Welcome to the Green Alliance podcast. We're the charity and think tank that's all about achieving ambitious leadership for the environment.

I'm Zoe Averson, a policy analyst at Green Alliance, and today I'm talking to Pete Dyson, a behavioural scientist working at the Department for Transport.

Various different disciplines make assumptions.

Communications often assumes that we just need to motivate people more to do something,

but that can have its limits.

Pete's the co-author of a new book,

Transport for Humans, which argues that innovation in transport

needn't be limited to speed and efficiency.

Understanding more about what motivates us and how we perceive

the world around us could enable changes to the transport system that make behaviour change

possible. Pete wrote this in a personal capacity with co-author Rory Sutherland from Ogilvie.

So hi Pete, thanks for joining me today. First of all, what are behavioural insights?

Yeah, hello, it's great to be here. It's a term that we're currently used to describe how people think, feel and behave.

I mean, behavioural insights is a term that's probably cropped up about 10 years ago in the UK, off the back of an application of psychology and now mostly called

behavioural science, what we're fundamentally just trying to get to the heart of is how do individuals

think, feel and behave, and also how do those individuals work within their family units or

their communities and their societies? So it's a real social science-led approach. And in my case,

I work in behavioural insights in transport, but of course we know they've been applied in many

different domains, probably more so in health, in financial decisions, but obviously also in

how people think about the environment and much, much more. Great. How do you apply behavioural insights

in your transport work? By a few different approaches or methods, let's say. Some aspects of

behavioural insights can come from the psychological literature, which means what have psychologists found

...