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Episode 66
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Practice Management and Business Skills
Don’t Shove – Nudge: Promoting Better Choices in the Legal System and Legal Practice
Law as stated: 7 December 2022
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This episode was published and is accurate as at this date.
Dr. Alex Gyani, psychologist and APAC Director at the Behavioural Insights Team - AKA the "Nudge Unit" - takes Hearsay host David Turner through some cross-industry tips and tricks for promoting positive behavioural change in the legal profession.
Practice Management and Business Skills| What area(s) of law does this episode consider? | Behavioural economics and how to best apply it to the legal field and legal practice. |
| Why is this topic relevant? | Behavioural economics takes a scientific approach to the way people make decisions. Drawing on economics, social psychology and even other disciplines like marketing and political theory, behavioural economics looks at the way systems are designed and how we interact with those systems, and then redesign those systems to help people make better choices. From paying their taxes on time to taking parental leave at a law firm, behavioural insights are versatile in their application and, if harnessed correctly, can positively influence workplace culture and ensure that a system works as effectively for its users as possible. |
| What are the main points? |
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| What are the practical takeaways? |
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| David Turner:
1:00
2:00 | Hello and welcome to Hearsay the Legal Podcast, a CPD podcast that allows Australian lawyers to earn their CPD points on the go and at a time that suits them. I’m your host David Turner. Hearsay the Legal Podcast is proudly supported by Lext Australia. Lext’s mission is to improve user experiences in the law and legal services and Hearsay the Legal Podcast is how we’re improving the experience of CPD. Hi, listeners. Before we start today’s episode, I wanted to take a second to let you know about our other podcast, Hearsay: Sidebar. If you haven’t listened to it yet, it’s a 20 to 30 minute show where the Hearsay team gathers around the microphone to talk about the legal side of what’s in the news today. Sidebar’s totally free and it’s available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts right now. So, have a listen when you get a chance and if you feel like leaving us a rating and following the new show so you don’t miss any episodes, that’d be awesome too. So far, we’ve talked about music, copyright, AI, inventors, celebrity defamation cases and more. So, make sure you check it out when you get a chance. Okay, on with your scheduled CPD programming. Many of you listening will know that running and managing a professional services firm is no easy task. It’s hard enough managing a business when it’s your full-time job, but add a heavy workload of legal practice as well and the temptation to just sit and forget or keep doing things the way it’s always been done before can be overwhelming for even the most well-intentioned principles. But as gatekeepers to the justice system, the systems that we build and support in our practices are important and, left to their own devices, those systems may have unintended consequences. Those unintended consequences could have a variety of deleterious effects, like reinforcing the prevalence of relationship violence amongst domestic violence offenders. Now, behavioural economics takes a scientific approach to the way people make decisions. Drawing, not just on economics, but also social psychology and even other disciplines like marketing and political theory, behavioural economists look at the way systems are designed and how we interact with them, and then redesign those systems to help people make better choices – these tweaks to the system being called nudges. With me today to discuss nudges, behavioural economics in the justice system and decision architecture in professional services firms is Dr. Alex Gyani. Alex is a psychologist by training and the acting managing director of the APAC arm of the Behavioural Insights Team, a global social impact organisation that aims to improve policy and public services through behavioural economics. Alex, thanks so much for joining me today on Hearsay the Legal Podcast. |
| Alex Gyani: | Well, thank you so much for having me, David. It’s really exciting to be here and to spread the word more broadly across disciplines. |
| DT: 3:00 | Yeah, it is very exciting. Our producer Ross and I are big behavioural economics and behavioural insights geeks. I listen to a lot of behavioural science podcasts. I’m sure I’m going to listen to an episode of No Stupid Questions with Angela Duckworth on the way home. So, I’m very excited to be doing my own one. Now, Alex, you are a psychologist by training. |
| AG: | I am. |
| DT: | Tell us how you came to be in the role of acting managing director at BIT. |
| AG:
4:00 | Yeah, I’ll talk about how I got into the role of just being a member of BIT, because it was a bit of an accident to start off with and then, yeah, how I ended up becoming the acting MD here which has been a really fun experience but, yeah, with lots of challenges and exciting opportunities. As you mentioned, I’m a psychologist by training. I did a PhD which looked at how we get evidence based mental health treatments into the National Health Service in the UK, particularly for anxiety and depression because that’s something that was really interesting to me. So, the idea of evidence-based medicine is something that many of your listeners may not be aware of, or may be aware of, but it’s basically the idea that there are millions of treatments that we could offer people but some of them have not been shown to work in a scientific process through something called a randomised control trial whereby you sort of randomly allocate people to different conditions and then see what the outcomes are usually against the placebo. Sadly, it turns out that a lot of the things that we do in a healthcare system, haven’t really been shown to work. So, when I learned that whilst finishing my undergrad course, I thought this seems a bit of a travesty really, and quite a scary thing to learn about. So, I did my PhD looking at how we can change that process and one of the things that came out of that work was that, actually, if you want to change policy, which is what we’re talking about when we’re talking about getting people to use certain treatments over others, then being in academia is probably not actually the best place for you to be. You want to be in that policy making world so that you can make a difference and while I was doing that PhD there was a research fellowship that was put up and they said, “do you want to join the Behavioural Insights Team for three months to see whether or not you can take some of the lessons that you’ve learned in a psych department to public policy?” and that was about 11 years ago now, just coming up to 11 years ago, so you can see that three month period definitely took a little bit longer. |
| DT: 5:00 | Yeah, absolutely. And the rest is history. |
| AG: | Indeed. |
| DT:
6:00 | I think that is going to be surprising to a lot of our listeners that many of those treatments that are available, especially in the mental health discipline might not have an evidentiary basis for efficacy and I think, by analogy, we see a lot of that in the legal system as well. That there might be new interventions, whether that’s in sentencing or in diversionary measures away from the traditional criminal justice system or even in civil law that maybe don’t have an evidentiary basis before they’ve been introduced. Certainly, I can think of one in my field of insolvency. Some of our listeners might be familiar with the white elephant of the small business restructuring process, which hasn’t really been used at all. Although maybe that’s an experiment in itself that has been proven not to work. Now, some of our listeners might be familiar with behavioural science and, in fact, what BIT does but for those who aren’t, there’s a few different terms that are sometimes used interchangeably or sometimes used as distinct concepts like behavioural science, behavioural economics, behavioural insights, nudges. Let’s start with those first three – behavioural science, behavioural economics, behavioural insights. What do we mean by those terms and where does BIT fit in? |
| AG:
