Civic Engagement

Earning a college degree is one of the best paths available to a secure economic future. But across the United States, too many people who want to earn a college degree are either not enrolling, or are enrolling but failing to graduate. Behavioral science research has revealed a number of subtle, sometimes surprising factors that can interfere with college enrollment, persistence, and completion. In close partnership with colleges, universities, college success non-profits, foundations, and others, ideas42 works to identify these factors and design behaviorally-informed interventions to address them. We develop innovative solutions using a rigorous behavioral design methodology. We optimize existing programs and processes by identifying behavioral pain points and evidence-based improvements. We lead capacity building with individuals and organizations, preparing these leaders to take a behavioral approach in their own work. Over the past 10 years, we’ve worked on more than 55 projects aimed at helping students persist through their postsecondary journey.

Health systems are human systems. At ideas42, we use behavioral science to study the unexpected and often curious quirks of human behavior. When we apply these breakthroughs and insights to global health programs, we can amplify impact and advance positive change. By better understanding how and why people make the choices they do, we can better help them see all the possibilities, chart their preferred path, reach personal goals, and achieve their fullest potential. Our goal is to transform global health practice to improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people worldwide with a focus on women and children under 5 years old in low- and middle-income countries.

We envision a world where financial products, services, and programs are behaviorally-informed, and designed to meet the needs of people of all socio-economic statuses, ages, races, and genders so that they can have a financially secure present and a self-determined future.  We do this work by partnering with a wide variety of organizations, including credit unions, banks, public agencies, governments, fintech startups, and nonprofits. Instead of assuming that increased knowledge or motivation are the sole keys to better outcomes, we seek to understand the context where decisions are made and remove barriers within the channels and systems through which people navigate their financial lives. Our ultimate goal – a financial system that works for everyone.

The Economic Justice team at ideas42 envisions a U.S. where a shared, behaviorally informed narrative of poverty removes inequities that prevent all people from leading fulfilled lives of their own definition. To achieve that vision, we work closely with the communities we serve to design and advance solutions that make it easier for people facing economic hardship to exercise their power for individual, community, and systems change. We also believe that economic justice and racial justice are deeply entwined, and so we bring a racial justice lens into all of the work that we do. Our principles of equity include fixing contexts, not people; listening to and acting on lived experiences; and always promoting dignity, autonomy, and justice in our designs. Using a two-generational lens, we work with a diverse group of partners. We are also building new work focused on narrative change, as we seek to shift the harmful and false poverty narratives that lead to ineffective, and at times harmful, policies and practices.

ideas42 applies behavioral science to some of the toughest problems in U.S. health: low and high-value care, chronic diseases such as diabetes and obesity, public health crises like vaccination and opioid use, healthy aging, and bias in care and algorithms. Ultimately, we envision a future where a healthy and dignified life is attainable and affordable for all, individuals and providers alike. Partnering with health systems, state and local governments, payers, health care companies, and community-based organizations, we use the evidence of what works from our knowledge of human behavior to design and build solutions that improve outcomes, lower costs, and reduce disparities. We work on provider and patient behavior change around adherence to care guidelines, preventative health and closing care gaps, care management and steerage, and patient engagement. Learn more about our work here. Applying behavioral science, we have already increased vaccination uptake 1.5x, increased medication adherence 1.5x, and increased high-value referrals and treatment 33%.

In the legal system, the smallest of mistakes — such as accidentally missing court or inability to pay a fine — can have outsized impacts on people’s freedom, livelihoods, and well-being. This is especially true for those most experiencing poverty, systemic racism, and/or violence. Our Safety & Justice team uses rigorous research and inventive behavioral design to improve outcomes (and prevent negative outcomes) in the legal system. We work directly with courts, police, probation and parole, district attorneys and public defenders, community organizations, and mayors’ offices to bring about positive change. This is done in partnership with communities, civil rights groups, action networks, and other researchers. Reforms are desperately needed, and their success ultimately depends on people changing prevailing, often deep-seeded patterns of behavior. By enabling better decisions, we aim to reduce the harms of our current system in the U.S. while helping to build a more fair, dignified, and equitable one.

Maximizing the impact of existing and new global livelihoods and humanitarian efforts using insights from behavioral science can help improve life for millions in contexts of extreme poverty or instability around the world. Living in such contexts forces people to make tough trade-offs every day, in turn making it difficult to improve their well-being and long-term economic prospects. This can include: Spending cash transfer funds on immediate needs rather than making productive livelihood investments Sending children to work instead of school Spending time on income-generating work rather than vocational training programs Meeting immediate consumption needs at the expense of protection, health, or other long-term priorities Using behavioral insights to redesign the delivery of global anti-poverty and humanitarian programs will give millions the slack needed to minimize such trade-offs, maximizing program effectiveness and providing participants with tools to improve their economic well-being as they see fit.

We believe that governmental tools, workplaces, and systems are not designed to maximize the efforts of hard-working public servants, and this is standing in the way of good governance. Despite public attention and material resources, officials often struggle to fulfill their mandates, missing out on the potential to catalyze development. Like all humans, when faced with competing priorities and scarce time and resources, public officials tend to “tunnel,” focusing only on the most urgent responsibilities. Small changes to often overlooked aspects of the context in which government workers and public officials operate can drastically improve government performance. By leveraging a deep understanding of human behavior, our governance team supports the work of public servants in low- and middle-income countries through light-touch, low-cost interventions aimed at optimizing limited public resources, and more importantly, at improving the lives of the people governments serve.

We’re focused on the most critical challenges of the foreseeable future: reducing carbon emissions and helping people adapt equitably to the inevitable effects of climate change. The decisions that are made every day by people across the world — whether in organizations, institutions, or at home — have ongoing impacts on climate change. Climate change is a long-term, vague threat that requires collective action to solve. Unfortunately, this plays to our behavioral biases, which favor short-term benefits and specific solutions, in the worst way possible. Behavioral science has a critical role to play in understanding and addressing this overall problem. We look for opportunities to deploy behavioral science to prompt action that meaningfully reduces carbon emissions, or helps individuals and communities adapt to climate impacts. By 2030, our bold goal is to avert 550 million metric tons CO2E annually — the equivalent of ~10% of projected 2020 US emissions.