Education Next – Phillip Oreopoulos
“We all make bad decisions sometimes. The role of behavioral scientists is to understand why we make these poor choices and develop policies to help us make better ones. With a Nobel Prize for Richard Thaler’s work on individual decision-making and runaway bestseller status for books like Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, behavioral science has garnered wide and growing attention. More than 200 government teams around the world now work on applying behavioral science to develop, test, and scale new interventions. The work of these “Nudge Units” demonstrates that even small, inexpensive changes in how information is conveyed can induce large changes in behavior.” (more)