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8:00 | Absolutely. So, I’ll start backwards. So, I think actually BIT coined the idea of behavioural insights to start off with and that was actually quite a long debate as to what we should call ourselves because behavioural economics was something that was becoming really prominent in the policymaking community at the time and that was really because when our team was set up in 2010, we were dealing with the outcomes of the Global Financial Crisis, which obviously bit really hard in the UK and globally, less so in Australia. You keep finding stuff in the ground that’s super valuable which floats the country through but, yeah, so through that process a lot of people were doing some soul searching when it came to, what is it that we actually know about economic theory and that really led to people looking at different ideas at the time and working out, what can we learn from different disciplines to create better policies and that coincided as well with a coalition government coming in in 2010. That was a coalition between the centre right Conservative party and the centre left Liberal Democrats and neither of those parties having just replaced the Labour government at the time wanted to introduce a load of legislation. So, they were stuck in this place where – government, for those of you who don’t know, is usually full of economists and lawyers and some of the tools that were really being relied on by economists and lawyers, so that economic theory that I talked about and also legislation, didn’t seem as available to them. So, they started looking around for new ideas and that’s when a book called Nudge came out by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. Richard Thaler now being a Nobel Laureate and Cass Sunstein, having worked with the Obama administration and now actually the Biden administration in the US, they started to espouse these ideas around how you can use behavioural economics to create better policy. So, at that point that seemed like a really good answer. So, there was a debate as to whether or not we should be called the Behavioural Economics Team and actually the team in the Federal Government here is called BETA or the Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian government but we generally wanted a much broader approach. So, you mentioned I’m a psychologist. Our CEO, David Halpern, is also a psychologist. So, he wanted to make sure that much broader lessons were being taken. So we thought maybe it could be the Behavioural Science Team. The problem with that is that it would end up being the BS team which you generally want to avoid. Everything gets shortened in government and if it can be used against you then it can. So, yeah, behavioural insights was the term that was used because it is a much broader set of fields and disciplines and it also focuses on the sort of action that you would take. So, behavioural science talks about the literature that you would be taking from. Behavioural insights is focusing on the fact that turns into a practical insight that you can use to design a better policy, better program, better service and whatnot. |
| DT: 9:00 | Great that you avoided the soundbite of the BS team, but that name, Behavioural Insights, really does reflect that even the lessons of behavioural economics are multidisciplinary. Correct? Because before the work of Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein and other behavioural economists, the dominant thinking, and I suppose still the dominant paradigm in economic theory, is that people are rational actors. They behave rationally in their own self-interest, having regard to all the information available to them and the insight in behavioural economics, am I right, is that, well, we don’t always behave rationally. Sometimes we behave quite irrationally because of the heuristics and biases that we all fall prey to. |
| AG: | Yeah. I think generally we try and avoid the term rational and irrational in this setting because it could be used quite pejoratively to say “you’re making this decision and that makes you an idiot because you’re irrational” and I always find it’s quite an odd framing where you’ve got an economic model and you’re saying ‘this economic model here is designed to describe the behaviour of human beings‘ but actually human beings don’t adhere to that model. Therefore it’s the human beings that are idiots rather than the model is wrong. So, I do think that’s something we need to be a little… |
| DT: 10:00 | Bad human beings… why can’t you be more like the hypothetical human being that behaves like the model? |
| AG:
11:00 | Exactly. Exactly. Which, when you’re job is to describe human behaviour, then there’s probably other things that you should look to explain the errors but I think one of the key things is the world in which we live in has lots and lots of information that is just thrown at us, and quite often when we think about how easy it is to parse that information than make decisions based on it, means that we just really don’t have the computing power to deal with it. So, quite often when we’re talking about making sure that people are making decisions based on useful information, we should really make it as easy for them as possible to reduce that cognitive load for them to make effective decisions and similarly, there’s a lot of talk about heuristics and biases in the field of behavioural economics and social psychology, which are essentially shortcuts that people use to make decisions. Part of that is also due to the fact that we just don’t have that much processing power. So, our brains have really optimised themselves to make decisions based on the information that we have, that in many cases are actually quite effective decision making heuristics. The problem is that the world in which we live in is very different to the one in which we evolved in and therefore some of them will lead to predictable errors and they are errors. TIP: A heuristic is a kind of mental shortcut that we often use to make fast decisions but heuristics, however, heuristics also result in cognitive biases which are problematic for a whole number of reasons we’ll explore in this episode. Cognitive biases interfere with how a person reasons, processes information and makes decisions. |
| DT: | I love the way you’ve reframed that from rational and irrational to the tools that we use to make sense of a complicated world because you’re right, these heuristics are very useful. Our pattern recognition skills help us to tell which berries are safe to eat and which aren’t and often are quite useful in the modern world but, as you say, sometimes they lead to us seeing the face of Christ in a piece of toast and seeing patterns that aren’t really there. |
| AG: | Exactly. Exactly. |
| DT: 12:00 | Now, behavioural economics and I suppose the kind of interventions that are informed by behavioural economics have sometimes been described as benevolent paternalism or libertarian paternalism and in your description of the political context in which these kind of policy interventions came to the fore, I can definitely see the label libertarian paternalism in what was happening there because we don’t have the tools of affect behaviour through law making, of prohibit and enforce and mandate but we can encourage what we see as the more desirable or the more efficient behaviour. Talk for a minute about this label of benevolent or libertarian paternalism. Is it a fair characterisation? Do some of that brilliant rephrasing that you’ve just helped us with? |
| AG:
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16:00 | Yeah, I think it’s a really interesting point and I think the idea of nudges really does fit into that libertarian paternalism idea, which is basically the idea that a nudge is something that fits into choice architecture which is a term coined by Thaler and Sunstein and choice architecture is really the way in which you might present any decision to a decision maker and by we, I mean, essentially, the universe really or any policy maker. If you’re going out to have breakfast or you go to a cafe, the menu of choices could actually affect what choice you make. So, that’s a really sort of basic example of just that information, the way it’s presented to you can affect how you behave but that is true for many different things. So, if government were to create a new subsidy or some sort of new process or program, you going online and the form that you would fill in is also a case of choice architecture. TIP: Paternalism, generally, is an action that limits a person’s liberty or autonomy with the intention of promoting their own good. So, libertarian (or benevolent) paternalism is a strategy to devise policy that influences behaviour while also maintaining that critical freedom of choice. Libertarian paternalism is also called soft governance – it operates without coercion meaning that it promotes better choices without restricting the range of choices on offer. As Alex said, the secret to this is to intentionally craft the