A decade of 'nudge' - in conversation with the pioneers (part 1 of 2)

Part 1 of a very special episode of Inside the Nudge Unit, recorded to tie in with the recent 10 year anniversary of the Behavioural Insights Team. Join our CEO, Professor David Halpern, with the founders and pioneers of behavioural economics, Professor Richard Thaler, Professor Cass Sunstein and Google’s head behavioural scientist Dr Maya Shankar, discussing how ‘nudge’ has evolved over the last decade and where the science of human behaviour is headed next. 

Richard Thaler is the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the 2017 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to behavioural economics. He has been at the forefront of research into psychology of decision-making and economics for over two decades and is the co-author of the international best seller Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness in which the concepts of behavioural economics are applied to tackle many of society’s biggest problems. 

As well as being co-author of the best-seller Nudge, Cass Sunstein is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School and Chair of the World Health Organization’s technical advisory group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health. From 2009 to 2012, he was Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and served on President Barack Obama’s Review Board on Intelligence and Communications Technologies and on the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Board. 

Maya Shankar is Google’s Global Director of Behavioral Economics and joined Cass Sunstein as a Senior Advisor within the Obama White House administration where she founded and served as Chair of the White House's Behavioral Science Team — a team of scientists charged with improving public policy using research insights about human behavior. Maya completed a post-doctoral fellowship in cognitive neuroscience at Stanford after receiving a Ph.D. from Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship and a B.A. from Yale in cognitive science. 

To learn more about BIT's first and next 10 years, go to www.bi.team/bit10. You can find every other episodes of Inside The Nudge Unit at www.bi.team/our-work/podcast-inside-the-nudge-unit and keep up to date with all our latest insights on Twitter @B_I_Tweets.

Further reading

Nudge is available to buy as paperback or e-book on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nudge-Improving-Decisions-Health-Happiness/dp/0141040017

Read more about Maya Shankar’s work on behavioural science at her website https://mayashankar.com/bio

Check out Richard Thaler’s Nobel Prize winning work here https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2017/thaler/biographical/

Credits 

Editing by Andy Hetherington

Music by Rich O’Brien