The Decision Corner Building better governments with behavioral science: Margarita Gómez
Jul 30, 2020
Margarita Gómez, Executive Director of the People in Government Lab at Oxford and builder of Mexico’s first behavioural unit, talks about using behavioural science to improve public servants’ honesty, motivation, and decision-making. She covers designing simple, context-aware interventions, managing government risk aversion with small pilots, and building internal capacity and champions to scale evidence-based policy.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
A Lab For People Inside Government
- The People in Government Lab focuses on improving public servants' motivation, effectiveness, and responsiveness using behavioral science.
- It fills a gap by applying experimentation and methods inside government rather than only designing policies externally.
Mexico Gift-Reporting Experiment
- Margarita described an experiment in Mexico that increased reporting of gifts by public servants during Christmas.
- The project combined simple messaging, reduced friction, social norms, moral appeals, and threat-based treatments sent to 157,000 servants.
Simplicity Outperformed Threats
- Simplicity and salience beat aggressive threat-based messaging in improving honest reporting.
- Threatening communications created negative office environments and backfired compared to timely simple instructions and impartiality salience.