Mind, Society and Behaviour... oh, and research!

There has, understandably, been a great deal of excitement – from the Cabinet Office's Behavioural Insights Team, the Economist, Timothy Taylor and the New York Times's David Brooks for example – at the recent publication of the World Development Report 2015, Mind, Society and Behavior. The report is incredibly rich and does a great job of distilling and synthesising an enormous amount of literature. From a rapid review, three features are particularly striking.

First, there’s a refreshing amount of attention paid to a range of research methods as well as a balanced take on respective strengths and limitations whether via the use of ethnography to understand social and cultural context (Spotlight 4); the role of qualitative work in complementing and picking up on things that survey work might miss; the place of both qualitative and quantitative methods in  “diagnosing obstacles” to a behaviour of interest; and the use of qualitative methods to “optimize” intervention development and implementation (ch.11).

Second, the report sounds a welcome note of caution in making assumptions about the views and beliefs of people not like development professionals and World Bank staff (Spotlight 3 and dealt with at greater length in Timothy Taylor’s post).

Third, the advisory panel for the report are a pretty interesting bunch: Daron Acemoglu, PaulDiMaggio, Herbert Gintis, and Cass Sunstein – a political-economist, sociologist, almost un-categorisable polymath and legal scholar / behavioural economist, respectively.

In fact, the first and second points may not be that surprising in light of the advisory group. The first point seems unsurprising in light of the diverse methodological backgrounds and perspectives of the panel.  The second seems unsurprising in light of Spotlight 3's explicit reference to Henrich et al’s WEIRD work and the fact that Gintis was an early collaborator of Henrich amongst other luminaries in conducting behavioural experiments in “small-scale societies".

Overall, this is a great resource which will certainly be recommended reading within our own Behavioural Research Group and beyond. It also served as a reminder that World Bank working papers are a great resource in their own right even though 31% are never downloaded and 87% are never cited!