choice architecture of a system in order to ‘nudge’ someone in the right direction. So, the way that nudges then fit in is, what are the changes that you can make within that choice architecture that might shift your behaviour one way or the other? And that is really a very deliberate way of changing that choice architecture but it’s also worth considering that, in designing that process, you are already making decisions that will affect whatever decision the person who is going through that system will make, right? So, there are no real neutral choices when you’re designing that program. It’s worth acknowledging that essentially we are all choice architects in many cases, even if you’re sending an email to someone, you are waiting for a response from that. Essentially, you are asking someone for a decision and the way in which you’ve written that email will affect that person’s decision. So, by the fact that there is no neutral choice means that actually, if you’re just more aware of those biases and heuristics then you can do your job better. Now, what does that mean for the idea of benevolent paternalism? It’s also worth thinking about the context in which the idea of libertarian paternalism came up, which is in the states where actually paternalism is a very dirty word. Maybe not a very dirty word, but a pretty dirty word which is very much not the case in Australia or in Europe and in the UK it’s in the middle. So, I think, a lot of the ideas around libertarian paternalism came out because people didn’t really want to introduce a lot of paternalistic ideas, but in other places it’s alright and generally we don’t lean on the term ‘nudges’ as much as others. Actually, in academia it tends to be used more often because what we generally think is the behavioural insights approach is much more about how do you understand how human beings behave so you can design better policies and that could actually be much bigger than a nudge. In fact, sometimes we’ve called for taxes like the sugar tax in the UK, which we were quite involved in and there’s discussions or even sometimes bans because that could be a much more behaviourally informed way of understanding how human beings interact. |
| DT: | More of a shove than a nudge. |
| AG: | Yeah sometimes, something much harder is needed and it’s worth just thinking about how actually human beings respond to that because it could not actually go to plan. We talk about mandates as being like the ultimate thing you can do, but the very fact that we have crimes occurring and that lawyers exist means that even actually a mandate isn’t enough to change people’s behaviour. |
| DT: | Yeah. It doesn’t guarantee compliance with the mandate. |
| AG: | Absolutely. |
| DT: | As we’ve seen time and again with mask mandates over the past couple of years. |
| AG:
17:00 | Indeed. Actually on that point, so there’s some interesting examples in the way that legislation is used once it’s actually put out there. So, the smoking ban in the UK is a great example of this where, for a while at least, I’m not sure if it’s still the case, but you go to a pub and it was really obvious overnight the people weren’t smoking in there, right? So, the smoke ban came in and suddenly no one was smoking in pubs. It’s worth thinking about how was that actually enacted? What was the mechanism by which people’s behaviour changed? It’s the fact that it was very widely advertised that this ban had come into place, but most of it was actually being enacted through social pressure. So, if you tried to light up in a pub, someone would very quickly tell you to put it out but that wasn’t because there was a fine or the police were there. It was just that sort of social and community pressure that led to that ban. |
| DT: | Really? |
| AG: | Yeah. |
| DT: | I do think that’s a great point, that even a mandate can be persuasive more than mandatory in the sense that it is a public condemnation in the strongest possible terms that might be very persuasive in affecting behaviour change, that you don’t have to have a police officer standing behind every person who’s otherwise going to be participating in that behaviour. I think we see the same thing with masks. |
| AG: | We see it with masks. I know that the public support for seatbelt mandates actually changed once it was introduced because we generally think that attitudes will change people’s behaviour, but quite often actually people’s behaviour will change their attitudes. |
| DT: | Interesting. |
| AG: 18:00 | So, yeah. So, I guess one of these things where if you were used to not putting your seatbelt on whilst driving then you think this is obviously fine. Whereas if you then start putting your seatbelt on every single day, you go ‘well, I must be doing this for a reason‘ and it’s your attitudes that will realign with your behaviours afterwards. So, quite often some of these big changes, you’ll see more support for them once they’ve been enacted because people like what I’m doing, therefore there has to be a reason for it. |
| DT: | Is there a behaviour version of the endowment effect that I do this thing so it must be valuable? |
| AG: | I’m actually just thinking what the specific name of the bias actually is now that has been named but it’s under the general sort of ideas of attribution biases that will explain what attitudes you have to a certain behaviour and then your behaviour will just reinforce your attitude, but it’s essentially that. It’s like I’m doing this, therefore it’s got to be valuable. |
| DT: 19:00 | I love that point you made earlier. Just going back to your earlier answer about what an intervention is and this idea of benevolent paternalism. I love the idea that there is no neutral response, that you’re always engaging in designing choice architecture. No matter whether you’re choosing to do that consciously or not, you are designing a choice for someone else and I think defaults is such a great example of that. I know that we’re very fortunate in Australia to have a mandated superannuation regime, I think, but setting defaults around retirement saving in the United States is a great example of the power of defaults and I love the idea as well, which will come onto later in the episode, that this isn’t just a tool for policy makers that of course policy makers in governments and public institutions have, perhaps, the greatest ability or, perhaps, the resources and reach to affect behaviour change but we can also change behaviour in our organisations. |
| AG:
20:00 | Yeah, absolutely. I think we are all choice architects is a key thing to internalise after this conversation. Any policies that you create in your organisation, any interactions that you have with your managers or your employees or whatever, those are things that will affect people’s behaviour and, actually, you could be doing it unconsciously. Just the way in which you run meetings creates a default, which would then encourage other people to follow that behaviour. So you can see that everything that we do really matters. TIP: Now, most behaviours are visible which means that behaviours can be very influential. Repeated behaviours create patterns which create norms. This is particularly important in the workplace because a team’s culture is intrinsically developed by its norms. Obviously, the influential effect of behaviour can be both positive and negative, depending on context but regardless of this fact, it is crucial to understand that everything we do matters and probably has a bigger impact than we think, on those around us and on the culture of our team. |
| DT: | BIT and Dr. David Halpern designed a framework called the EAST Framework, which I’ve seen described on the Behavioural Insight Team’s website as “a good framework for busy policy makers” and I’m sure a good framework for busy law firm principles and other business owners. Tell us a little bit about the EAST framework and why it’s a good summary of the sorts of things that you want to see in an effective behaviour change intervention. |
| AG: 21:00
