LSE Behavioural Lab joins the European Commission’s €10million funded PERISCOPE consortium to study the effectiveness of COVID-19 policy messages on compliance behaviours.
The LSE Behavioural Lab for Teaching and Research (BL) - a joint initiative from the Department of Management (DoM) and the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science (PBS) at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) - has been awarded a competitive grant by the European Commission to gather evidence on the effectiveness of COVID-19 policy measures on compliance behaviours, as part of a large Horizon 2020 (H2020) funding call.
The LSE and the LSE Behavioural Lab join the PERISCOPE (Pan-European Response to the Impacts of COVID-19 and Future Pandemics and Epidemics) consortium, a network of thirty-two top institutions, led by the University of Pavia (Italy) where the team will lead or co-lead two projects within the work package BEAM (Behaviour, Experiments, Atlas and Modelling). The projects will utilize the lab’s expertise and state-of-the-art equipment to design and conduct behavioural experiments related to risk taking and to the behavioural responses to different policy messages.
Dr Matteo M Galizzi (PBS) says: “It is a great honour and responsibility to be awarded such a competitive and important award by the European Commission, and to be part of the outstanding inter-disciplinary and cross-national PERISCOPE consortium. This ground-breaking policy response grant will enable us to gather rigorous experimental evidence on the behavioural responses to different policy messages to deal with the pandemic, as well as on their unintended behavioural spillover effects. The evidence can provide novel insights to inform policy-making and public health actions at a population level, with the potential of making a difference in the lives of millions of people in Europe and beyond.”
Dr Barbara Fasolo (DoM) says: “I’m very much looking forward to collaborating with colleagues from the Behavioural Lab, LSE and the Consortium to study how people react to messages around COVID-19 and similar pandemics. There is currently a lack of systematic evidence on the effectiveness that rules and messages have on compliance with COVID-19 related behaviours. Our research will explore what makes rules and messages ‘work’ and the inadvertent spillover effects on other areas of one’s life. For instance, does wearing a face mask make people take fewer or more risks? Is this spillover effect deliberate or are people unaware of it? Does risk perception increase or decrease, and do people become more or less compliant, as knowledge about COVID-19 increases?
On 11 August 2020, the European Commission announced the results of a large Horizon 2020 (H2020) funding call on the policy response to COVID-19, which attracted 159 bids from thousands of research teams around the world. The PERISCOPE bid has been ranked first by the European Commission among the 159 bids. PERISCOPE aims to equip policymakers with effective, resilient and sustainable solutions by looking under the surface at the various unintended and indirect consequences brought on by the pandemic.
The LSE Behavioural Lab application has been a collective effort of the LSE Behavioural Lab team including Rebecca Bianchi (DoM), Dr Barbara Fasolo (DoM), Dr Matteo M. Galizzi (PBS), Nino Nizharadze (DoM), Sean Rooney (PBS) and Dr Miriam Tresh (PBS).
About the LSE Behavioural Lab for Teaching and Research
The Behavioural Lab for Teaching and Research is co-managed by LSE’s Department of Management and Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science, providing state-of-the-art facilities for researchers in Central London. https://www.lse.ac.uk/management/research/bl