In partnership with 
Blog
BIT Partners Win $100 Million Grant from MacArthur Foundation
We are delighted to announce that our partners at the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and Sesame Workshop have been selected as the winners of the MacArthur Foundation’s 100&Change Challenge, a groundbreaking award providing $100 million to fund a critical problem facing the world today. IRC and Sesame Workshop have teamed up to develop the winning […]
December 21, 2017
Changing teachers’ attitudes toward corporal punishment
Physical punishment — from hitting children with sticks to making them kneel to slapping them — occurs every day in classrooms throughout the world. Yet we know experiences of violence at school are linked to lower attendance and academic achievement as well as higher drop-out rates. In turn, lower educational attainment rates among girls can have effects across generations, leading to […]
November 7, 2017
Using behavioral insights to support early child development in the Syria response
We are living in a time when more families have been forced from their homes by conflict and crisis than at any other time since World War II. The most vulnerable among these are children. Refugee children are often deprived of educational opportunities, some are separated from their families, and all are affected by their […]
August 25, 2017
How can a letter increase sewer bill payments?
As more residents and businesses fail to pay their sewer bills, cities across the United States have had to resort to turning off water services to prompt them to pay. In some cities, sewer charges are included on the water bill and collected by the utility company. This makes it easy for cities to collect […]
May 3, 2016
How can a letter encourage us to pay our parking fines?
Like death and taxes, parking tickets are a fact of life – especially in urban areas. While no driver likes seeing that slip of paper tucked under their windshield wiper, parking tickets serve important functions – like keeping busy roadways free of impediments and making parking fair to all drivers. The problem is, many drivers […]
March 4, 2016
How can text messages encourage people to see a doctor?
If you haven’t seen a doctor in a long time, the thought of picking up the phone to schedule an appointment can be terrifying. Sometimes it’s easier to adopt an “out of sight out of mind” mentality. However, the people who haven’t seen a doctor in years are the ones most likely to benefit from […]
February 22, 2016
Stories from the States
As part of BIT North America’s work with the Bloomberg Philanthropies What Works Cities initiative, we have launched ten randomized control trials in six cities from Kentucky to California in the last six months. While we wait for the results, we thought we’d share three stories that shed some light on BIT’s methodology and let […]
February 4, 2016
Happy holidays to our stateside cousins – Inside the Nudge Unit is available in the USA!
We’ve known for some time that across countries labour productivity per hour is negatively correlated with hours worked. Just to check, we ran a seasonally festive correlation between labour productivity and average days of holiday taken by country, which also showed a modest negative correlation (about -0.12 in the data we had to hand…). It seems, […]
December 22, 2015
BIT to partner with US cities through Bloomberg Philanthropies’ What Works Cities Initiative
New partnership will help to launch US operations for BIT The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) has entered into a three-year partnership with Bloomberg Philanthropies on its new What Works Cities initiative. The $42 million project endeavors to build on existing innovation at the city-level by helping mayors and local leaders use data and evidence to […]
April 20, 2015
Harvard conference
On the 21 and 22 October, Harvard’s Behavioural Insights Group hosted a two day conference on “Lessons from the front lines of global policy”. The event, which was funded through the joint BIT/BIG Sloan Foundation grant, featured talks from leading Harvard Academics and practitioners from around the world. Highlights of the conference included: Professor Michael […]
October 30, 2014