Publications from ODSW Social Insights: Letters by DSW (Vol 2) | Page 105

Practice Issues
Understanding these cognitive biases can help us to better frame policies
and the designs of our interventions to achieve better outcomes more
efficiently.

Behavioural Economics and Social Work
So what has behavioural economics got to do with social work? Increasingly,
behavioural insights from the study of behavioural economics is used to
try to solve social problems especially in the way social policies are being
designed or framed. What I have found out is that much of the thinking in
behavioural economics reflects the principles of social work ranging from
relationship building, contracting about changes in behaviour, ownership of
issues, calibrating the balance of responsibility, strengths based interventions
to using interpersonal reciprocity to bring about change.
Behavioural economics has shown that it is not helpful for people to be
defined by what they cannot do as opposed to what they can. This is rather
similar to the strengths based approach in many social work interventions
when we look for strengths in individuals, families and communities as we
work with them to increase their wellbeing. Social work also fosters mutual
support and enables these groups to be change agents. There are many
examples of support groups where people with similar chronic health
conditions come together and achieve behavioural outcomes that no
professional is able to achieve.

Intervention design from joined up perspectives
With their similarity, there are areas such as addressing anti-social behaviour
where both behavioural economics and social work’s joined up perspectives
can design strong interventions. For example, sending a family member
to prison could make matters much worse so more countries now use
community based sentencing and interventions to achieve the same, if
not better outcomes for some misconduct. Alternatives to the hard lined
approach however must be accompanied by services and support. For
example, to make smoking or gambling-cessation and abuse prevention or
protection interventions more effective, we need to involve family, friends,
and even friends of friends. To reduce poverty, we should focus not merely
on monetary transfers and job training, we should also help the poor form
new relationships with other members of society.
As we face an increasingly complex, inter-connected world with greater
uncertainties, the problems of inequality, exclusion and integration will
104