Behavioral Science

For example, people often don’t access services that are good for them, or they may drop out of programs that help them pursue important goals (like graduating college, saving for retirement, or finding a new job). These puzzling behaviors are often rooted in familiar human tendencies. We procrastinate, forget, get overwhelmed by too many choices, and take mental shortcuts. And we do this because our attention and capacity to process information have limits.

Mathematica helps make social programs and policies better by testing enhancements that are designed to change people’s decision making and actions for the better. We work closely with our clients every step of the way to develop feasible, effective solutions. Our six-step behavioral design process is designed to:

1. Understand: We partner with our clients to understand the problem they want to solve.
2. Diagnose: We map out the behavioral bottlenecks that may be contributing to the problem.
3. Design: We design interventions (“nudges”) that fit the program context and the available resources, and field-test them to ensure they work as intended.
4. Support: We train frontline staff to implement the intervention and provide ongoing support.
5. Evaluate: We design rigorous, low-cost evaluation strategies to quickly find out whether the solution works. We collect and analyze data to understand short- and long-term results. 
6. Learn: We communicate what we find clearly, concisely, and promptly, and suggest next steps.