Blog

Simple behavioural insights interventions significantly reduce the gender gap in recruitment
Using two behaviourally informed interventions, an email and a phone call, we increased the likelihood of women reapplying for a senior role by 27% and significantly reduced the gender gap between men and women reapplying for senior roles from 45% to just 4%.

Opportunities to remove gender as a barrier to senior leadership
We wanted to understand the barriers to reaching the Premier's gender equality target for senior leadership roles in the government sector. Today we are launching the findings of research we conducted in partnership with the Public Service Commission, Customer Service, Stronger Communities and Transport Clusters.

Increasing Apprenticeship Course Attendance Through Behavioural Interventions
We ran a randomised control trial (RCT) with Training Services NSW and TAFE NSW to increase the proportion of course lessons that apprentices and trainees attend.

Applying BI to get Trainee Teachers to Rural and Remote NSW
We partnered with the NSW Department of Education to apply BI to attract trainee teachers to apply for professional experience placements in rural and remote NSW.

Using economic experiments in behavioural insights
So you have a great idea about how you could change people’s behaviour. You want to go ahead and test your idea out, but you don’t know if people will respond to the intervention, or if it will have the impact you hope. Rather than going ahead and investing heavily in a field trial, you could use an economic experiment to test your idea first.

Segmenting: What works for whom
Since 2013, the Behavioural Insights Unit (BIU) has been running Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) to test whether our ideas result in behaviour change in the real world. RCTs are the gold standard of evidence. They allow us to test the effectiveness of an intervention compared to if we had changed nothing.

BETA’s guide to running randomised controlled trials
The Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian Government (BETA) has released a guide to developing and testing behavioural interventions using randomised controlled trials (RCTs).

Behavioural Insights trials - one hit wonders or sustainable and scalable solutions?
Lessons in practical applications of BI from the health domain.

The Office of State Revenue’s Behavioural Insights Experience – Land Tax Legal Notice Trial
We started working with the Behavioural Insights Unit (BIU) to increase the compliance effectiveness with respect to our fines, tax and debt recovery businesses. We conducted various trials to robustly understand the value of BI, one of which was for our land tax legal notices. Here are the details of the trial.

Australian Taxation Office applies behavioural insights to tax and debts
The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has been using insights from behavioural science to trial different ways of getting people to pay their fines and lodge their tax forms on time.