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25:00 | Yeah, absolutely. We started the conversation talking about behavioural science and how that’s many different disciplines. We talked about behavioural economics, we talked about social psychology. We also forget our sociologist friends and our anthropologist friends. Now, these are all big disciplines and any academic will probably have a little bit of that pie that they all focus on so that if we then say to policy makers or anyone else who’s running a business or anyone who’s trying to implement some of these ideas and insights from these disciplines, it seems a bit mad to say, ‘you don’t just need to be on top of your day job. You also need to know all of this other stuff,’ right? That even the experts aren’t on top of. So yeah, that was the idea that we would then distill that into some of the main insights that you could use and take forward and it was really the product of a decent amount of time testing out what works and what cuts through. We actually had an early framework called Mindspace that was developed pre-BIT, commissioned by the Institute for Government and that was brought together reasonably quickly just to distill some of the key lessons and that had nine letters in it, each one stood for a different thing that you need to consider, and we realised that even nine is too long. So, that’s how EAST came about. So EAST stands for Easy, Attractive, Social and Timely and the key idea is that if you want to change people’s behaviour, then you need to make it as easy as possible for them to do what it is that you want them to do, which sounds pretty obvious and it sounds pretty simple, but quite often actually designing a system that makes it very easy for people to pass through can be quite difficult on the program end. So, if you want to design a system whereby, I don’t know, people upload their details so that they can receive some sort of government benefit then it could be the case that you have, as government, spoken to lots of different people, different times and therefore have information about them but it’s all in different databases. So, you want to reduce the amount of information you ask them. So on the back end, you need to pull together all those data sources so that you can prepopulate those forms. For a developer, that could be an absolute pain, but it means that for the consumer or for the citizen, it’s really easy, right? So, those are the little things that you can do to make things easy and we find that you can keep getting gains out of making a system as easy as possible to pass through. So, we’ve done little things where you would save a click on a government website to get people to pay their tax and even just by removing one extra click or one extra page they need to go through, you can have quite substantial benefits. So, yeah, really you can be an absolute zealot when it comes to making things easy and that can still pay dividends quite far down the track. So, yeah, make it easy and the reason why that one’s at the beginning is that quite often we found that, even a short acronym, people just get stuck on the first point and the reason why easy is first is that it’s really the one that you just want to focus on as much as possible. The A stands for ‘attractive’ and that isn’t necessarily just make things bright and shiny and sparkly, although quite often that can be beneficial. The key thing is if you want someone to do something, then make sure that the information that you want them to see attracts the most attention. So, in psychology we call this salience, which basically means that something really pops out and that means that people are really aware of what it is that they want to do and you can have a good call to action on various bits of communications that makes it really clear, this is what I’m asking you to do. So, yeah, make sure that the key points of information that you want people to have attracts the most attention. The S stands for ‘Make it Social’, as I’ve said. Generally human beings are really social creatures. It comes through in a few different ways. So, one way that it comes through is that we will look to others to modify our behaviour, particularly under really uncertain circumstances. So, if you’ve ever gone to a place where you’re not really sure what it is that you’re meant to do, then you will immediately look to others and that will govern your own process TIP: So just to quickly recap, EAST stands for Easy, Attractive, Social and Timely. The EAST framework facilitates improved performance and organisation in law firms by encouraging practitioners to engage in better decision making processes and create better choice architecture. Some of the ways in which principals can implement the EAST framework include creating default procedures to make the sensible choice easier. Policies should be attractive to receive maximum attention, and principals should model the desired behaviour by first performing it themselves – being Social. Slowly, as Alex suggests, people will catch on and start matching that behaviour, improving that social effect. Lastly, be receptive. Listen to your employees and their feedback and act on it. There’s great examples of this in early psych experiments or videos where people will walk into a lift and then face the wrong direction, which is quite a strange thing to do but if you’re the first person doing it, then some people go in and be like, ‘alright, cool. We’ll just all do that.‘ |
| DT: | Really? |
| AG:
26:00 | One thing that if you’re listening, wandering down the street at the minute, and if you just stare up into the sky and point, then you’ll see that basically everyone else will start looking up and do the same thing just because you are setting that social norm that encourages people to follow it. TIP: Now, often in uncertain situations people look to others to determine the correct or acceptable behaviour. Now, this is because we, as humans, are inherently social animals and we adhere to social norms. The situation here is a great example of the chameleon effect. The chameleon effect can be likened to the phenomenon where just by seeing a certain behaviour, a person becomes more likely to do it. Monkey see, monkey do? |
| DT: | One of the ‘Make it Social’ sort of examples that I always think of is one that I think BIT was involved in the UK for Her Majesty’s Revenue. The reminder letters to say most people pay their taxes on time. Just a really simple kind of message, but one that was not so much about the personal consequences for you. If you don’t pay your tax, you’ll be fine, but most people are doing this the right way and maybe you should follow the herd. |
| AG: 27:00 | Yeah, exactly, that was the one study that really helped BI gain popularity, I think, partly because just the simplicity of the message. So, we literally just added 9 out 10 people pay their tax on time in Exeter, or wherever the person was when they received that letter. We actually managed to get further gains out of that by saying 9 out 10 people with a debt like yours pay their tax on time. |
| DT: | I was about to say, is it important how specific the social class is? I noticed you said in Exeter, for example. |
| AG: | Yeah, I mean, that just basically gets more and more gains because particularly for certain groups, they might not think of themselves as being in that cohort. So, if you have a really vague norm, then you know, you could actually say “I’m not like that person,” or, “yes, 9 out of 10 people generally pay their tax on time, but I, you know, am a high net worth individual, and therefore, I’ve done special things that mean that my tax affairs are… |
| DT: | …are different to the plebeians.“ |
| AG:
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28:00 | Your words, but yeah. So, yes, that specificity is really important. TIP: The research conducted by BIT indicates that simplicity is really key when it comes to these benevolent paternalism nudges and encouraging behavioural change. Alex is going to touch on this more later in this episode. And I think the other thing that really made that example really powerful was just how effective it was. So, that letter there, by sending it out, brought forward hundreds of millions of pounds and actually because of that real money was saved. So, if you don’t pay your tax on time in the UK or anywhere, really, the next thing that they’ll do is they’ll send you a letter to say, “actually pay your tax.” After that, you’ll get a phone call. After that, the bailiffs will come around or your debt will be sold, or you’ll go to jail. All of these things are actually very expensive things for the state to do and generally aren’t good for anybody involved in the process, apart from maybe the bailiffs and the debt collectors, |
| DT: | I’m sure they don’t even enjoy it. |
| AG: | Yeah, exactly. So you make real savings from that process. |
| DT: | That’s a great point. It’s not just paying on time or avoiding interest or fines for the taxpayer, but it’s actually the cost of the system of undertaking those economically inefficient tasks. |
| AG: 29:00 | Yeah, and actually, it’s a really powerful example cause we did a similar piece of work here in New South Wales where we focused on some of the fines that people got from speeding or running a red light and they’re quite expensive fines here but some of the things that we did were, adding that social norm also have a big sort of red pay now stamp on the fines that you get and when we looked at the data, what we saw was actually there was a reduction in not just people not paying their fines, but also the number of people who’d lost their licenses from that process because if you think about that whole process, actually at the end of it, you might lose your license which then has huge impacts on your life and if we can avoid that, that’s a good thing. |
