: White House OSTP SBST Annual Report: "Over its first year, SBST focused on executing proof-of-concept projects...
...where behavioral insights could be em- bedded directly into programs at a low cost and lead to immediate, quantifiable improvements in program outcomes. To generate reliable evidence about the effectiveness of integrating behavioral insights into programs, SBST designed these projects, in nearly all cases, as randomized trials. This report presents the results of all completed SBST projects, including projects that did not yield statistically significant improvements.
Because SBST projects are designed to address only the behavioral barriers that affect how people engage with programs, project effects can be modest. Yet, because be-havioral changes to program administration often require little or no additional cost, returns on investment can be large even when project effects are small. It is no more expensive to send an effective version of an email than an ineffective one.
In building an initial portfolio of work, SBST focused on projects in two areas where behavioral science had a strong role to play and impacts could be demonstrated relatively rapidly: (1) streamlining access to programs and (2) improving government efficiency...
