What is Behaviour Change?

Why is falling for fake news so easy despite all the warnings? Why do we carry high-interest debt even when we have the means to pay it off? Why are there so many browser tabs open on your screen right now even though digital clutter is so stressful?

The answers to these questions – and so many other perplexities of human behaviour – are the domain of behavioural science.

Once upon a time, we believed human beings were logical creatures, capable of making good decisions and acting in our own best interests.
Today, we know better.
Thanks to breakthroughs in behavioural research, we’ve been able to peer at the inner workings of our decision-making processes – and instead of logic and reason, we’ve found a tangle of biases and cognitive pitfalls that lead to irrational and even harmful behaviours.
The good news? We have effective tools at our disposal to steer those behaviours in a more desirable direction.
At BCA, we mine insights from behavioural research to illuminate what really motivates human actions.
Then, we add rigorous data analysis and a range of creative strategies to develop behavioural and communication solutions that improve decision-making and create better outcomes for customers, employees and citizens.
"To understand why we do what we do, neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky looks at extreme context, examining actions on timescales from seconds to millions of years before they occurred. In this fascinating talk, he shares his cutting-edge research into the biology that drives our worst and best behaviours."
The biology of behaviour
Understanding something as wildly complex as human behaviour is impossible without considering our biology. The work of Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky has done a lot to illuminate the neurological and biological factors that influence how we act and make decisions. As we learn more about these interconnections, our insights can be used for positive behaviour change. In Sapolsky's words, “We’re learning more and more about the biological underpinnings of our behaviour, and that can help us produce better outcomes.”
Altruism bias
Acting in the best interest of others can contribute to our own happiness

“We humans notoriously underestimate how happy it makes us to give to others.”

– Nava Ashraf

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Men make more extreme choices and decisions, find scientists

Findings show that the more extreme choices and decisions of men can be both positive and negative. This is the main finding of new research involving more than 50,000 participants in 97 samples, published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). "We found men were much more likely than women to be at the extreme ends of the behavioural spectrum, either acting very selfishly or very altruistically, very trusting or very distrusting, very fair or very unfair, very risky or very risk averse and were either very short-term or very long-term focused."
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Behaviour Change in the age of Covid-19

September 15, 2020

This Mail & Guardian webinar was sponsored by The Behaviour Change Agency.  Speakers included Antoine Ferrere, Global Head of Behavioural Science at Novartis, Switzerland; Matthew Battersby, Chief Behavioural Scientist at Reinsurance Group of America, United Kingdom; Aimee Wesso, Advanced Strategic Specialist at Afrocentric Group; Pat Govender, Founder and Managing Director of The Behaviour Change Agency and Dr Anam Nyembezi, Behavioural Medicine Specialist and a Senior Lecturer in the School of Public Health, University of the Western Cape.

The Lemonade effect: What every business can learn from this startup’s focus on scarcity

May 10, 2021

While conventional wisdom states that we should be creating outstanding, end-to-end customer experiences, scientific research suggests otherwise. As important as experiences are in the moment, it’s the memory of those experiences that we carry around with us for days, months and sometimes years afterwards that really matters.

How can world’s wealthy change polluting behaviour?

April 16, 2021

The world’s wealthiest need to reduce their carbon emissions to help tackle climate change, a report by the Cambridge Sustainability Commission has said.Highest global earners caused a 37% increase in global emissions over 25 years, the document said. For the majority of people making changes is about shifting infrastructure so we can get about and heat our homes in low carbon ways, Prof Peter Newell, the lead author of the report told BBC World News.

Social and behavioural sciences to overcome daunting challenges

March 29, 2021

From public health and job creation to environmental sustainability and safer communities, the social and behavioural sciences empower people everywhere to find solutions.

Leading LSE academics call for post-COVID wellbeing agency

March 11, 2021

The government should create a wellbeing impacts agency and a wellbeing commission to enable policymakers to consider citizens’ wellbeing and quality of life in future, state a leading group of LSE academics.

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