The Behavioural Insights Team

The Behavioural Insights Team, often known by our other name The Nudge Unit, is a unique company. We started life inside No 10 Downing Street as the world’s first government institution dedicated to the application of behavioural sciences. We are now a world-leading consulting firm whose mission is to help organisations in the UK and overseas to apply behavioural insights in support of social purpose goals. The company itself has three owners: the employees, the UK government, and Nesta (the UK's leading innovation charity). Nesta were the winners of a highly competitive process to become the team's joint venture partners, and we're delighted to have them on board. We coined the term ‘behavioural insights’ in 2010 to help bring together ideas from a range of inter-related academic disciplines (behavioural economics, psychology, and social anthropology). These fields seek to understand how individuals take decisions in practice and how they are likely to respond to options. Their insights enable us to design policies or interventions that can encourage, support and enable people to make better choices for themselves and society. Behavioural insights interventions are usually simple, highly cost-effective, and often yield surprising results.