The Behavioral Insights Team

The Behavioral Insights Team (BIT) is a social purpose company with offices around the world. We are jointly owned by the UK Government; Nesta (the innovation charity); and our employees.

BIT started life inside 10 Downing Street as the world’s first government institution dedicated to the application of behavioral sciences. Our objectives remain the same as they always have been:

• making public services more cost-effective and easier for citizens to use;
• improving outcomes by introducing a more realistic model of human behavior to policy; and wherever possible,
• enabling people to make ‘better choices for themselves’

We do this by redesigning public services and drawing on ideas from the behavioral science literature. We are also highly empirical; we test and trial these ideas before they are scaled up. This enables us to understand what works and (importantly) what does not work.

Our staff have either a strong academic grounding in economics, psychology, or randomized controlled trial design; or a background in government policy-making.

Our Academic Advisory Panel includes Richard Thaler, co-author of Nudge; former Cabinet Secretary Lord Gus O’Donnell (the panel’s chair); and senior academics from leading Universities.