Rafaela Bastos wears many hats, among them public manager, geographer, marketing director, Carnival commentator, and samba dancer. She’s also the head of the first government-based behavioral science unit in Brazil. By the OECD’s (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) count, NudgeRio is one of over 200 such teams around the world—and one of around 50 based in local government.
While wearing her NudgeRio hat, Bastos’ primary focus is to use behavioral science to improve the lives of the citizens of Rio de Janeiro. But she also has two loftier ambitions. The first is to better equip behavioral scientists across Latin America to run experiments, develop solutions, and share knowledge to improve the health and well-being of people in their own communities. The second is to elevate the role of behavioral science in local governments, both within Latin America and around the globe.
When the world leaders of the G20 decided to come to Rio de Janeiro for their annual summit this year, she saw an opportunity to make progress toward both.
Bastos and her team at NudgeRio organized the Latin American Conference on Behavioral Science alongside the summit. There, she gathered a group of researchers, practitioners, and local decision-makers to discuss how to improve collaboration among behavioral scientists across Latin America. The goal was to enable more ambitious projects and to develop solutions to region-specific problems that may not be part of the broader conversation in behavioral science, which U.S.- and European-based researchers often dominate.
I flew to Rio to join this discussion and to learn about the behavioral science happening in Brazil and the region. I was also curious to see how behavioral science fits into the big-picture conversations happening at the G20. The summit convenes national leaders from 19 countries, the European Union, and the African Union to discuss global issues like climate change, public health, and economic development.
G20 member countries compose about 85 percent of the global GDP and two-thirds of the global population, so these conversations have potentially far-reaching implications. My trip was part of our ongoing effort at Behavioral Scientist to expand the routes of behavioral science knowledge happening in different parts of the world. (Earlier this year, I reported on the Neuropaz conference in Colombia as part of the same mission.)
“Institutions in the northern hemisphere tend to be older and more established, more rigid. We’re newer countries . . . there’s more room to find our own ways of doing things.“
First on the agenda was the behavioral science conference hosted by Bastos and her team. There, the room was buzzing with visions of a bright future. Brazilian psychologist Vera Rita de Mello Ferreira was optimistic that Latin America is uniquely positioned to use behavioral science to influence the systems and structures that shape people’s lives. “Institutions in the northern hemisphere tend to be older and more established, more rigid,” she said. “In Latin America, it’s all less structured. We’re newer countries . . . there’s more room to find our own ways of doing things.”
The day began with two panels that featured local perspectives, including Bastos and Ferreira from Brazil, who presented on the foundational behavioral science principles that have informed their work. Bastos described the framework developed by her team at NudgeRio to aid local decision-makers in finding creative solutions to long-standing problems. She’s found that it helps derail the “I’ve tried it all” flavor of resistance that often crops up in local politics.
Michael Hallsworth of the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) and Mary MacLennan at the United Nations provided a global perspective on similar themes. Hallsworth described several of the BIT’s successes in applying behavioral science across the region—from increasing tax compliance in Guatemala to COVID vaccine uptake in Argentina. MacLennan reflected on the lessons that the UN has learned from its international projects—particularly the ethical imperative to engage with and support local people in doing this work in their own region.
In the afternoon, attendees collaborated on guidelines that could help entities across the region collaborate more successfully. The priorities they identified included: consolidating existing knowledge, prioritizing projects that span institutional and national borders, and organizing training sessions to share best practices.
The conference was held on the third floor of the Rio Operations Center (COR), an imposing, glass-walled building that houses an interdepartmental team tasked with keeping the city running smoothly. After a series of flash floods and mudslides struck Rio in April of 2010, killing over 200 people and leaving 15,000 homeless, the city built the COR to better manage crises. The core function is information management—to keep track of what is happening, where it’s happening, and who needs to know about it—whether the goal is to evacuate neighborhoods in danger of flooding or to reroute traffic during rush hour. Marcus Belchior, head of the COR, recounted an incident in which a lamb from a local farm wandered off and caused a traffic jam. Now, he said, there’s a protocol for what to do when there’s an animal in the road.
The control room on the first floor of the COR appears equipped to handle a rocket launch. The front wall of the room is tiled with over 100 CCTV cameras pointed toward intersections, bridges, and plazas. The ongoing G20 Summit meant that over 50 of them were trained on the event space. Other screens show traffic maps and weather patterns. At the touch of the button, a cluster of those screens fades to black, and a chipper AI-generated assistant named Cora appears in their place to welcome any visitors.
Though the Operations Center exists separately from NudgeRio, Belchior hopes to infuse more behavioral science into the management of the city. When an emergency evacuation alarm sounds and people need to decide whether to heed the warning—that’s a behavioral challenge. When Rio hosted the Olympics in 2016 and swarms of eager attendees were trying to figure out the best route to take from the beach volleyball courts to the gymnastics arena, that’s another one.
Since the founding of NudgeRio ten years ago, Bastos and her team have already conducted over 30 projects in collaboration with various municipal departments. These include redesigning intersections to reduce dangerous street crossings, curbing workplace harassment in municipal offices, and building reading habits among kids at local schools.
In 2021, they were invited to facilitate the city’s strategic planning session for the next four years to ensure that the city’s priorities accurately reflect those of the people who live in it. They brought in athletes and scientists, educators and Carnival organizers. They invited community leaders and people from the favelas. They even brought in a group of kids from local schools when it came time to speak about education.
“We’re designing the future,” explained Pedro Arias Martins, coordinator of data and behavior at the Rio de Janeiro City Hall. “We need to talk to the people that are going to live in it.”
“Cities may have the greatest potential for applying some of this work . . . Cities interact in so many ways with people directly.“
The combination of a dedicated behavioral science team, expressed buy-in from the mayor, and infrastructure honed by a city accustomed to marshaling its 6.2 million citizens through everything from natural disasters to the Olympic Games makes Rio well-positioned to push this work further. But one challenge they face—a challenge that Bastos hoped to address during this conference—is Brazil’s relative isolation.
Brazil is isolated both linguistically, as the only Portuguese speakers in the region, and geographically—most of its major cities hug the eastern coast, with mountains to the west and ocean to the east. This dynamic was apparent even at the conference itself. Though the aspiration was to facilitate collaboration within Latin America, there was little representation from outside of Brazil.
But starting the conversation was a first step. And that barrier didn’t prevent Bastos and her team from making strides toward her larger goal of advocating for more behavioral science in government globally. One means to this end, Bastos believes, is giving leaders in local governments visibility into the sort of work that behavioral scientists can do alongside policymakers.
So in addition to the conference, they organized a mainstage panel on behavioral science at the Urban 20 (U20), the city-focused companion event to the G20 that convenes mayors and urban policymakers from major cities across the world. There, Bastos, Ferreira, Hallsworth, and MacLennan spoke to an audience of policymakers experienced in local government but new to behavioral science. The quartet shared their perspectives and experience on how to bring behavioral science to city government.
Though the number of behavioral science units in government has grown from 1 to over 200 in just 14 years, less than a quarter of those are based in local government. This presents an opportunity.
“We work with many different levels of government from the UN down. I think cities may have the greatest potential for applying some of this work,” Hallsworth said in his closing remarks on the panel. “Cities interact in so many ways with people directly. Messages, incentives, shared spaces where new behaviors emerge . . . There are practical things you can do in those messages and in those built environments that make a difference.”
Disclosure: Michael Hallsworth, who is quoted in the piece, is a member of the BIT, which provides financial support to Behavioral Scientist as an organizational partner. Organizational partners do not play a role in the editorial decisions of the magazine.
