The Behavioural Insights Team

Abstract Climate change profoundly affects well‐being in complex and interconnected ways. However, the relationship between climate change and well‐being has been explored in only a handful of settings, most of which are industrialized. Here, we investigate the association between perceived climate change impacts, their severity and subjective well‐being (measured as life satisfaction) using cross‐culturally comparable first‐hand reports from 2488 participants across 14 nature‐dependent communities. We find a negative association between site‐aggregated life satisfaction and different metrics of climate change: perceptions of local impacts, reported severity and instrumental measurements. Within sites, individual‐level associations between perceived severity of climate change impacts and life satisfaction are weak or absent. Further analysis suggests that site‐level characteristics play a crucial role in shaping these patterns. This could indicate that it is the overall vulnerability and exposure of a community to climate change impacts, rather than individual experiences that matters most. Our findings offer a nuanced understanding of how climate change impacts relate to well‐being, emphasizing the multidimensional character of climate change impacts and underscoring the importance of local context in shaping these relationships. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

• The intervention did not reduce homelessness for most participants. • Aboriginal participants experienced worse outcomes than non-Aboriginal participants. • Previously homeless youth benefited more than peers without such history. • Participants found intervention more acceptable than support they received during OOHC. • Aftercare planning practice was a major barrier to implementation. Young people transitioning from out-of-home care (OOHC) face elevated risks of adverse outcomes across multiple domains. Existing interventions have shown small or null effects when rigorously evaluated, highlighting the need to identify effective approaches to supporting care leavers. Evaluate the impact of the Premier’s Youth Initiative (PYI), an accommodation and support intervention, on homelessness outcomes for care leavers and explore its implementation. 295 eligible care leavers who received PYI in New South Wales, Australia between 2017–2020 and a matched comparison group drawn from locations where PYI was unavailable. We undertook a hybrid type-1 implementation-effectiveness study that used linked administrative data from child welfare and homelessness services. Propensity score methods were applied to estimate the average treatment effect on the treated on ten measures of homelessness between ages 18–19. Implementation was explored through focus groups with participants, service providers and the funder to explore intervention acceptability as well as barriers and facilitators. Overall PYI had no impact on any assessed homelessness measures—with treatment effects consistently near zero. Subgroup analyses showed that Aboriginal participants experienced worse outcomes than non-Aboriginal peers. Participants who experienced homelessness during OOHC appeared to benefit more from PYI, relative to those who did not, but estimates were inconsistent. Implementation analysis identified high acceptability among participants but revealed substantial barriers, particularly inadequate planning for leaving care. Interventions like PYI may need to commence earlier, be provided at greater intensity, or be targeted more effectively to the most vulnerable care leavers.

Abstract Social media offers many benefits but also carries risks, including exposure to distressing content. The UK’s Online Safety Act requires certain platforms to empower users to control the content they see. Content controls can reduce users’ exposure to sensitive content. However, there is little public data on how platform design shapes the use of these controls. In our online randomised controlled trial on a simulated social media platform, participants were given an initial choice between seeing ‘All content types’ or ‘Reduced sensitive content’. After browsing, they were given the opportunity to change their choice. In the Control arm, none of the options were pre-selected. 24% chose ‘Reduced sensitive content’. Pre-selecting ‘All content types’ reduced this proportion to 15%. Conversely, adding a description of ‘sensitive content’ on the choice page increased that figure to 29%. The initial choice proved to be ‘sticky’. When invited to review after browsing, those defaulted away from ‘Reduced sensitive content’ did not switch any more than those whose choice was not influenced by a default. Overall, user choice was susceptible to choice architecture, and users’ tendency to update their initial choice was weak. This highlights the importance of platform design to deliver genuine user empowerment.

ABSTRACT This study investigates how polycrisis-induced strategic shifts in Scandinavian retail chains affect their dynamic capabilities and interconnectedness with high streets, and the implications for city center resilience and revitalization. The research addresses a significant gap in understanding how retail chains strategically adapt to polycrisis challenges in ways that could contribute to city center regeneration. By integrating dynamic capabilities theory with systems thinking and a multi-stakeholder place lens, we develop a holistic framework for analyzing retail adaptation within broader city center ecosystems. The study employs a qualitative longitudinal methodology, conducting 60 semi-structured interviews with 12 senior executives from seven Swedish retail chains across diverse sectors during 2020–2022. Using template analysis guided by sensemaking principles, we examined how retail chains developed collaborative capabilities in response to the evolving polycrisis conditions. Our findings reveal three key adaptive strategies: cost-sharing initiatives (including condominium-style property management and joint logistics operations), innovation alliances (such as cross-industry knowledge sharing and flexible pop-up concepts), and recognition of interdependency with local environments. The study demonstrates that retailers exercise nonlinear capability development, fundamentally altering the temporal logic of adaptation by requiring concurrent rather than sequential learning, experimentation, and transformational processes. We identify a paradigm shift from firm-centric to place-oriented approaches, where retail capabilities are co-created and shaped by specific city center contexts. The research contributes a novel ‘systems-based territorial capabilities perspective’ that operationalizes the synthesis of dynamic capabilities, multi-stakeholder collaboration, and systems theory. However, cultural inertia limits implementation, as retailers recognize their interdependence while not seeing themselves as primarily responsible for placemaking. The study suggests that successful city center revitalization requires transcending traditional isolated retail roles through collaborative territorial development processes that cross-leverage community assets.

