Comments on: BASIC – the Behavioural Insights Toolkit and Ethical Guidelines for Policy Makers

By: Geoffrey Elbaz

Geoffrey Elbaz — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 17:08:57 +0000

This toolkit was particularly helpful as it used many organizational diagrams, graphs, and flowcharts to help clarify psychological principles and help us understand case studies in which policymakers can view behavioral insights in action. The methods elucidated in the toolkit help us to understand how behavioral insights can be applied to real-world scenarios. The toolkit intuitively describes five steps that should be followed when designing policies, also taking into account ethical and behavioral concerns. It also uses behavioral insights to understand the psychological motives behind peoples’ actions, allowing us to understand if our policy designs are strategically effective from a psychological point of view. I greatly appreciated that all of the information and policymaking strategies presented in the toolkit were intelligently linked and easily cross-referenced.

By: Jules

Jules — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 14:23:14 +0000

This toolkit uses the template of the policy cycle composed of 5 steps (Policy analysis, consultation, implementation, enforcement and evaluation)
While other toolkits have fewer steps, this one is unique because it emphasizes on a constant evaluation of the policies put in place. The dynamics of self-management are a guarantee of efficiency and control that allow real-time adjustment of the public policy. In line with behavioural themes, this toolkit attempts to respond to a series of cognitive biases by using them. However, it is more complex insofar as it does not have the same objectives as other toolkits (EAST, for example, insisting on the need for a simple policy). This toolkit is very useful for responding to specific issues but because of its length is more rigorous and therefore more difficult to implement. However, if it is used well, it can be used to respond to complex issues.

By: Joseph Allouche

Joseph Allouche — Tue, 22 Dec 2020 15:59:43 +0000

This toolkit is very complete. It gives a process for policy makers to apply behavioral insights. Five steps are described that take into account the entire policy cycle from start to the end. Within all of these steps, ethical guidelines are present to “regulate” each step of the process. This guide is quite useful since it allows to take into account all the stakes associated to each step of the process.
In addition, an ABCD Framework is used for the Analysis and Strategy steps for understanding why people act as they do and to match analyses with strategies.
Therefore, this toolkit is much more dense than the others of the same style, i.e. those on MINDSPACE and EAST.
It is nevertheless possible to understand globally thanks to the roadmap located at the beginning of each new element which summarizes the part to come.
This is useful to avoid getting lost in the large amount of information that is given. In addition to these roadmaps, the 20 boxes present concretes examples of policies that have been put in place and allow us to put all the elements that are presented in context.

From the user’s point of view, this toolkit is therefore difficult to assimilate in its entirety but it is undoubtedly the most appropriate one to respond to the complex issues of policy making. It’s probably not visual enough for me.