to disruption by gang warfare or taxi violence.
It’s no surprise that developing countries tend to have limited resources, but this means that they are more reluctant to divert funding towards BI and away from critical priorities like health or education provision. BI will likely always be a lesser priority. Additionally, the BI protocol that has become the norm in the Global North, for example using RCTs, can often be expensive and take a long time to implement. Not only does this make RCTs impractical in developing contexts, Dilip argues they are not always necessary:
“With a lot of policy challenges you can’t do [randomised control] trials, like privacy policies or financial disclosures...Sometimes you have to do impulsive experiments and that’s fine.”
He concludes that organisations have tried to convince us that without an RCT, that you were not doing good behavioural work – which is not accurate. When considering the expensive and time-consuming nature of such methods, it becomes understandable that policymakers in the Global South may struggle to even think about using behavioural insights in their interventions.
Juxtaposing the infamous metaphor ‘to think outside the box’ that alludes to thinking differently, or unconventionally, the ‘BI box’ hints at restriction. Dilip believes these shackles need to be eliminated. In a field that studies the inconsistencies of human behaviour, more allowances need to be made for the variations in the contexts we function within. Failing this, interventions with the potential for profound behaviour change could continue to be stunted in the Global South.
The reach of BI work is limited by the existence of broader, systemic barriers which limit the scope of change in low-resource environments
The challenging contexts in the Global South—including the broader, systemic environment, such as poor physical infrastructure or low technological penetration, can also pose certain barriers to behaviour change. For instance, the lack of a robust national identity system in India prevented practitioners like Dilip even being able to contact some of the people most in need. In the following section, Dilip argues that this set of problems can be circumvented through reimagining the role of the BI practitioner.
THE WAY FORWARD: SETTING A NEW GOLD STANDARD IN BI
Questioning the role of the BI practitioner
Dilip found that due to these systemic challenges, “the moment you start pigeonholing yourself as a BI practitioner you lose a lot of traction with all stakeholders”. Yet, the picture isn’t all bleak. He is of the view that the answer to these seemingly insurmountable barriers to behaviour change may not always lie with the standard BI tools and methodology.
“Every problem at some level is a behaviour change problem. But it doesn’t require behavioural insights to solve every behavioural change problem… We need to get beyond the BI box and start to think about behaviour change more broadly.”
Instead, Dilip puts forward a case to challenge the current BI practices with a unique approach that focuses on overall behaviour change as the driver. He shared with us the following practical tips on how to get out the ‘BI box’ and redesign the BI working standards in the Global South, with this end goal in mind - make BI work more effective, increase the amount of BI work happening, and achieve more behaviour change.
The traditional behavioural insights practitioner focuses on designing solutions to behavioural barriers. But when the barrier is larger than the individual’s behaviours and requires a systematic change, Dilip urges practitioners to go beyond their typical job description, and use a wider variety of tactics to achieve behaviour change.
For example, in India, without a formal identity system, Dilip found there was no way to track or contact individuals. In this instance, practitioners are unable to merely diagnose problems within these communities, much less to deliver any form of intervention to them. Such barriers are more prevalent in low-and middle-income countries due to limited government budgets to solve them. With the responsibility to tackle these problems shifting onto whoever has the resources and the willingness to do so, BI practitioners need to start proactively finding solutions to the issues acting as barriers to their work.
Practitioners can begin to deploy tactics such as lobbying for changes, building partnerships, or sourcing funding: “Should behaviour change practitioners care about lobbying the government to create an identity system? Yes, that’s something we should do. You can’t just sit around and wait.”
With the consequence of inaction being a block on their work, BI practitioners must resume the responsibility of these issues in order not to hamper development in the Global South.
Introduce innovation and challenge methodology: the benefits of pilots
When pushing the behavioural insights agenda in the Global South, Dilip has found a few vital ingredients to success:
It’s essential to have some insight on how to scale-up effectively: this is required if you want to achieve profound and sustained behaviour change
Stakeholder buy-in: essential to be able to run an intervention
To achieve these vital ingredients, practitioners need to move beyond the traditional options like RCTs and increasingly towards innovative solutions such as methodology and evaluation methods in the form of pilots, informal case studies, or before and after comparisons. We only need to look to the vast methodological toolbox of an industrial-organisational psychologist to find grounds for this advice, who make use of a mixture of methods including: lab studies, field research, randomised controlled trials, quasi-experimental designs, correlational designs, validation studies, and so forth.
Dilip strongly favours the use of pilots as an alternative strategy as it has led to successes in the past through providing insights on how to scale-up effectively and how to improve stakeholder buy-in, while also improving the reach of BI work in the Global South. These methods serve as an effective way of circumventing the problems such as a lack of time for implementation and resource constraints.
