How do we help students lift their aspirations and apply themselves harder? How can we encourage people to save for a rainy day? What would convince people to waste less water?
Increasingly, policymakers are turning to the behavioral sciences to help tackle longstanding and difficult policy challenges, such as increasing student learning, raising savings rates, promoting energy and resource conservation, increasing productivity, improving sanitation practices, strengthening institutions, and reducing corruption.
The Mind, Behavior and Development unit (eMBeD), the World Bank’s behavioral science unit, works closely with project teams, participating in the diagnosis, design, and evaluation of behaviorally informed interventions. By embedding in project teams, we facilitate the transfer of skills in behavioral diagnostics, and are at the heart of an institution-wide movement to utilize social and behavioral insights in a sustainable and scalable way. And by working with a wide network of partners, the eMBeD unit develops global knowledge about what works in development practice, and why eMBeD uses the behavioral sciences to fight global poverty and increase equity.
| Peru, Indonesia, and South Africa: Acquiring a growth mindset and increasing academic achievement. How do you motivate students to learn more? This intervention intends to change the beliefs and perceptions of middle-school students by showing them that intelligence is malleable and learning abilities can be developed with effort, perseverance and learning from failure. | Peru: Motivating Teachers. More than a half of the teachers in Peru think that their role in society is not valued and exhibit some dissatisfaction with their career. In this project, we experimented with a weekly SMS campaign targeting teachers that informed them about school and non-school benefits and also shared motivational messages. |
| Peru: Reducing teacher absenteeism. Although Peru exhibits overall low levels of teacher absenteeism, attendance rates are inferior in the poorest and remotest areas. The project consists of sending teachers weekly text or email messages on the importance of attending school using pro-social and social norms framing approaches. | Guatemala: Reducing dropouts. Despite near universal primary enrolment rates, around a third of students in Guatemala drop out during the transition from primary to lower secondary. Currently, student-level administrative data is being used to develop an Early Warning System that can predict which students are at-risk of dropping out. This project evaluates the impact of informing school directors about at-risk students, and the relative effectiveness of supplementing this with guidance on preventing dropouts, reminders, goal-setting, and non-pecuniary awards or raffle prizes to recognize top performing schools. |
| FYR Macedonia: Using socio-emotional skills development to motivate middle schoolers. With an increasing young population not working nor studying, the education system of FYR Macedonia needs to equip students with skills to access a wider set of opportunities. This semester-long intervention provides socio-emotional skills to middle school students through self-paced and teacher-trained lessons on perseverance. The program aims to change students’ attitudes on gender and ethnicity and also teachers’ attitudes as they can demotivate students. | Bulgaria & Serbia: Changing social norms to address the gender gap in skills. The Roma communities in both countries have consistently faced limited access to education, job opportunities, and decent housing. This project aims to identify and empower adolescent girls and their families through delivering targeted information to prioritize education and training, and support them in adapting to new gender roles through a normative messaging campaign. |
| Mexico: Reducing high-school dropouts (PODER- Programa de Oportunidades y Desarrollo para Evitar Riesgos). Forty percent of students in Mexico drop out between 10th and 12th grade, making it a major challenge for the country. Aiming to reduce the problem, the World Bank and the Mexican government are conducting an intervention delivered by teachers that combine Cognitive Behavioral Therapy with math tutoring. | Nicaragua: Improving parenting practices. Children from rural areas exhibit large development delays urging the government to invest in health and educational outcomes of children. By engaging with parents more frequently through daily text messages with information about health, nutrition, stimulation, and environment, the project seeks to encourage better caring practices that improve nutrition and academic performance of their children. |
| India: Technical education. In collaboration with ideas42, we are partnering with postsecondary institutions in India to explore how behavioral interventions can increase student retention in quality postsecondary programs. Potential behavioral interventions to address psychological barriers to retention and completion includes affirmations to reinforce values and abilities, reminders about enrollment deadlines to maintain commitment to re-enrolling, and simplified, personalized outreach to help students choose courses. |