Designing and operationalizing valid surveys during public health emergencies and similarly fast changing situations can be a challenge. In this research note, we present an exploration of whether an approach to cognitive pre-test interviewing through an online survey platform augmented by the use of AI prompts could help achieve robust pre-testing at pace, in a sensitive and effective manner. We integrated an LLM tool into an online survey system and configured it to generate qualitative prompts to better understand how a sample of 46 respondents understood and approached answering a series of questions about mpox. The results indicate using an LLM to conduct pre-test cognitive interviewing did not fully meet the need to conduct these activities to the standard needed by those working in quickly evolving situations such as health security incidents. However, this investigation of an untrained LLM with limited capability should be understood as an early step towards discovering the potential to cognitive pre-test survey questions using LLMs.

Most organizations encourage employees to provide feedback to one another to support learning, personal growth, and career advancement. However, employee feedback often fails to improve performance because it lacks concrete, specific guidance. We provide a temporal explanation for why workplace input processes routinely fail to produce valuable and concrete developmental insights: they are insufficiently focused on the future. In this paper, we theorize and demonstrate that encouraging input providers to think about the future leads them to produce more concrete developmental input. Across a large scale, preregistered field experiment (n = 27,432 comments) and two laboratory studies (n = 806), people provide more concrete and actionable developmental input when they are prompted to provide future-looking “advice” rather than “feedback,” a common method of soliciting input in organizations. The effect of soliciting advice on input concreteness was mediated by providers’ future focus. Moreover, in a follow-up study, such concrete input was assessed by independent raters as more useful. These findings highlight the role of temporal orientation in driving the content of developmental input. In doing so, our data suggest that individuals and organizations have the potential to promote higher-quality developmental input by attending to the temporal orientation that their input systems encourage. This paper was accepted by Isabel Fernandez-Mateo, organizations. Funding: Funding for the laboratory experiments was provided by Harvard Business School. Supplemental Material: The supplementary appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.03207 .

BackgroundDespite global campaigns, the public’s understanding of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) as a global emergency remains limited. Behaviour change is crucial in preserving antimicrobials but requires improved understanding of AMR at a population level.MethodsMembers of the public co-designed intervention arms, selecting three alternatives to AMR to be evaluated in a four-armed online randomised behavioural experiment. The primary outcome was attitudes towards AMR. Secondary and exploratory outcomes included comprehension, behavioural intent and recall.ResultsIn April 2024, 4296 participants completed the online survey. Antibiotic Resistance is the most effective terminology for attitudes towards AMR (p < 3.95E-06), comprehension (p = 0.013) and recall (p < 0.0003). Both Antibiotic Resistance and The Antibiotic Crisis reduce behavioural intent to stop a course of antibiotics early.ConclusionsAlternative terminology to describe AMR can impact attitudes, comprehension and behavioural intent towards antimicrobial use. Co-designing such terminology with the public can be an effective way utilising meaningful language in public health campaigns.

System Strength (SS) is becoming increasingly important while more and more inverter-based resources (IBRs) get connected to weak parts of the grid. There is still, however, a level of ambiguity with respect to formal SS definition. It is to a large extent legacy from conventional systems dominated by synchronous generators, often only simplistically associated with fault level. To overcome these issues and encourage discussion that will lead to more formal SS definition, this paper proposes a new inclusive concept of SS and technical framework to clarify its fundamental technical aspects. Starting from a comprehensive review of existing definitions, assessment metrics, and observed real-life challenges and solutions, the paper identifies the gaps between the technical fundamentals of the SS concept and its legacy perception. This is followed by identification of the key SS components relevant for assessment of both steady-state and dynamic system performance. The paper proposes a new SS classification where the SS "umbrella concept" is broken down into <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">small-signal</i> strength, <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">large-signal</i> strength, and <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">short-circuit</i> strength with relevant SS factors, which may also be used in the context of ancillary services market developments. We indeed highlight how the overall SS can be influenced by a combination of factors, not only by fault level, and recommend that a "voltage-behind-an-impedance" parametrization and model may be more effective in defining SS in many circumstances. Finally, the capabilities of different types of IBRs in providing SS products are discussed along with relevant complexity and limitations.