Behavioral Insights Quotes

“Just as changing a message’s presentation can affect results, so too can changing the messenger.”
― Michael Hallsworth, Behavioral Insights

“Financial incentives are undoubtedly a powerful influence on behavior. However, as suggested in chapter 1, behavioral insights can also be used to design them in more effective ways. For example, in one study giving financial rewards for group outcomes resulted in greater healthy weight loss compared with rewarding individual performance: the added motivation to not let down a teammate supercharged the promise of financial gain.”
― Michael Hallsworth, Behavioral Insights

“For example, many people feel anxious before they need to perform a task like speaking in public or participating in an important meeting. Most people try a strategy of trying to calm down in order to deal with this anxiety. But an alternative approach is to reinterpret this anxiety as excitement. A study found that when people use this tactic they perform better at anxiety-inducing tasks.60 This is the kind of useful yet easy tactic, informed by behavioral science, that people can apply to their everyday lives.”
― Michael Hallsworth, Behavioral Insights

“Using behavioral science insights to better serve the American people.” On the basis that “by improving the effectiveness and efficiency of Government, behavioral science insights can support a range of national priorities,”
― Michael Hallsworth, Behavioral Insights

“Behavioral science should help officials understand the “behavioral dimension” of their policies and actions, rather than just focusing on new interventions.”
― Michael Hallsworth, Behavioral Insights

“The logical conclusion is that everyone is in the business of nudging, whether they like it or not, and therefore they need to be aware of what they are doing.”
― Michael Hallsworth, Behavioral Insights

“But in general, having more income produces only a very small shift toward buying premium.”
― Michael Hallsworth, Behavioral Insights

“The main principles of this “rational choice theory” are that we have coherent and stable preferences, we consider the full range of information relevant to a decision, and we use that information to calculate the option that best fulfills our preferences.”
― Michael Hallsworth, Behavioral Insights

“While these automatic reactions take place outside our conscious awareness, often they have developed as efficient and powerful ways to accomplish our goals.”
― Michael Hallsworth, Behavioral Insights

“In contrast, the key “insight” of behavioral insights is that much of our behavior is nonconscious, habitual, and driven by cues in our environment or the way in which choices are presented. We are capable of making decisions in a considered, deliberate way, but this happens less often than we assume. Instead, our actions are guided by mental shortcuts or simple “rules of thumb”—for example, “do what everyone else is doing” or “take the middle option.” These shortcuts are often triggered automatically—outside our conscious awareness—by features of the choices or situations that we encounter.”
― Michael Hallsworth, Behavioral Insights

“Behavioral insights can give a realistic account of how and why we act the way we do, allowing us to design or redesign policies, products, and services accordingly.”
― Michael Hallsworth, Behavioral Insights