Behavior Change for Good Newsletter
March 2023

Our new paper in PNAS Nexus provides a how-to guide for conducting “megastudies,” which are BCFG’s signature research method. Megastudies allow us to do massive, team social science research projects with immediate policy relevance. We hope our guide will help others use megastudies to rapidly generate new policy-relevant behavioral insights.

What is a megastudy?
A megastudy is a “massive field experiment in which many different interventions are tested synchronously in one large sample using a common, objectively measured outcome.”

What are the benefits of a megastudy? 
Megastudies:

1. Allow for apples-to-apples comparisons across many interventions by testing them at the same time in the same population. 
2. Accelerate the pace of scientific discovery by simultaneously launching numerous tightly-controlled experiments.
3. Determine which interventions work best for whom, not just what works best on average.
4. Build bridges across diverse disciplines by pooling interventions developed by scientists from different fields.
5. Facilitate the publication of null results to share what doesn’t work, not just what does.

What are their limits? Megastudies have limits too, including the need for massive scale and the winner’s curse. Read more here.

University of California, San Diego Professor Uri Gneezy will discuss his new book Mixed Signals with Dave Nussbaum of Psychgeist Media on Friday, March 10th at 12 PM ET. Mixed Signals exposes how incentives often create confusing signals and explains how to design incentives to achieve the best outcomes. Register below!