BR-UK Themes

Leads: Professor David Shipworth (UCL), Professor Nick Pidgeon (Cardiff), and Professor Ian Hamilton (UCL)

The world’s populations currently face existential threats of the closely connected climate and biodiversity crises, with people’s individual and collective patterns of behaviour at their heart. A major challenge for behavioural research in this domain relates to the urgent need to scale-up the means of achieving societal transformation and interventions at multiple levels. This theme aims to deepen the understanding of environmental challenges by redefining the concept of 'environment' in the context of current changes, uncertainties, and accelerating socio-technical-environmental complexity, and reconciling competing theoretical and empirical frameworks to maximise the use of existing knowledge, and comparing scientific methods for eliciting people's values toward future sustainability.

Leads: Dr Laura McGowan (QUB), Professor Graham Moore (Cardiff), and Professor Paul Aveyard (Oxford).

Physical and mental health are intimately, reciprocally and complexly bound with health behaviour, while the ability of policy interventions to reduce preventable illness at scale is unclear. Covid-19, following a decade of austerity, has threatened years of progress in public health and severely disrupted health, social and economic systems. These crises have brought to the forefront the importance of behavioural research to health and wellbeing while also surfacing challenges in their translation into real-world action.

The Health and Wellbeing Theme will focus on physical and mental health and interventions and policies to support health-promoting behaviours and reduce health-harming behaviours, specifically addressing health inequalities.  It will connect  with, and work across, other areas of BR-UK work  to identify and use existing data sources to understand how health promoting and health harming behaviours, and mental health, are affected by periods of national crisis and economic shock; explore how academic, public and policy understandings of the concept of ‘health behaviour’ influence the production, interpretation and use of behavioural research to improve health; and building  upon the work of Demonstration Project 3, develop a better understanding of the interlinkages between behaviours and multimorbidity.

Leads: Dr Shaun Helman (TRL) and Professor Deborah Fry (Edinburgh) 

This theme will focus on issues where increasing behavioural research capability will contribute to better policies and interventions. The initial focus will be on sustainable and safe transport and keeping children safe, particularly online. We will develop a set of behavioural research findings and recommendations for: sustainable and safe transport, focusing on reducing accidents and traffic and, in particular, the reduction of speed, along with reducing public resistance to these and behavioural indicators and recommendations for disruption, and deterrence of online child sexual exploitation and abuse offending triangulating with incorporated learning from the wider BR-UK programme of work.

Leads: Professor Pedro Bordalo (Oxford) and Professor Lucie Byrne-Davis (Manchester)

This theme will address some of the UK’s significant economic challenges, emphasising the pivotal role of behaviour in both driving these challenges and devising effective policies to mitigate them. Work will include developing a better understanding of why regular financial boom and bust cycles and instability occur, considering aspects such as the contribution of people and organisations’ expectations, the measures and drivers of government and private sector and which informational interventions are expected to improve decisions and outcomes. Additionally, we will devise guidance and strategies for large private and public sector organisations to transition from basic behavioural nudges for consumers and employees to more complex and effective interventions. Work will also progress the use of behavioural economic techniques for persuasion to combat disinformation and polarisation (see Demonstration Project 2).