| DT: | Absolutely. The knock on effects of that to the people who rely on you or… |
| AG: | Exactly and I think the really critical thing here as well is that you assume that someone who doesn’t respond to these letters and then ends up losing their license, you know, it’s because they’re a bad person but actually quite often people are just really bad at bureaucracy or they’ve got really busy lives. If you make that system as easy as possible for people to pass through you use some of these BI messages, then you can have a big impact on people’s lives. |
| DT: | That last part of the EAST framework, Timely. Now what does that mean? |
| AG: 30:00 | Yeah, it’s one that we probably end up focusing on least because it seems quite self evident. And also the ideas of social norms are so exciting that’s what we end up focusing on quite a lot but the timely aspect is basically the idea that quite often as choice architects, and I use that term broadly, we really think about the systems from our own perspective and quite often we might deliver them to our own timelines. So, if you need to send out requests for information from people, various different guises you think, “actually, it’s because I need it,” but you don’t really think about what’s going on in other people’s life cycles and the better that we are at matching what we’re asking people for to what’s going on in their lives, the more impactful they can be. There’s lots of different ways in which we can think about this. One of the nice sort of examples I like to think about is that if you’re asking people to change their travel habits, one of the best times that you can do that is when they’ve had a kid, when they’ve just changed jobs or when they’ve moved house because that’s when all of their behaviours around travel are quite malleable. |
| DT: | … already sort of replanning travel as it is. |
| AG: 31:00
32:00 | Exactly and that’s when you can really say, “why don’t you use public transport instead? Or why don’t you use a bike?” And we’ve actually used that idea when getting people to take up, active transport. Just focus on when they’re going to move. Just focus on those groups of people and then you can have a much, much bigger impact. So, yeah, make it timely can be a very powerful idea and the idea that we are generally driven by our own sort of view of the world is something that we see quite broadly. There’s two biases or heuristics that I really like that I think capture this. So, one of them is the curse of knowledge, which is the idea that, we assume that what’s in our heads isn’t the same as what’s in other people’s heads. So, if I’m trying to explain an idea, there’s a load of assumed knowledge that I’ve got, or even a load of jargon that I might use, that because it’s so ubiquitous in my world I assume that you also know that, David, but actually that’s not the case and this is where we can have big issues in the healthcare system where doctors, I think are famous for just using terms and I have literally no idea what you’re telling me, but I’ll just nod but also it’s really important in the legal system where essentially a lot of legal language is almost like a programming language in the way in which clauses are written has a really specific technical idea, and it really looks like English, right? It really looks like English, but it’s not. So, that curse of knowledge is really important. The second one is the idea of déformation professionnelle, which is a French term that I’ve just massacred but it’s basically the idea that we will look at problems through the lens of our own profession, and that’s essentially what we’re paid to do. So, my job is to look at problems and say “here’s the behavioural lens that can be applied to this issue” and it’s the same for any lawyers. Your job is to basically look at it through a risk lens or a legal lens that will affect the way in which you advise people or the way in which you act. |
| DT: | Absolutely. That’s why, often, the in-house legal department is called the department of No. It’s because you are not looking through it from the perspective of the sales department who’s trying to get something done. |
| AG: 33:00 | But that’s why you need to work together and that’s why you have a firm is that you have different groups of people looking at different things and that creates an ecosystem, although you may not think of a company as an ecosystem, where you can then work out what the best way forward is through all these different lenses. Right? It’s not that one lens is correct all the time. It’s that the combination of all those different points is what you really want. |
| DT: | And that point about the curse of knowledge, it’s not just that we have assumed knowledge and that we sometimes forget to explain that, it’s that even when we do consciously attempt to explain that, we assume that the base level of knowledge is much higher than it actually is. |
| AG: | Yeah. It’s a really powerful one just because it’s quite difficult to empathise with people sometimes and you just can’t undo all of that training because you spend a lot of time developing that training. |
| DT:
34:00 | Now, you mentioned earlier some of the work that BIT has done with the justice system in New South Wales around fines. And let’s talk about some of that now. I actually listened to one of your own podcast episodes, Alex, and it’s a great podcast. It’s called Inside The Nudge Unit. And the episode that features Alex is called You can’t Read Your Way Out of a Complex Policy Problem, which is a great point to take away. But in it some of your colleagues described what I think all of us lawyers will have to say shamefully is an accurate description of any list court in New South Wales. It’s busy, it’s chaotic. For someone who’s not legally represented, it’s very confusing. People are being asked to come to court at 9:30 AM to wait sometimes until three o’clock for their matter to be heard. There’s a lot of jargon. Things are moving very quickly and there’s few opportunities to ask questions. There’s a great deal of pressure not to ask a question so as not to slow things down and just nod along with whatever it is that the Magistrate is saying. Tell us a little bit about some of the work that you’ve done around domestic violence in the courts. |
| AG:
35:00
36:00 | Yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s exactly right. That these systems, if you are used to going in them, then you are very well acquainted about what’s going on but if they’re relatively new to, and they are terrifying. And the fact that you might go into court as a domestic violence offender is just very confusing. And you are, as you say, quite often just encouraged to leave without really understanding what’s going on. The project that you’re referencing was done with the behavioural insights unit that were previously at the Department of Premier and Cabinet which we helped set up – they’re now actually the Department of Customer Service in New South Wales – and with the Department of Justice, now the Department of Communities and Justice. Basically our mandate was to look at how do we address re-offending behaviour in domestic violence matters. It’s part of the Premier’s priorities, and one of the things that we tried to do is to go out and understand the system from multiple different viewpoints and lenses because frankly, we didn’t really have that much understanding of what was going on to then identify what sort of behavioural issues might be occurring. So part of that was going to courts to understand actually what does that process look like from multiple different viewpoints and what are the things that are sticking points for people. That work actually resulted in the plain English apprehended domestic violence order. Because one of the things that we saw was the Apprehended Domestic Violence Order itself was very jargon heavy, very complicated and at a very high reading age. So if you go into Word at the time, then if you type, if you write anything out and you click on the word count point, it’ll give you a reading age. |
| DT: | Really? |
| AG: | And that’s actually how we came across this issue was that we saw the reading age was for people who had about 13 years of education. Most people don’t have 13 years of education. A lot of the people that you’d be seeing in those courts and whilst domestic violence is a very broad issue, domestic violence is an issue where perpetrators can come from any sort of sector of society. You want to basically design a process that helps as many people as possible because most people don’t have 13 years of education, it’s generally missing the mark. So, we also found that specific terms in the ADVO had issues with it. So, initially it would say things like, you should not molest the protected person, which was understood by a large number of defendants as meaning sexual molestation, whereas that is not what the legalese term means. Just basically don’t harass this individual. |
