INSIGHTS INTO HUMAN BEHAVIOUR

The World Bank in its latest report (World Development Report 2015: Mind, Society, and Behaviour) said that development policies become more effective when combined with insights into human behaviour. It further adds that policy decisions informed by behavioural economics can deliver

impressive improvements in promoting development and well-being in society. It sites some examples from India in the areas of healthcare and education:

• Open defecation dropped 11 per cent from very high levels after a Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) programme was combined in some chosen villages with the standard approach of subsidies for toilet construction and information on the transmission of diseases.

• The likelihood of default on loans became three times less with a simple change in the periodicity of meetings between microfinance clients and their repayment groups to weekly rather than monthly.

• Research showed that boys from backward classes were just as good at solving puzzles as boys from the upper castes when caste identity was not revealed. However, in mixed-caste groups, revealing the boys’ castes before puzzle-solving sessions created a significant “caste gap” in achievement with the boys from backward classes underperforming by 23 per cent (making caste salient to the test takers invoked identities, which in turn affected performance, as per the report).

The Report has recommended that the presence of a stereotype can contribute to measured ability differences, which in turn reinforce the stereotype and serve as a basis for exclusion, in a vicious cycle—finding ways to break this cycle could increase the well-being of marginalised individuals enormously.