IPA Makes the Case for Using RCTs. The Nudgy State - By Joshua E. Keating. Is Internet-Based Sexual Education Effective? By Angela García Vargas and Rachel Strohm * As young adults marry at older ages, they are more likely to have sex before marriage, increasing exposure to unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections (STIs).
In Colombia, 60% of young people are sexually active by age 18, and only 55% of young women used a condom during their first sexual encounter. Sexual education courses are supposed to be provided in public schools, but in practice their extent is limited, and many Colombian adolescents never receive formal sex ed. The need for a cost-effective, scalable course of instruction in sexual health is clear. While most sex ed programs around the world rely on teachers and peer educators to provide instruction in schools, there has been growing interest in the use of information and communication technology (ICT) for sexual education.
First, scale-up may be easier than with school-based methods. What were the evaluation results? Www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2012/popular-economicsciences2012.pdf. Sure, We Can Build a Better Toilet. But Will People Use It? A latrine over water in Cap-Haitien, Haiti.
Photo: Remik Kaupp/Flickr The Gates Foundation’s plan to build a better toilet has inspired optimism for the future of sanitation in the developing world. But if history is any guide, good intentions and clever engineering aren’t enough. Would-be designers of post-porcelain thrones won’t just need to account for water use and material costs, but sociology and psychology — the human factors that, as much as any tech spec set, determine whether an innovation takes root.
“You need a good engineering solution, but there’s also this behavioral and social science problem,” said Mushfiq Mobarak, an environmental economist at Yale University. Mobarak is supported by the Gates Foundation in studying how best to promote the new toilets. The problem was, and still is, dirty cookstoves: the open fires and smoke-billowing stoves, fueled by wood or coal or dung, used by nearly half the world’s population. 'Designing a new cool gadget is neat and fun. Field Testing, Slice by Slice. Free exchange: Hope springs a trap. The Implicit Prejudice. Mahzarin Banaji wrestled with a slide projector while senior executives filed grumpily into the screening room at New Line Cinema studios in Los Angeles.
They anticipated a pointless November afternoon in which they would be lectured on diversity, including their shortcomings in portraying characters on-screen. "My expectations were of total boredom," admitted Camela Galano, president of New Line International. By the break, though, executives for New Line and its fellow Time Warner subsidiary HBO were crowding around Banaji, eager for more. The 50-year-old experimental social psychologist from Harvard University had started with a series of images that showed the tricks our minds play. In one video clip, a team passed around a basketball. "It's reasonable and rational," Banaji told them.
Banaji has been studying these implicit attitudes and their unintended social consequences since the late 1980s, when she first teamed up with Anthony Greenwald of the University of Washington. Behavioural economics: Herding the masses.