Thomas Beuchot

Behavioural public policy should take the psychology of poverty into account - Communications Psychology Behavioural policies succeed on average but yield highly heterogeneous outcomes. Reviewing the psychology of poverty, this Perspective argues that variability in conformism, present orientation, perso...

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Link to the article: www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Link to my blog post: www.thomasbeuchot.com/post/are-nud...

👉 Design behavioural policies with motivations from the target group in mind.

If poverty affects preferences, ignoring heterogeneity risks weak effects, and sometimes unfair ones.

• Overall, social norms are more potent for those deviating most from the norm.
• Private social norms should be more potent for high-SES people, consistent with higher social trust.
• Public social norms should be more potent for low-SES people, consistent with higher social vigilance.

• Information campaigns are more potent for high-SES people, consistent with higher personal agency.
• Belonging intervention are more potent for low-SES people, consistent with higher social vigilance.

• Defaults are more potent for low-SES people, consistent with higher conformism.
• Self-regulation tools are more potent for low-SES people, consistent with higher present-focus.

Summary of our predictions

Next, we ask: do behavioural interventions actually show different effects by socio-economic status (SES)?

We review evidence across several policy toolkits, looking for patterns that match those psychological shifts.

Four shifts show up repeatedly:
1. Conformism ↑ (less exploration)
2. Present-focus ↑ (steeper discounting)
3. Personal agency ↓ (lower perceived control)
4. Social vigilance ↑ (more cautious trust)

We start from a simple framework:

Resource availability → psychological traits → intervention response.

The psychology of poverty literature suggests psychological shifts under scarcity.

Behavioural policies often rely on simple, scalable tweaks (defaults, reminders, social norms…).

But many are designed as if people face the same constraints.

Key question: how does poverty reshape cognition and change which interventions help?

🎉 Our paper is out in Communications Psychology: a perspective on behavioural public policies & the psychology of poverty.

Core idea: poverty can shift psychology, so the same intervention won’t work the same for everyone.

Thread 🧵

I just had an amazing week at @ehbea2025.bsky.social where I was able to present the results of my upcoming meta-analysis on human personality traits and resource availability!

#ehbea2025
#ehbea

Yes please!