A new global study led by Kai Ruggeri, PhD, of the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, and involving more than 80 collaborators from more than 30 countries, highlights the critical role of behavioural science in policy-making, while developing a new method for systematically evaluating experimental evidence on public policy. The findings have been published in the journal Nature.
In April 2020, a group of researchers published an influential paper on COVID-19 with 19 policy recommendations based on behavioural science. The paper was the result of an extensive collaboration of more than 40 experts, led by Jay Van Bavel of New York University and Robb Willer of Stanford, and has been cited thousands of times by governments, researchers and public figures. Its recommendations covered topics such as official communication on social distancing, how to get a vaccine once it is available, and the need to work within communities to make a real impact. Now, the new paper in Nature by Ruggeri et al. assesses the scientific evidence that has emerged since the first paper was published to support his claims and their applicability to policy.
"Governments around the world have formulated policy strategies for the pandemic explicitly based on the behavioural suggestions highlighted in the 2020 paper by Jay J. Van Bavel et al," says Ruggeri, professor of health policy and management at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. "Given concerns about the public's lack of trust in science, particularly in the context of COVID-19, we felt it was important to evaluate the experimental evidence behind public policy recommendations to promote transparency and build trust."
Two independent teams of 72 experts - including both the authors of the 2020 paper and an independent team of reviewers - reviewed 747 pandemic-related research articles to assess the extent to which the claims in the original paper provided sound policy guidance.
"We systematically assigned a rating to each research paper. Higher ratings corresponded to research with stronger conclusions in terms of potential real-world impact, such as field studies. The ratings of each article were assigned independently and anonymously by several researchers," says Valerio Capraro, associate professor of psychology at the University of Milan-Bicocca and lead Italian author of the study.