While the world has been consumed this year with the immediate, large and fast‑moving threat posed by COVID‑19, another large but creeping health risk has been looming for several years: antimicrobial resistance (AMR).
Why did we develop the Behaviour Discovery Tool? Many people come to the Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian Government (BETA) because they are stuck on a problem.
Building on BETA’s work with the Australian Financial Security Authority (AFSA) on applying behavioural science to the Personal Property Securities Register, BETA and AFSA are evaluating the impact of selected recommendations.
BETA partnered with AFSA on two projects to determine how to best communicate about the consequences of bankruptcy.
In the first project, over 6,500 Australians completed one of six educational tools online that explain the consequences of bankruptcy and then assessed their levels of understanding. A pop-quiz and video were most effective, improving people’s understanding by 27 percentage points above the group that saw no educational tool.
Surveys and questionnaires are indispensable tools for research. At their best, they are a quick, efficient way to gather feedback and opinions from a study population, and they can be an enormously valuable tool for re-designing government processes to better serve people.
BETA and ASIC partnered to design and test information statements to help support consumer decision-making about add-on insurance.
We designed an information statement to remind people add-on insurance is not compulsory, highlight the (usually poor) value-for-money of add-on insurance, and prompt people to consider shopping around for a better deal.
Dropping out of university is associated with a heightened risk of unemployment or long-term welfare dependence. BETA designed a new behaviourally-informed app called ‘Grok’. Grok aimed to improve university completion rates by growing student resilience through reminding students to connect with social groups and delivering practical wellbeing and study tips. We evaluated the impact of Grok on academic performance, completion, wellbeing and belonging. Despite high rates of downloads and largely positive feedback, overall app usage was low.
Despite email alert systems having a large reach, email can be a difficult platform to spread awareness. BETA partnered with the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) to find ways of boosting the impact of an email alert system. We applied behavioural insights to the email design to bolster its effects, and tested these different design aspects using a randomised controlled trial. Subscribers were randomly assigned to receive an alert with one or more of our new design features (or a business-as-usual alert with the standard branding).
To help improve the impact of cyber security advice for individuals and small businesses, BETA partnered with the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) to design and test different formats of advice. We conducted focus groups and two survey experiments (surveys with embedded randomised controlled trials) to understand whether behavioural insights concepts are effective in shifting people’s intentions to enact safer cyber security practices. We surveyed small and medium business (SMB) owners and operators and tested the effect of different formats of advice.
Since the launch of ReportCyber, there has been approximately one report made every ten minutes. Many more incidents are likely to go unreported. To better understand how and why people become the victim of cyber incidents, BETA dedicated a section of our research on cyber security (including focus groups, two surveys, and analysis of feedback on the ReportCyber tool) to the topic of experiencing a cyber incident. We found more than half of our survey participants had experienced some kind of cyber incident in the previous twelve months.