We study psychological impediments that make it difficult to change behaviour. In particular, we evaluate the impact of a randomised psychological intervention designed to target locus of control--an individual’s belief in their own ability to influence their outcomes -- on the adoption of...

Applied behavioral science has made its mark identifying and correcting for cognitive biases and noise as causes of “irrational” decision-making that lead individuals to act against their self-interest. However, its reliance on surfacing behavioral insights largely through decontextualized...

The COVID-19 pandemic represents a massive global health crisis. Because the crisis requires large-scale behaviour change and places significant psychological burdens on individuals, insights from the social and behavioural sciences can be used to help align human behavior with the...

Building on the much-celebrated sex-specific hypothesis on visceral responses, here we examine whether the well-replicated gender difference in competitiveness may be influenced by the visceral responses. In the first experiment, we show that the gender difference in competitiveness is partially...

Take-up of a social benefit is usually defined as receiving a benefit for which an individual or household is eligible. The take-up rate is the fraction of those eligible for a program who participate and receive a benefit or service. We survey estimates of take-up of social benefits around the...

Religious adherence has been hard to study because it is hard to measure. We develop a new measure of religious adherence, which is granular in both time and space, using anonymized mobile phone transaction records. After validating the measure with traditional data, we show how it can shed...

Punishment menus allow offenders to choose the punishment to which they will be subjected from a set of options. We present several behaviorally informed rationales for why punishment menus may serve as effective deterrents, notably by causing people to refrain from entering a calculative...

We provide the first empirical evidence on the direct link between locus of control and self-control, and how they interact in explaining a range of health outcomes. Using rich Australian survey data, we find that, while the two traits are distinct constructs, a greater internal locus of control...

We provide the first empirical evidence on the direct link between locus of control and self-control, and how they interact in explaining a range of health outcomes. Using rich Australian survey data, we find that, while the two traits are distinct constructs, a greater internal locus of control...

Women's voices are likely to be even more absent from economic debates than headline figures on female under-representation suggest. Focusing on a panel of leading economists we find that men are more willing than women to express an opinion and are more certain and more confident in their...