If I had to describe my 2025 work in one sentence, it would be this: applied social and behavioural science is moving upstream.

This year I’ve worked across vaccine uptake in Cameroon, safety and accountability in nightlife settings in Georgia, and national social protection behavioural design in Rwanda, along with a number of assignments around team capacity building.

On paper, these look like very different assignments. In practice, they all asked the same question: what has to be true in a person’s day-to-day reality for the desired behaviour to become the easiest, safest, most normal thing to do?

So, as we head into 2026, here are the shifts I’m seeing and the ones I’m hoping we will accelerate.

Entertainment has always shaped how we see the world. In recent years, we’ve seen a real acceleration in how strategic storytelling can shift norms, spark conversations, and nudge people toward more positive behaviours.

During a recent panel discussion I moderated, organized in collaboration with Robert Rippberger, I had the pleasure of speaking with Laurel Felt, PhD, Margot Fahnestock, Mugambi Nthiga , and Namir Nava, four brilliant leaders from organisations that create social and behaviour change (SBC) dramas across Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

Together, we explored what it really takes for a drama to move people, influence norms, and create sustained change, as well as how digital channels are transforming the field.

Going into a full-blown behavioural science process is not always feasible for teams. In fact, it is not always necessarily advisable. A good first step is to review current systems and processes through a behavioural lens first. But what does it mean to ‘apply a behavioural lens’? What does that look like in practice? And how can you help your team do it well?

Applying a behavioural lens is not about adding a behavioural checklist to your next project. It’s about changing how your team sees problems and designs solutions, shifting from what we want people to do to why people do what they do.

Success in applying behavioural starts with the mindsets your organisation cultivates. Below are five that can help you make a great start.

When a social media influencer shares a conspiracy theory, it’s frustrating. But when the misinformation comes from a figure of authority (e.g. a health minister, a CEO, a political leader) it’s something else entirely.

People tend to place greater trust in those with status, titles, or expertise. That trust is a heuristic that saves us from having to fact-check everything ourselves. But it also creates risk. When those in power spread misinformation, the falsehood carries the weight of credibility and can quickly cascade across communities, institutions, and even countries.

So how do we push back when the messenger is as powerful as the message?

If you work in global development, you’ve probably heard people throw around terms like Applied Behavioural Science, Social and Behaviour Change (SBC), and Behavioural Insights (BI). They all sound similar because they are: each draws on how people make decisions and behave.
But they come from different traditions, use different toolkits, and are useful in different ways. As someone who helps social impact organisations apply social and behavioural science in their projects, I see a lot of confusion about the labels. This piece is a practical guide to what each means, how they overlap, and how you can use them alone or together to make programmes more effective.

So far this year, I’ve worked with five different teams on projects ranging from social protection to making nightlife safer. A large portion of my work involves supporting teams in understanding how they can pragmatically apply a social and behavioural science lens to their work. Having always been drawn to psychology and understanding how people are ‘put together’, it still comes as a surprise to me when I encounter people who haven’t really engaged with concepts like understanding behavioural barriers, systems thinking, applying a behavioural design lens or even the socio-ecological model. Because I look at everything through a behavioural science lens, I can’t process how people work without it.