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| Niger: Improving nutrition of children through better water, sanitation and hygienic practices. As of 2013, almost a third of children under-2 were stunted in Niger, with higher rates in rural areas. Ongoing work is tackling malnutrition through cash transfers with accompanying behavioral measures to support parenting. As part of these measures, the project focuses on interventions to support Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) practices of family members. | Georgia: Changing social norms to address sex preference at birth. Recent evidence from Georgia shows that parents’ preference for sons is distorting sex ratio at birth, which exacerbates gender inequality across generations. The study tests the effectiveness of an information campaign in altering and influencing parental perceptions, beliefs, attitudes, preferences, and behaviors toward their daughters. The campaign will be delivered through mass media and key service providers by appealing to the role of influential models. |
Brazil: Adhering to tuberculosis treatment in slums of Rio de Janeiro. Tuberculosis is a treatable and completely curable disease. However, treatment adherence is challenging for patients as it requires a prolonged intake of medicines, as reflected by a wanting treatment success rate of 70% in Rio de Janeiro. The intervention seeks to promote treatment adherence for patients, using call centers and improving the patients’ journey experience to provide timely motivation, salience and feedback on the progress towards a cure. |
Cameroon: Increasing uptake of long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs) by adolescent girls. Despite the high adolescent fertility rate in Cameroon, use of contraceptives, particularly LARCs, remain very low. This project aims to understand the interactions among social, psychological, behavioral, and neurodevelopmental processes that influence young women’s utilization of LARCs. This insights will inform the design of both demand and supply side interventions, such as counseling apps for adolescents and training for health workers, to overcome behavioral bottlenecks to LARCs uptake. |
| India: Changing social norms and mental models to increase toilet use. Despite efforts to improve access to better sanitation, India accounts for nearly 60% of the world's population that still defecates in the open. Beyond economic reasons, particular social norms and cultural beliefs or mental models can and do constrain toilet use. The goal of this project is to identify these normative and cultural barriers to toilet use, particularly among toilet owners, and design low-cost, community level behavioral interventions to address them. |
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Central America: Using text reminders, framing and social norms to increase income tax compliance. Reminders are a cost-effective strategy to increase tax reporting and payment. Letters from the tax authority were sent to taxpayers (individuals and firms) who had failed to pay in Costa Rica, Guatemala and Honduras. In them, various messages were tested such as social norms, showing how most people comply, nationalistic, framing compliance as a citizen’s responsibility and, last, as a deterrent (framing non-declaration as an intentional and deliberate choice.) The interventions increased the rate of payment as well as the average amount paid, more than tripling the tax receipts. After 12 months, the effects of the intervention persisted, sustaining the increased rate of payment. For more information:
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Poland: Using behavioral letters to improve tax compliance among later payers. This intervention involved sending letters, adapted using behavioral design, from the tax authority to remind late payers of their overdue income taxes. Results showed that all behavioral letters, especially hard-tone ones, were effective at increasing payment rate and payment amount relative to standard reminder letters. Payment rates and average amount paid increased by up to 20.8 percent and 31 percent respectively, with the combination of omission and deterrence messages showing the most impact. For more information: |
Latvia: Improving tax compliance. This project targets business owners that have been failing to file their income taxes in the past three years. To do so, the Latvian tax authority will send reminders at the beginning of the tax filing period randomly choosing people to receive a standard email or one with the following behavioral message: ‘ignoring notices is an intentional act of commission.’ The reminders will also highlight social norms around tax compliance. |
Nicaragua: Increasing aspirations and living standards through social interactions. Can successful leaders influence their neighbors’ investment decisions? This project studies the interaction between women leaders and cash transfer beneficiaries and looks at the long-term effect on aspirations and investments in education, health and income generation.
