NAIROBI, Kenya — Last year at primary schools in western Kenya, social scientists were busy performing dirty skits in front of hundreds of children. The script went like this:
The facilitator pretends to go to the bathroom behind a tree, then wipes using a thin leaf or piece of paper. But the leaf or paper rips, and she reacts with surprise upon getting (imaginary) feces on her hand. But she doesn’t wash her hands. Instead she wipes them on her clothes, then goes to shake the hand of one of the students, or picks up a mandazi — a doughnut — and offers it to a student to eat.
The students recoil in disgust, and the facilitator’s work is done: She has just implanted a “disgust trigger” into the kids’ brains — a simple, but powerful psychological reminder that forgetting to wash your hands is gross. And it works.
“Nobody was using soap before this intervention,” says Rachel Steinacher, a researcher with the non-profit Innovations for Poverty Action, which monitored the students’ hand-washing tendencies in the weeks that followed. “Now, more than a third of the time kids wash their hands with soap.”
Welcome to behavioral psychology, the emerging science that seeks to nudge people to make smarter decisions. Thanks to IPA and outfits like it, the next frontier for nudge theory is being developed in the developing world itself. The epicenter is Kenya — a country with relatively robust infrastructure that serves as a regional hub for international agencies and technology start-ups.
Though you may not have heard of it, behavioral psychology is probably already nudging you in your daily life. First conceived by a pair of Israeli psychologists in the 1950s, it’s what taught departments of motor vehicles across the U.S. that they could drastically increase the number of organ donors by asking not whether a driver wants to participate in the program, but whether she wants to opt out.
But there’s a problem: “The majority of social science research is done in the West,” says James Vancel, managing director of the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics in Nairobi. “Lots of stuff works among U.S. college students. The key is to design interventions that solve problems in other parts of the world.”
In Kenya, groups like the Busara Center, IPA and Evidence Action conduct behavioral science research, most of it via randomized control trials — science fair projects but scaled-up and rigorous.
For several weeks after performing those sanitation skits in western Kenya, researchers sat by the hand washing stations outside the schools’ bathrooms to monitor how often kids washed their hands and whether they used soap. They compared their behavior to students who hadn’t yet received the intervention and saw the percentage of students washing their hands with soap increased from 0 to 32 percent. Called “Shit & Shake,” the method has been tested in India and endorsed by UNICEF in Malawi. It draws upon our general knowledge that unwashed hands can transmit bacteria that can lead to sickness or disease, but corrects our tendency to forget that while we’re in the bathroom.
In another recent experiment, researchers at the Busara Center selected 220 people from a large Nairobi slum called Kibera to participate in an experiment about haggling. Half, the sellers, were told they could produce a theoretical item for 10 shillings (10 cents) each, but that they could attempt to sell it at any price. The other half, the buyers, weren’t told how much the item was worth. When sellers set their prices too high, buyers bought from other sellers. After a number of rounds of haggling, nearly every seller had decided to sell at the market equilibrium price — 11 shillings.
But when participants were asked to switch roles, the new sellers “set prices optimally from the very first round,” according to the study. The takeaway: Experiencing haggling from the other person’s perspective makes you a better negotiator. In fact, changing roles lowered the price by 4.5 shillings on average — nearly 50 percent of the item’s actual value.
Applied in a country like the United States, such insight might help you buy that laptop on eBay at a lower price. But for low-income families in Kenya who haggle for food, clothing and other items on a daily basis, the discovery could someday be used to significantly reduce their cost of living.
A short walk from the slum in which the studies’ participants were selected, the haggling conundrum becomes visible at Toi Market — a vast expanse of stalls selling mountains of second hand clothes, shoes, hats and more. On a hot afternoon a women’s clothing seller named Nancy Kiguru described her haggling strategy.
“I tell them the price and then we start negotiating. If I start very high, the customer will walk away,” says Kiguru. She says less experienced customers sometimes make the mistake of taking her up on her first offer. “Some, you tell them this is 550 (shillings), and they buy for 500. They don’t know!”
Kenya is positioned to be a testing ground for behavioral economics for years to come. GiveDirectly, the cash transfer charity, is currently conducting a 12-year study in which they’re giving hundreds of people a constant, monthly basic income — the first experiment of its kind in the world.
Critics of behavioral science tend to argue that many of these interventions are too small and location-specific for their results to be replicable or useful in other parts of the world. Many behavioral studies merely “confirmed what should have been obvious,” writes the economist Tim Harford. Rather, the challenge lies in putting theory into practice by finding ways to change human behavior on a massive scale.
Other critics worry that behavioral interventions border dangerously on manipulation — that having foreigners nudge Africans seems uncomfortably neocolonial. But similar studies have been done in the West for decades.
“Actively marketing development programs does not mean misleading recipients or presuming that they cannot make good decisions on their own,” write behavioral scientists Dean Karlan and Jacob Appel in their book, “More Than Good Intentions.” “It just means acknowledging that they’re like anyone else: susceptible both to reason and to suggestion.”
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Kenya and the New Science of Human Behavior originally appeared on usnews.com
