EAST framework
A Behavioural Insights Team framework that sums up how to encourage a behavior: make it easy, attractive, social and timely.
What it’s for
Offers a short, practical checklist for designing interventions that change behavior without banning or forcing.
Principles
Easy
Remove steps and effort, and choose defaults well.
Attractive
Make it catch attention and feel desirable.
Social
Show what others do and rely on commitments.
Timely
Intervene when people are most receptive.
An example
The UK tax authority sent letters to people with unpaid taxes.
Telling people what others do was enough to get many more people to pay, at no extra cost.
How it’s done
Choose the behavior you want to encourage, specifically.
Go through the four letters: remove effort, catch attention, show what others do and pick the moment.
Run an experiment to see which version really works.
Applications in design
When to use it
Before asking people to do something: pay, sign up, reply or change a habit.
Avoid
Using social pressure with false or exaggerated data.
Don’t fall for it
Test with a control group: what works in one service may not work in another.
+15 percentage points
What the research says
The letter saying that most people in the town had already paid raised payment from 67.5% to 83%, in a trial with 140,000 taxpayers (Behavioural Insights Team, 2012).
Debated evidence. A later trial with more than 200,000 people confirmed that social norm messages increase payment, although the size of the effect depends on the message (Hallsworth et al., 2017).
Connections
Builds on
Related to
Authors and works
- 2014
Behavioural Insights Team
Published the EAST framework.
- 2017
Michael Hallsworth et al.
Tested social norm messages in tax letters with more than 200,000 people.
Sources
Original sources
- Service, O., Hallsworth, M., Halpern, D., Algate, F., Gallagher, R., Nguyen, S., Ruda, S., & Sanders, M. (2014). EAST: Four simple ways to apply behavioural insights. Behavioural Insights Team. View source: Service, O., Hallsworth, M., Halpern, D., Algate, F., Gallagher, R., Nguyen, S., Ruda, S., & Sanders, M. (2014)
- Behavioural Insights Team (2012). Applying behavioural insights to reduce fraud, error and debt. Cabinet Office. View source: Behavioural Insights Team (2012)
- Hallsworth, M., List, J. A., Metcalfe, R. D., & Vlaev, I. (2017). The behavioralist as tax collector: Using natural field experiments to enhance tax compliance. Journal of Public Economics, 148, 14–31. View source: Hallsworth, M., List, J. A., Metcalfe, R. D., & Vlaev, I. (2017)
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