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| Bangladesh: Increasing access and usage of mobile financial services for women. Women in Bangladesh do not have access to finance and are disproportionately likely to be the rural poor. In recent years, mobile financial services have tried to deepen financial inclusion in the country but women persist to be extensively excluded from these services. This project seeks to increase access to financial institution for unbanked women by specifically facilitating the process for them to open and use e-wallet accounts. |
Tanzania: Increasing use of mobile money for savings. In collaboration with CGAP and Airtel (MFS provider in Tanzania), we are conducting qualitative and quantitative surveys as well as behavioral lab and lab-in-the-field experiments to identify barriers to and opportunities for increasing use of mobile financial services for savings. |
| Pakistan: Increasing access and usage of financial products. Almost three quarters of people living in poverty lack formal financial access due to the costs, distances and onerous requirements for opening a financial account. This program focuses on tackling two challenges preventing universal financial access: increasing access and usage of mobile financial products and services, and raising awareness and confidence of current and potential consumers. | Senegal: Boosting women’s rights to economic access. Senegal has sharp inequalities with regard to gender in the labor market, particularly in terms of access. Women are significantly more likely than men to be economically inactive and out of the labor force. This pilot project aims to support the women’s psychological agency (their capacity to act independently and to make their own free choices) by helping the center’s participants develop a growth mindset, have greater self-efficacy and achieve higher aspirations. |
| Moldova: Reducing envelope wages to increase tax revenue. The phenomenon of informal economy is wide-spread in many parts of the world. In Moldova, it often takes form of hidden wages, where employees are paid only part of the wage formally and the rest “in envelope”, thus avoiding taxes. In partnership with UNDP and the tax authority, we are sending behavioral letters to firms to encourage them to report higher wages in an effort to increase tax revenue. |
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Comoros: Make electricity services more efficient. This project consists of conducting a behavioral audit to look at bill payment behavior and behavior of utility company officials. It uses both qualitative and quantitative instruments to investigate bottlenecks (in the billing and payment processes) and behavior, social norms, beliefs, and trust on both sides (bill payments, energy theft, selling of quotas and confrontations). |
Jordan: Encouraging female labor force participation among refugees and Jordanian nationals. Jordan has made significant progress in educational attainment, particularly among women. However, female labor market participation is low and has recently dropped to 13 percent. The project will systematically measure social norms and cultural beliefs to better identify barriers to increased participation, and will subsequently inform interventions that aim to change these. |
| Ethiopia: Supporting youth work aspirations. Despite Ethiopia’s strong economic growth in recent years, youth unemployment remains very high in urban areas, particularly in larger cities. Diagnostic work has identified a gap between youths’ expressed aspirations and daily economic behaviors. To tackle this, the pilot intervention aims to support the unemployed youths’ psychological agency by tailoring training sessions that address the psychological and informational constraints faced by the young people that attend the center. | Turkey: Equipping youth with socio-emotional skills that make them employable. Turkey has experienced an increase in people, particularly youth and women, seeking opportunities in the labor market. The project provides job-seekers with information and tools to set goals and shares practical strategies to persevere and sustain the motivation in their pursuit. |
| Turkey: Increasing employability of women by reducing gender stereotyping. This study seeks strategies to reduce gender stereotyping in the Turkish labor market by assessing how the presentation of socio-emotional (soft) skills in women´s resumes might affect call back by employers. It includes a set of discrete choice experiments with students aspiring to be hiring managers, a correspondence study, and an Implicit Association Test with human resources managers. | Nicaragua: Improving women's intra-household bargaining and empowerment. Poor households struggle to cope with shocks that affect their income generation capacity and exacerbate their conditions. This study evaluates a productive transfer to help households to protect their income by diversifying its sources. Furthermore, it explores the extent by which a combination of capital, technical, and soft skills provided to women in poor rural areas led to improvements in both female income as well as intra-household decision-making. For more information: |
