With trial and error being an inherent part of the research process, some projects may not always achieve their anticipated social impact – but the reasons why are often left unexplored. To better understand this challenge and learn from unsuccessful attempts, a team from the Department of Economics collaborated with the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) to identify how gaps between expectations and outcomes can emerge throughout the research life cycle.
Spun out of the UK Government in 2014, BIT is a social purpose company that applies insights from behavioural science to improve public policy and people’s lives. Social impact is at the heart of BIT’s mission, and the organisation has conducted hundreds of research projects with governments, non-profits and private sector organisations around the world. It was acquired by Nesta in 2021.
With support from the Social Sciences Business Engagement Seed Fund, Professor Séverine Toussaert and Economics DPhil student Hubert Wu worked with BIT to observe one of the unit’s online behavioural experiments. Over several months, they collected observational data, observed BIT meetings and interviewed project researchers to understand more about the research process and the results they expected to obtain. By exploring aspects of a study that are not typically reported, like how decisions are made about research design, the collaboration aimed to produce new insights into how to improve the process of behavioural studies.
The funding enabled Hubert Wu to work closely with BIT throughout their experiment, analyse the insights gathered, and create a 25-page case study. This was later presented at an Oxford workshop, Behavioural Science Meets Metascience, where Hubert led a panel discussion with BIT staff to reflect on their shared insights and lessons learned about research design.
