Mission & Vision
It seems everyone these days has a stake in behaviour change campaigns of one sort or another:
- Governments coax us to eat more healthily, go green and fill out our tax forms on time
- Social organisations implore people to give more to charity, and communicate health practices in developing countries
- Marketeers and advertisers foist new products on us
- Education professionals aim to improve results, to incentivise, and to reduce smoking, drug and alcohol use through attitude and awareness campaigns
- Military communications officers long to co-opt the support of local populations by wining their ‘hearts and minds’
- Even city planners believe they can design spaces to positively affect - and effect - community spirit
But do these intentions actually translate into measurable and meaningful behaviour change? In most instances, the campaigns are hit-and-miss, and many may have unwanted negative effects on group action. Underpinning these various approaches to behaviour change is a plethora of models, techniques drawn from advertising and branding, intuition, and pseudo-science – theorists, practitioners and specialists are legion, yet there are no well-validated proven solutions.
The goal of the BDI has been to assemble and assimilate the full extent of creative and scientific knowledge on group behaviour and the dynamics of change, and package it into a unified and workable methodological approach to conducting successful and measurable behaviour change campaigns. It rests on precise research, a focus on groups, and actionable recommendations.
We want to understand group behaviour, and thereby advance effective solutions to complex behavioural problems. To achieve this we take a holistic approach, which is inherently multidisciplinary, and we ensure that the science is field expedient and has direct application to the kinds of problems encountered in real-life situations, not just laboratory-contrived ones. The BDI’s methods are not didactic and dogmatic, but adaptive: we use a comprehensive framework for thinking through behavioural problems, and draw our interventions from the many corners of the social sciences. We constantly strive to stay at the forefront of advances in the field, collating existing research, commenting on it, and contributing to the debate ourselves.
Our community of committed experts share and advance this corpus of knowledge, thus incorporating into our vision the prospect of a more humane and intelligent future.