Matthew Taylor
speaker
407 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2011
last heard Nov 2011
Matthew Taylor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
I was working for Tony Blair when the first ever government paper on what was called behaviour change was commissioned.
Whereas in the past policymakers relied exclusively on taxes, laws or exhortation, this new approach drew heavily on brain and behaviour science to try to develop a new policy toolkit.
Since that first paper, there's been a constant stream of experts offering government new insights into how we make decisions and how we can be influenced.
Indeed, behaviour change was about the only strand of Number 10's work that David Cameron decided to keep on with when he was elected.
And now those ideas are being turned into practice, as you might find out the next time you book into the GPs.
Marie is visiting the Toddington Medical Centre, a quiet village surgery in Bedfordshire.
But what Marie doesn't know is that the procedure she's about to go through was designed by one of the world's leading behavioural scientists, Robert Cialdini, author of the best-selling book Influence.
The No.
10 Behaviour Change Unit is receptive to Cialdini's new intervention on an old but very expensive problem.
In fact, £700 million a year of expense across the UK.
The question is this.
How to reduce the number of no-shows for appointments in GP surgeries and hospitals?
Based in part on ideas drawn from neuroscience, Professor Cialdini asked the surgery to display a sign.
It was telling the truth, and it said, 98.5% of people turn up on time for their appointment.
Like the other nudging techniques, the idea that everybody else turned up on time made more people do so themselves.
Altogether, no-shows were down by almost a third during the trial period, and they went back up when the period stopped.
With the NHS in England being told to make £20 billion in efficiency savings, who on earth could argue with a way of saving millions of pounds without anyone losing a service?
But how did Marie feel about being nudged?
The ranks of the nudged sceptics, and that now includes a recent House of Lords committee, veer between saying the techniques don't work and worrying that they're an infringement of our liberties.
Ray Tallis, the eternal neurosceptic.
Showing 81–100 of 407 · page 5 of 21
← Previous
Next →