| DT: 37:00 | It’s also an inherently negative description of a behaviour. Very few people are likely to describe their own behaviour in that way. |
| AG:
38:00 | So, they would go in and say “you know what? I haven’t breached this order because there was no sexual molestation,” but obviously they had breached the order because that person felt harassed. So, we spent a lot of time working out how we can simplify that language to make it easier for defendants to understand. We also did similar work in New Zealand where we looked at police bail notices. So, part of that work also involved understanding the system. So, actually a colleague of mine went on a ride along with police and then spent some time in a drunk tank on a Saturday night in Wellington to just go through the process of what it would mean if you were discharged from custody at that point. So, we looked at the orders that people received immediately after that and we saw similar things where the reading age was very high, in fact, in that case it was 12 years, which we cut down to 9 years. We had long discussions with the New Zealand police lawyers to actually work out what needed to change and what didn’t need to change. In New South Wales, we had to change the actual Act. So, that had to go through parliament. In New Zealand, that wasn’t the case. So, we just worked to clarify the orders and made it really clear as to what people needed to do, including showing up to court later and what we found there was when we actually evaluated it and partnered with six different police stations, was that we increased the number of people attending court from 84% to 88%, which doesn’t sound like a huge amount but actually, if rolled out across New Zealand, would lead to 1,600 people attending court. So, these little changes, they do make a difference when you add them up in the same way that those tax letters make quite a big difference. |
| DT: | Yeah, absolutely and as you said a little earlier in the episode, these aren’t always little nudges. Changing an act of parliament is quite a significant intervention but one that is still designed with behavioural insights behind it. |
| AG:
39:00 | Yeah, exactly. Exactly and it was nice to have that scientific angle to then actually have a much more informed debate. Through, what would work and what would actually change behaviour because it’s pretty clear as to what it was that everybody wanted defendants to do, which is to adhere to their order. So, having that different lens allowed us to have a different kind of debate. |
| DT: | And in terms of making a plan to comply with an order, tell us a little bit about that because I can really see the benefits of that in private practice, that you might help parties to agree on something and sign a contract or sign a settlement agreement or something like that but you leave the execution in the sense of the practical execution, the practical performance of that agreement, up to the parties and perhaps it doesn’t always happen. |
| AG:
40:00
41:00 | Yeah. So, this is some work that we then did with the Aboriginal Services Unit at the Department of Justice, who were absolutely wonderful in terms of co-designing these ideas with us and really took the lead in terms of implementing it. So, the idea behind ‘What’s your Plan’, which is an intervention that was delivered by the Aboriginal Services Unit, was that you would take some of the conditions of your order and then work out what your plan would be to adhere to them. So, some of the orders that you might receive would be things like; if you’ve been drinking, then you cannot go to this certain address. So, you actually need to think about, ‘if I have had a drink, then where will I go that night to make sure that my order is adhered to?’ So, it’s just really working out what the concrete things are, ‘if something happens, then I will do this‘ and the idea behind it is something called implementation intentions, which is essentially the creation of if-then plans so that you can actually foresee some of the issues and some of the practical obstacles that you might face when it comes to adhering to an order and then building that plan in and the way in which Peter Gollwitzer, who’s the originator of the idea of implementation intentions, talks about it is that quite often a lot of our behaviours are due to contextual cues. So, if something happens that you respond in this sort of automatic, they’re called schema, so this sort of script that you might have and if you can internalise some of their scripts to more positive behaviours, then you can have a really clear if-then plan that will help you actually do what it is that you need to do and quite often we can see these things work because we rely essentially on memory to create that if-then plan – you need to do something but you just forget therefore everything falls apart, whereas if you really rehearse that, if-then component, then any queue in your behaviour will essentially help you achieve what it is that you want to achieve. It doesn’t need to be domestic violence order, it can be anything really. It’s used quite a lot in exercise plans so, yeah. |
| DT: | Yeah, of course. Is that a little bit like choice bundling? Maybe going to an exercise plan, putting something that you really want to do, that you’re likely to remember to do because you find it easy with something that you ought to be doing, but maybe you find it a little bit harder to do? |
| AG: | That could be one way of doing it. One of the things that I used to do, because I used to do a lot of running, was like ‘I want to go running in the morning.‘ So, I’d just make sure that I would sleep in my gym kit. The cue is there. So, if I’m in my gym kit, then I’ll go running as I’m already doing that. So, I’ve got that plan set out for me. |
| DT: | That’s actually a great idea. Sometimes I have problems getting up to go for a run, I might try that. |
| AG: | Yeah. |
| DT: 42:00 | Now, one thing that has come out of your descriptions of the interventions that you’ve rolled out in the justice system as well as in that fabulous podcast episode you’re in, whether that’s going to a list court or going for a ride along or delivering fast food was one that your colleague Rory did, is the importance of getting out on the ground and seeing conditions in the real world. Maybe in the context of a business owner or a law practice principle who’s looking to change some things in their organisation using behavioural insights, tell us a little bit about the sorts of things that you’re trying to notice when you are out in the field before planning an intervention. Why is it so important that you are out there seeing things for yourself? |
| AG:
43:00
44:00 | Yeah, it’s a good question. We really do encourage people to go out and understand systems from multiple different viewpoints and I think it goes back to that point that we were talking about with the curse of knowledge is that ultimately you go into any problem with a certain predetermined hypothesis about what’s going on and unless you really go out and try and disconfirm that idea or view it from different angles, then you are really not going to design an optimal solution. So, yeah, you raise the food delivery worker example there. So, this is a project that we ran with the Center for Work Health and Safety in New South Wales to look at gig economy workers and their health and safety behaviours, which was a relatively novel area of inquiry at the time. Actually, as we started that project, there was a lot more focus on this because sadly a number of food delivery workers had died in accidents. So, we really wanted to understand what are the behavioural factors in that process and one of the things that we did was actually just sign up to a bunch of platforms. So, yeah, you would hear Rory actually going through and driving in his car to understand what are the pressures and what does it feel like to actually be in that situation and a load of different things came out of it that we previously wouldn’t have thought even if we just interviewed people, which we also encourage people to do. If you can’t actually go through the system yourself, speak to people who do, which is also a step that gets missed out quite often. So, yeah, just the time pressure of trying to make the deliveries was really clear in those conversations but also things that we thought were very problematic going into it, it gave us a different nuance to what was happening. So, things like you see a lot of food delivery workers on bikes who will have their headphones in and most people will say, that’s obviously a really bad idea and will cause a load of health and safety risks and, of course, it is a big risk, but the alternative is that you’re looking at your screen. So, actually, maybe having your headphones in and getting a feed that says ‘turn left, turn right here‘ is much better than you looking down whilst being on a very busy road and then get hit by a car or not see a pedestrian cross. So, it just gives you a different view on what’s happening. |
