Latest thinking

Doing and thinking: the ethics of 'nudge'

Blog

16 Jun 2009

Nudge, nudge, think, think

Blog

08 May 2009

Matthew Taylor

Having started the day in Kettering talking to the trustees of Youth Music, I have just come back from the advisory board of an ESRC funded project called ‘Researching Civic Behaviour’.

Happy faces, happy places

Blog

20 Apr 2009

Matthew Taylor

I have Libby Purves in the Times today to thank for putting me on to the research of Dr Jason Rentfrow. Working initially in the US (with Dr Sam Gosling from Texas), and now in the UK, Dr Rentfrow claims to show that there is a geographical basis to personality type.

£5 if you read this blog...

Blog

17 Apr 2009

Matthew Taylor

I am speaking next week about communities and it is an area of growing significance to RSA research. Here are my musings. But given this post is five times as long as a blog should be and given that, despite my best endeavours, the prose is both complicated and constipated, I am personally promising £5 to the nominated charity of the first ten people  to leave intelligible (not necessarily positive) comments on my site. (PS For my more superficial readers, I am also going to return very briefly to the McBride affair later on today)

Why networks make people better

Blog

15 Apr 2009

Matthew Taylor

As I thought they might, the ‘why don’t you stop talking about politics and go back to running the RSA’ comments have started appearing. I’m happy to oblige by sharing some fascinating research – sent to me by Dan Jones (thanks, Dan!) on the relationship between altruism and social capital.

Ringo, Paul, my big toe and meta-cognition

Blog

09 Apr 2009

Matthew Taylor

Last weekend Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney were reunited in New York to launch an initiative from the Foundation of cult film director David Lynch.  The aim is to get a million American school children to take up transcendental meditation. Apart from seeing the two Beatles together, I found the event fascinating because I am myself half way through a mindfulness stress reduction course, based on meditation techniques.

Are parents and kids really that bad?

Blog

06 Apr 2009

Matthew Taylor

In a strange editorial decision, The Observer decided yesterday to dedicate its front page splash and nearly three full internal pages to research by the ATL (Association of Teachers and Lecturers) which claimed to show that children and their parents are not only vicious and nasty but getting worse. The Today programme featured the same survey this morning. For the media to report the ATL’s claims so uncritically is lazy and reactionary.   

The Fogg Behaviour Model

Blog

03 Apr 2009

Behaviour models are a way to understand the factors that drive particular behaviours. The best known comes from economics and is the theory of rational man (or homo economicus). Rational man theory simply says that people decide how to behave by weighing up the costs and benefits of each choice, and choose the action that maximises their expected benefits.

A lesson from the G20 - to save the environment, get shopping

Blog

03 Apr 2009

Matthew Taylor

The G20 is a real reason for optimism. Not only the scale and range of the communiqué, but the agreement to meet again in the autumn. As I said yesterday, crucial for the future of global governance is the steady thickening of relationships between the political and administrative elites of different nations. The G20 leaders know they will be held to account individually and collectively if yesterday’s impressive words have not started to turn into action by the time they meet again. And, after a few days rest, the ‘sherpas,’ whose job it is to do the pre-negotiation ahead of the summit, will be back at work.