Behavioural Insights

The goal of these seminars is to learn about new ideas and research on BI in a wide range of topics. We will start with a presentation by Prof. Natalia Montinari (U. Bologna) about the persistent gender pay gap that we observe in many different settings. Other topics that will be covered by various speakers are Misinformation, Environment, Artificial Intelligence, Migration, and Education. The seminar agenda is available here.

In 2022 the CCBI has welcomed five new colleagues (Andrea, Michal, Elisa, Anita and Marion) and we are about to recruit a permanent colleague to replace René, who left in September. With more resources, we also broadened the scope of our activity, and – while continuing or completing on-going work – we started work on AI, education, energy, migration and waste. In 2023 we should finally have a full team and should be able to harvest from the good quality work delivered so far.

We offer an introductory course on behavioural insights on the 7th and 8th of March in the morning, and on the 16th and 17th of June in the morning. The course introduces methods, principles and findings from the behavioural sciences and their relevance to policy-makers. Behavioural insights can be used to improve the way policies are designed. We explain how to identify behavioural aspects of policy problems and apply behaviourally informed solutions to them. The course is highly interactive, with group work, examples and exercises. Please register via the platform EU Learn by clicking on the "read more" button below. Further more specialized and advanced thematic courses and workshops are planned for later in the year.

This behavioural experiment with farmers assesses the effect of two features of the new push to adopt environmentally friendly practices within the EU common agricultural policy. Adoption of such practices can be made mandatory, or budgets can be shifted to encourage voluntary adoption. Results highlight trade-offs between mandatory and voluntary schemes to increase agriculture’s environmental and climate performance.

Despite being considered by many to be harmful for society, inequality has been rising in the past decades. How this is experienced may differ from the objective levels of inequality. We systematically revisit common measures of perceived inequality. Individuals’ experience and exposure to local inequality have profound impact on their perceptions and how they would like to redistribute wealth in society.

On 23 October 2020 the online symposium on “Managing the Green Transition”, organised by the EC Competence Centre on Behavioural Insights took place. The symposium addressed policymakers and behavioural scientists, and discussed learnings from the Covid-19 pandemic for the climate crisis with a focus on the individual behavioural level.

Building a globally recognised centre for applying behavioural insights to policymaking.