PILOTING IN SOUTH AFRICA: TEACHING GROWTH MINDSET
A practical example of the benefits of a pilot can be found in the Western Cape Government’s Growth Mindset project in South Africa. Eight high schools and twelve primary schools were recruited for the study with the goal to teach primary school students that intelligence is not predetermined, but rather malleable, to help improve academic outcomes. In the pilot, attendance was disrupted due to community unrest including teacher and taxi strikes and gang violence. This generated a key insight that informed how to scale-up most effectively, which is to build in extra time in the curriculum for implementation due to potential disruptions in poor communities.
Aside from providing insight on how to scale-up, the Growth Mindset pilot is proof we can effectively measure impact without deploying an RCT. Using a less resource-demanding approach, it was assessed using a before and after comparison using baseline and endline questionnaires that consisted of self-report questionnaires, a behavioural performance task, and mathematics tests to measure academic outcomes. Despite the simplicity of the trial design, the results showed it had a significant impact: final mathematics scores of the treatment improved by 10 percent in the year of the pilot, which was further sustained and improved in the subsequent year by 17 percent.
Good behavioural work can in fact be achieved without an RCT. The results of the pilot acted as a proof of concept that convinced stakeholders of the benefits of the intervention. The Growth Mindset project will be scaled-up across all 1500 schools in the Western Cape Province.
According to Dilip, piloting at a small-scale is, therefore, beneficial because it can identify potential hurdles to generate insight on how, and if, effective scale-up is possible before committing a large investment. With a smaller history of BI case studies to refer to for guidance in developing country contexts, pilots become key to provide those insights and generate new knowledge. Indeed, considering the limited resources and less predictable nature of developing contexts, generating insight on how to scale-up effectively is even more crucial.
Competing interests highlighted above in low resourced contexts also understandably breeds scepticism towards BI interventions – are we wasting money, could we be doing something else? Pilots work to solve this by showcasing the potential benefits of an intervention to stakeholders if it were to be scaled-up at relatively low cost. As Dilip puts it, “make the pitch… if we only had a way of reaching people at national level, imagine how much benefit it could have” - stakeholder buy-in is crucial as they act as the gatekeepers to BI work in the Global South.
PILOTING IN INDIA: ENCOURAGING MONEY SAVING IN UNREGULATED ECONOMIES
The benefit of pilots in showcasing potential benefits to stakeholders is shown in Dilip’s work in India, which focused on encouraging people earning cash in unregulated, unstructured economies to save more. The sample consisted of around 300 construction workers from one town in India, each of which would receive a visit from a financial planner to develop a savings plan. When it came to payday, a social worker would physically earmark an amount in an envelope labelled ‘savings’. One group received a plain white envelope, and the other group received an envelope displaying a picture of their children as a visual reminder of the goal.
The two behavioural concepts in action were segregation (of finances) and guilt (not saving will have an impact on their children’s lives). Due to the resource limitations of the context, the intervention was measured using a simple two by two experiment, with the subjects being tracked over fourteen weeks. Despite the simplicity of the intervention, they found “the moment we earmarked money separately...people were more likely to save it.”
The pilot and other such demonstrations had the following effects:
Demonstrating to banks and other agencies the potential benefits of providing financial apparatus to those without it, launched a branch on wheels for people to be able to deposit their money in a physical bank.
These banks then supported the government’s initiative to implement an electronic identification system
The positive results of the pilot spread and an online bank transferred certain lessons to its processes.
This pilot served its purpose to generate insight on both how to scale-up effectively (using a combination of the behavioural techniques of segregation and guilt as well as visual reminders), as well as showcasing the potential benefits of the intervention to stakeholders (low-cost, high impact on savings), which led to the lessons being scaled-up and shared. Achieved without using an RCT, the pilot wouldn’t have gone ahead without an openness to innovative solutions to the process, methodology and evaluation methods. Most notably, by influencing the central bank to introduce an electronic identity system, it demonstrated BI practitioners have the power to create widespread behaviour change—the new gold standard.
THE FUTURE OF BI
While the effectiveness of BI has seen headlines in the Global North, it is still in burgeoning stages in the Global South. Acknowledging that there are many unknowns in the type of contexts found in the Global South, we have set out just a few ways behavioural insights practitioners can take some control back. This requires an openness to adapt, take risks and move out of your comfort zone while challenging the BI status quo. To fulfil its potential for considerable growth, we hope to see the Global South pave its own path—one that accommodates its distinct challenges and opportunities.
This blog serves as Part 1 to our interview with Dilip – watch out for Part 2 being posted next on ‘Changing the direction of the diffusion of innovation: Global South to the North’.