| DT: | Sometimes that context can challenge the conventional wisdom. |
| AG: 45:00 | Exactly and one of the key lessons from behavioural science is that context really matters. If we go back to the idea of choice architecture, the context in which we’re operating is having a direct impact on our behaviour. So, if we don’t see that, then we’re going to miss a load of things that either could help us create more effective processes or might actually explain some of the reasons why people are doing things that you might think are irrational but actually could make a lot of sense because you just haven’t seen it from their point of view. |
| DT:
46:00 | Yeah, absolutely and fantastic work addressing those issues of work health safety for gig economy workers. It’s a very challenging issue legally and one we’ve talked about on the podcast before, for people who are in that twilight zone between the employee and the independent contractor, encourage everyone to have a listen to that episode with Nicola Martin when they get a chance. Now, I wanted to ask you about implementing choice architecture, implementing interventions in a business, perhaps not an especially large one like a law firm. Maybe we can look at it through the lens of a particular issue which is parental leave and return to work. because we know that parental leave is an occasion where businesses can lose great people because they’re not encouraged to return to work or they’re not encouraged to take the parental leave in the way that they should. So, let’s talk about that example. How can a business design systems to help parents make good choices about parental leave and encourage their people to come back to work afterwards? |
| AG: | Yeah, I think my view on this is that actually in many cases, particularly for fathers is that you do want to encourage them to take parental leave to start off with. |
| DT: | Yeah. |
| AG: | And I say this, you know, I took five months off myself to look after my daughter. |
| DT | It’s my last week of work before I start four months off, actually. |
| AG: | Yeah. Congratulations. |
| DT: | Thanks very much. I’m really looking forward to it. |
| AG:
47:00 | Yeah, it was awesome. It was, yeah, definitely different kind of work but I think visibility is really important and I think that goes to the social norms point of highlighting actually, there are people who are doing this in the organisation, makes quite a big difference. So, that’s something that I would really focus on and also have really visual examples of this is where people are doing it and believe it is the right thing to do. TIP: BIT’s research indicates that the idea of men taking parental leave is, more often than not, a case of what’s called pluralistic ignorance. Meaning, the position of the minority is misunderstood to be the position of the majority. This pluralistic ignorance has a negative effect on the number of men who take parental leave, out of a fear of being judged. For this reason, visibility is most important to help workplaces authentically endorse shared parental leave and model that behaviour for employees. |
| DT: | It’s a bit of that ‘Make it Social’ from the EAST framework, isn’t it? Demonstrating that other people do this and perhaps it’s okay for you to do it too. |
| AG:
48:00 | Absolutely because I think that’s one of the big things that you see and there’s other social norms that you can use in that process. So, something that we see quite often in this space in terms of encouraging people to take parental leave is that people assume that there is that stigma. So, you can do some surveys and we’ve done this where you actually just survey your workforce and see “do you believe that it is right for people to do this?” And most people will say, “yeah, actually it is, we should be doing this” but that isn’t necessarily what people feel. . So, most people might say, “actually, if my colleague took this time off, I would absolutely back them to do it and that shouldn’t have any repercussions on their career but I still don’t internalise that” but by not only having visible examples of people taking that time off, but even using those social norms to say “actually most people think it is right for you to do this,” is a very different way of approaching that problem. So, it’s almost like a step back because quite often it’s hard to give that visible example for a large group of people, particularly if you’re a smaller organisation but having those stated norms can be a really powerful thing. So, surveys start off with to establish those norms and then emails afterwards to say, this is what your organisation feels, will probably give people a much stronger feeling of community, really, because if their views are in line with that and they feel that actually their colleagues back them, you’ll develop a better culture. |
| DT: 49:00 | Are you saying there’s an interesting kind of relationship of causation there where someone might have the stated preference; “no, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that,” but their express preference, secretly within, “actually, I do judge someone who chooses to take parental leave,” but just by everyone stating the preference in the survey, that creates a group dynamic or a group value that perhaps then persuades everyone to internalise that? |
| AG:
50:00 | Yeah, I think so and we see this quite a lot. So, you make assumptions about what other people are doing and then that also changes your behaviour. So we see this quite a lot in lots of different areas. So, teen drinking from a while ago people generally think that their peers are drinking more, taking more drugs, having sex younger than they actually are. So, having that information out there can actually then change people’s perceptions of what their peers are doing and then also have an effect on their behaviour. So, yeah, social norm messages could be a really powerful thing, both when it comes to encouraging positive behaviours or reducing negative behaviours. So, actually an example of reducing negative behaviours, building on that work that we did in tax, we’ve done similar trials with GPs both in the UK and actually in New Zealand, where we would tell GPs who are over-prescribers that they are over-prescribers and then that would have a significant impact in their prescribing rates. |
| DT: | I think I’ve heard about this. So, this was in relation to antibiotic prescriptions? |
| AG:
51:00 | Yeah, that’s the important part. Yeah, so they would then prescribe fewer antibiotics overall, and the effects are huge. A simple letter that would cost several thousand pounds would reduce the rate of antibiotics by, I think it was, 0.8% and bear in mind that the NHS target when we did it in the UK was about a percent. That’s huge impact compared to the million pound advertising campaigns that you might have and we found the same thing in New Zealand where it was a little bit more nuanced because generally you wanted to reduce the number of antibiotics that people are prescribing across the board, but there are some populations in New Zealand, particularly Maori and Pacific people, who may actually be under-prescribed. So, what we did was we highlighted the global prescribing rates for everybody and then also looked at where people sat on ethnicity basis. So, this is where your prescribing rates are for Maori patients, you’re in that percentile, for Pacific patients, you’re in that percentile and we thought we might get some negative messages back. We didn’t actually. People generally were quite interested to learn more about their data but what we found was that generally it reduced prescribing rates by 9% in this case but for the small group of GPs who were over-prescribers overall but under-prescribers to Maori and Pacific patients, their prescribing rates didn’t drop. So, it really had that targeted messaging. |
| DT: | It’s so interesting. I would’ve had the same assumption that some people would be quite confronted by the suggestion that they have an inconsistent approach to prescribing based on ethnicity but it is interesting that people were actually curious about. |