| Peru: Measuring teacher biases toward poor students. Do you think that the way students dress has nothing to do with their academic performance in high school? This experiment tests whether the socio economic appearance of a student can influence teachers’ judgment about their performance and behavior. | Kenya: Improving measurement of cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Measures of cognitive, non-cognitive, and technical skills are used in development studies to analyze determinants of skills formation, economic decisions and labor market outcomes. Yet, these measures have mostly been validated only in developed countries. This project tests the reliability and validity of some of the most commonly used skills measures (Raven's, executive function, Big-5, self-efficacy, depression) in the context of rural Kenya. For more information: |
| Global: Measuring socio-emotional skills well in low and middle-income countries. Standard indicators of educational level leave an information gap on workforce skill characteristics, job skill requirements, quality of worker-job matches, working conditions, and non-earnings job rewards. This prevents policymakers from making informed and timely decisions on skills training and educational needs for current and future employees. The STEP Skills Measurement Program is a research initiative by the World Bank that aims to validate and improve collection of measures of socio-emotional skills and psychological constructs of the adult population from 14 different countries in developing settings. | Peru: Measuring welfare well. Consumption and income are the two conventional metrics to define a poverty line and measure welfare. With innovative objective and subjective welfare measures, such as the ones captured by biomarkers or activity trackers, this project aims to provide evidence of the feasibility of integrating these indicators in household surveys and to demonstrate their value as improvements to welfare measurement and consequential policy design. |
| Vietnam: Accounting for food consumed away from home. The measurement of food consumption is central to the assessment of multiple welfare dimensions, including nutrition and poverty. Food consumed away from home constitutes an increasingly important portion of the total expenditure but it is poorly measured in most household surveys. Building on the general guidelines known to date, this intervention tests alternative protocols aiming to identify a design that delivers accurate information on such consumption in a cost effective way. | Vietnam: Measuring well-being. Various shortcomings have been documented on the use of consumption and income as metrics of human welfare, both in accuracy and fidelity to real expenditure. This intervention will provide evidence of the feasibility and the benefits of including objective and subjective welfare indicators to socio-economic household surveys for better policy design and measurement. |
Nigeria: Motivating health facility workers to improve bookkeeping practices. For health facility workers, low supervision and lack of intrinsic motivation to perform mundane administrative tasks provide little incentive for proper resource tracking. Our intervention experimented with lottery tickets and social recognition for health workers to find that extrinsic motivators do improve performance when used in the right context. |
| Narratives. Narrative psychology is the perspective that human beings deal with experiences by interpreting them through stories. That is, people tell stories not only to make sense of themselves and others but all experiences are understood, interpreted, and made meaningful through story telling. On the other hand, machine learning algorithm can be used to decode human narrative features including cadence, tone, volume, sentiment, word structure and patterns. This project will record stories and opinions on a broad range of topics: the experience of poverty, what it means to be successful in life, thoughts on female employment, cleanliness, and other. Through the use of machines, we will measure and understand the true beliefs, attitudes, aspirations, and emotions of respondents. | The Biases of Development Professionals. There is plenty of literature that focuses on the biases of individual decision-making and policies undertaken to mitigate them but there is little attention devoted to the biases of policymakers themselves. Using a pool of development professionals, employees of the World Bank and the Department for International Development in the UK, we conducted a series of survey vignettes using classic behavioral experiments adapted to the development context. The experiments focused on framing (gains vs. losses), risk aversion, sunk costs and confirmation biases. Early findings suggest that policymakers, similar to average individuals, are consistently biased in their decision-making. We find evidence for risk seeking in losses and risk aversion in gains, greater risk-aversion when undertaking policy decisions, sensitivity to sunk costs and prior beliefs influencing the evaluation of data (confirmation bias). |
The Mind, Behavior, Development (eMBeD) Unit is part of the Poverty & Equity Global Practice at the World Bank. Its goal is to provide support to World Bank departments, country units, and national and sub-national governments to:
