Behavioural Science

End poverty in all its forms everywhere

End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture

Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages

Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls

Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all

Reduce inequality within and among countries

Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable

Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns

Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impact

Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels

Strenghten the means of implementation and revitalise the global partnership for sustainable development

Leveraging behavioural insights for sustainable development

Insights from the behavioural sciences, or what is commonly referred to as Behavioural Insights (BI), are the accumulation of knowledge gained from various disciplines – including psychology, economics, sociology, cognitive science and neuroscience – that challenges the notion of rationality and supports the use of more human-centered approaches to designing policies, programmes and projects.

Research in behavioural science — regarding how people make decisions and act on them, how they think about, influence, and relate to one another, and how they develop beliefs and attitudes, can help nudge citizens and other stakeholders to take decisions that better support sustainable development outcomes (while preserving freedom of choice).

What distinguishes this approach from other forms of human-centred design is the use of thorough experimentation methods that measure the impact of different kinds of interventions. The most rigorous form of measurement, the randomized controlled trial (RCT), involves randomly assigning individuals, time slots, or locations to receive the behavioural intervention while assigning others to receive a different intervention, "business as usual", or nothing at all.