Johnian magazine issue 54, autumn 2025
Career spotlight: Dr Matt Barnard on how behavioural insights help tackle social problems
Dr Matt Barnard is a social researcher, evaluator and behavioural scientist, developer of the integrated model of behaviour and founder of the online resource www.whatworksbehaviourchange.org. He has held senior research positions at a range of independent research organisations, charities and government departments, including The Behavioural Insights Team, the UK Health Security Agency, the NSPCC, the Anna Freud Centre and the National Centre for Social Research. He has led major ‘what works’ programmes, designed and implemented large scale, field randomised controlled trials and undertaken cutting edge primary research.
Social researcher and behavioural scientist Matt Barnard has spent his career understanding the complexity of people’s lives and behaviour and developing and assessing solutions to some of society’s most difficult problems.
After working with the Behavioural Insights Team, which grew out of the Government’s Nudge Unit, set up by fellow Johnian David Halpern (1984), Matt helped evaluate ways to encourage the public to isolate during the pandemic at the UK health Security Agency. Now he is head of the ICF Centre for Behaviour Change, focusing on research and evaluation for government and government-associated bodies.
Through his work, he came to realise that behavioural psychology wasn’t explaining all the aspects of how people make decisions to change and the barriers they face.
He has now developed The Integrated Model of Behaviour, a new holistic approach to understanding behaviour that comprises motivation, choice, execution, outcome and feedback. And it is being used to tackle some of the most entrenched social problems, such as criminality and addiction.
“The core of people who set up the behavioural economics movement were, for the most part, economists,” says Matt. “Or they were psychologists interested in applying some of these psychological insights to a rational choice economics framework. That all came out of the Nudge Unit, which was set up under David Cameron’s government and then went on to become an independent company called the Behavioural Insights Team.
“I worked with them for a number of years on some very exciting projects, learning more about what really drives people’s behaviour and decisions.”
The work of the unit was primarily based on the principles of behavioural psychology and focused on development of interventions that would change people’s behaviour. Often small, low cost interventions in the way choices were presented were found to lead to profound changes.
Famously, Nudge strategies increased the number of people saving into a workplace pension by several million, thanks to a change that made people have to opt out of saving for a work pension scheme. This meant if you did nothing, you would automatically be enrolled. They also increased tax payments by sending reminders that stated a majority of people in the recipient’s local area had already paid their taxes.
Matt’s own area of research is now looking at more complex and entrenched social problems which he has found need a multi-layered approach to effect change.
He says: “The majority of my research and work has been on vulnerable populations, often with complex and multiple needs, so that that’s substantively the area I’m most interested in. And the Behavioural Insights Team does do a lot of that, but they also do a lot of other stuff on general education or general consumer behaviour. The behavioural economics movement is probably more focused on consumer behaviour than wider behaviour change around children’s social care, addiction or criminality.
“I’m interested in a much more holistic kind of approach and model. So, I’ve developed something I’ve called the Integrated Model, which tries to combine behavioural psychology with health psychology and traditional economics. In a way those have been quite siloed in other approaches. This model is something I developed since I left the Behaviour Insights Team.”
He explains that when trying to change “substantial behaviours”, bigger levers are required to have an effect. “Behavioural economics tends to make small differences, but cheaply, but sometimes you want to make a big difference, so you need to draw on that wider behaviour change literature,” he says.
His new model looks at several barriers at once that could be preventing someone from starting a desired behaviour. It takes into account a person’s needs and drives, the options available to them, their capability and the opportunities they have to put their good intentions into practice, and their experience of and feedback from the behaviour.
Some of the recent projects Matt has been involved with include work with the Youth Endowment Fund. Matt says these “feel really significant and are really rewarding to be involved in.”
He adds, “We’ve been able to use our model to understand why certain interventions are working and which mechanisms are making a difference.”
One project, called Meaningful Mentoring by the organisation Spark2Life, provides mentoring for young people who have been involved in criminal behaviour and aims to prevent them reoffending.
Another is looking at how involving young people in weekly sports sessions, particularly rugby, can help them become more in tune with their bodies, become healthier and develop goals and aspirations that move them away from risky or criminal behaviour.
Finally, Skill Mill is looking at whether providing six months of paid employment could have a positive effect on a young person’s behaviour. Matt’s work is to evaluate the effectiveness of these interventions.
A recent project looked at the prescribing behaviour of GPs in Wales. The Welsh Government wanted them to increase prescribing lengths where clinically appropriate. So instead of needing a prescription every 28 days, some patients could be given a prescription every 56 days. This would eventually free up time for GPs, pharmacists and patients. The problem was that GPs were not making this change.
Using his behaviour model, Matt’s team discovered that the wrong behaviour was being incentivised and that’s one of the reasons why the policy hadn’t been effective. It encouraged GPs just to make the prescription length greater, rather than to review cases and make individual decisions.
“The change would help GPs in the long term, because they won’t have to sign off so many prescriptions, but to get to that point they need to do quite a lot of work reviewing cases,” says Matt.
“Given that they have this uncertain future benefit, but very certain short-term costs, we looked at how to incentivise the GPs in the short term with additional funding to do this reviewing process, but crucially to make sure that funding is associated with the reviewing process, not increasing the length of prescription outcome. So, it’s that combination of knowing who to incentivise, but also what exactly you’re trying to incentivise, that gets the right results.”
Matt offers some takeaways from behavioural psychology the everyone can use in their own lives to, say, go to the gym more often or give up alcohol. He suggests: “Look at your motivations and incentives. Be honest about these. Don’t assume that your incentives are the same as everyone else’s”.
Then, try to make some of your incentives short term. Matt says: “The further into the future your reward is, such as losing weight in a month’s time, the less valuable it is to you. Put it another way, £10 today is worth more than £10 in a year’s time.”
For some people, any reward that isn’t happening today becomes meaningless. This is called hyperbolic discounting and can account for procrastination.
Also, he recommends planning ahead for situations which you know you won’t be able to resist, such as eating cake at a party when offered a slice even though you had earlier decided not to eat it. One way to plan for success is to use a “commitment device” such as telling someone else that your intention is not to eat the cake. “Now you will feel too proud to break your promise,” says Matt.
Alongside his career as a social scientist, Matt is a writer and poet, whose short fiction has won prizes including the Ink Tears short story competition. He has published one full length poetry collection, Anatomy of a Whale (The Onslaught Press) and edited the anthology Poems for the NHS, and his poetry has won multiple national and international prizes, most recently second prize in the National Poetry Competition for his poem ‘Two Boys at Midnight’.
To find out more about Matt’s Integrated Model, visit whatworksbehaviourchange.org