| AG: | Yeah and we had so many complaints programs set up just so that we could triage them as they came through. It also goes to the point really that, you need to be prepared to evaluate these ideas and understand what happens and quite often, we are wrong in terms of what we might expect to happen. So, that’s why we really focus on that data and experimentation point. |
| DT: 52:00 | Yeah and on that point about data and experimentation, you couldn’t have delivered that intervention without having reliable and granular data about not only prescription levels but being able to interrogate those prescription levels based on ethnicity. Data is so important in designing an intervention and if you don’t already have the data creating it through experimentation and randomised controlled trials is a good way to do that. For a smaller organisation who might not have the resources to run a randomised controlled trial with very many participants and who may have a limited set of data available to them, can you give us some tips on how an organisation of that scale and resourcing could use a data driven approach or an experimental approach to improve some of the decisions they’re making when designing an intervention? |
| AG: 53:00 | Yeah, I think the first thing is almost just to be open to the idea that you can be wrong, which goes back to the first conversation that we had around evidence based medicine. It’s quite terrifying to know that most of the things that we experience through our lives, whether government policies or procedures that might occur in courts or our doctors might prescribe us, many of those things don’t work. That’s quite a terrifying proposition. So, being comfortable with some level of uncertainty then allows you to just question, is this actually the best way in which I can put things forward? And then I think that just changes your mindset to then think about what are those metrics that will allow me to at least get some evidence that this is or isn’t working. So, I’d encourage you to even just find some opportunities to run some quick experiments where possible. So, an area where lots of people actually have the opportunity to, but don’t necessarily take it, is if you do any sort of mass mail out, it’s now a package thing that you can get through most platforms, that you can run an A/B test and use that to understand actually what are the decisions that I’m making? What are the impact of those? And just getting into that mindset can really shift your way of approaching your work. |
| DT: 54:00 | That’s true. There are great A/B testing tools out there and a lot of off the shelf products website publishing ones are another example of tools that already have A/B testing built in and even just making the decision of what’s in the A format and what’s in the B format makes you think about the sorts of things that might move the lever. |
| AG:
55:00
56:00 | This is one thing that we usually see that when we work and partner with a team that aren’t really across the BI, they’re not already sold on the idea of evaluation. Then when you say, “look, when you’re writing a letter or you’re writing out some bit of comms, you’re making all these decisions. Why don’t you really just want to work out what worked? Let’s try a few different implementations of it and see what the impact is.” People get really hooked on the idea that, sometimes there is the right answer, but when you’re actually writing something out, you might go, “I’ll delete that bit. Maybe that doesn’t work” but you know what? Actually in some cases you can find out whether right does work and that’s quite an exciting prospect because you are, first of all opening yourself to that idea of uncertainty and then realising actually there are certain things that you can look at and it gets even more fun when you start applying it to broader theories about how the world works, which makes us sound very grandiose but I’ll give an example of quite an old piece of work that we did at St. Vincent’s down the road here, where we were looking at how’d you get people to attend their outpatient appointments? And what we did there was we spent a bit of time just talking to the staff who are dealing with people not showing up. So, largely administrative staff and nurses on the wards and they gave us lots of different explanations as to what was going on. So, some of the things that came out were, people don’t attend their appointment because they’ve got multiple appointments going on at the same time, often in the same hospital and because they clash then they can’t show up. Makes sense. The other one was that people don’t show up because they’re forgetful, which also makes sense. And the third idea that came up was the idea that people don’t really value their appointment because they’re not really paying for it through various different reasons, so they don’t show up. So, you can take those explanations and theories about how the world works in this instance and then start thinking about designing a trial that might help you understand which one of those is true or which one is more true than the others. So, in that case, we ran a text message trial to get people to show up at their appointments and the thing is that if the first one is true and people don’t show up because they’ve clashing appointments, then no text message will have an impact. Right? |
| DT: | It’s not a choice. |
| AG:
57:00 | Exactly. If, however, it’s because they’re forgetful, then a text message that you send out will be effective but it doesn’t necessarily matter what the content of that message is, what the copy is but if it’s the case of that they don’t value their appointment, then actually a message that says, this appointment costs this much money, and we lose that money. If you don’t show up, then that one should be more effective than other text messages, right? So, you can use that way of designing a trial to start understanding the world and then importantly, also designing better systems. So, if it’s the case that your text messages don’t work, then actually just work on a scheduling system, right? Because you should really think about how you solve that problem before you start looking at other solutions. If it’s the case that the reminders work, but it doesn’t really matter what’s in them, then just send more reminders. If it’s the case that the cost message is really effective, then think about the other places in which you can get that message across, right? So, billboard ads or in the UK, sometimes you’d have it running on in the waiting rooms. You could have some sort of other messages going around there to make sure that people do show up. So, this experimental mindset could be a really powerful tool to unpack things. Sometimes it’s not through a formal experiment. Sometimes it’s just approaching a problem, with the understanding that you could be wrong. |
| DT: | Well, that’s a great tip and I think a great takeaway point for this episode to admit the possibility you may be wrong for a profession of risk averse perfectionists, it’s a difficult message to internalise but the promise that doing so might lead you to even greater heights of perfection, maybe will be one that will persuade our listeners to take it on. That’s just about all we’ve got time for but Dr. Alex Gyani, thanks so much for joining me on Hearsay. |
| AG: | Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure. |
| DT: 58:00
59:00 | As always, you’ve been listening to Hearsay the Legal Podcast. I’d like to thank my guest today, Alex Gyani from the Behavioral Insights Team for coming on the show. Now, we talked about behavioral economics in this episode. If you want some more economics related content, you could listen to a very early episode of Hearsay, episode 6 with Dr. George Beaton about the microeconomics of your law and, speaking of decisions, if you haven’t listened to it yet, why don’t you listen to our interview with Justice Michael Kirby, episode 29, on how judges make their decisions. If you’re an Australian legal practitioner, you can claim one Continuing Professional Development point for listening to this episode. Whether an activity entitles you to claim a CPD unit is self-assessed, but we suggest this episode entitles you to claim a practice management and business skills point. More information on claiming and tracking your points on Hearsay can be found on our website. Hearsay the Legal Podcast, as always, is brought to you by Lext Australia, a legal innovation company that makes the law easier to access and easier to practice, and that includes CPD. I’d like to ask you a favour, listeners. If you like us, please leave us a Google Review. It helps other listeners find us and that keeps us in business. Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you on the next episode of Hearsay.
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