Beyond the West: behavioral insights for policymaking in Central and Eastern Europe

Introduction

Behavioral science applications to policymaking are now commonplace in many governments around the world (Naru, 2024), especially in the West, where early adopters such as the United Kingdom and the United States have led the way over the past decade (Halpern, 2015). Behavioral Public Policy is an established discipline that uses insights from behavioral science to make public policies more effective and legitimate (Banerjee and John, 2025). However, despite these well-established benefits, the use of behavioral insights for policy is far from universal across governance frameworks. Early critiques suggested that behavioral regulation might be an artifact of rich, industrialized nations. Even within affluent democracies, behavioral insights are often confined to innovation units and have historically been vulnerable to limited funding, budget cuts, and administrative reorganization—reinforcing the need for more systematic integration.

While adoption of behavioral insights may lag in several non-WEIRD countries, it is misleading to assume that its benefits are confined to WEIRD contexts. Adopting a behavioral governance framework can provide strategic advantages to governments globally, a point supported by studies in the Global South (see Sanders et al., 2023). Organizations such as Busara have been active in the Global South for several years, and ideas42, J-PAL, and the Inter-American Development Bank have applied behavioral approaches across non-Western settings for more than a decade. There have also been organized efforts¹ to facilitate dialogue between academics and practitioners in ways that embed behavioral insights into policy design. In this opinion piece, we highlight the benefits of a behavioral approach to policymaking in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), a region that remains underrepresented in behavioral public policy research. Beyond improving policy, CEE also offers behavioral science a critical testing ground—revealing which interventions remain effective when institutions are fragile, conflict disrupts daily life, and societies face persistent information manipulation.

The need and benefits of expanding behavioral insights beyond the West

Ongoing institutional transformation shapes the region's policy environment. Several countries are aligning with the European Union's governance frameworks, regulations, and democratic norms (including Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia, and countries of the Western Balkans), while others are already EU member states yet face challenges such as democratic backsliding, declining trust in public institutions, and citizen disengagement (including Hungary, Slovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Bulgaria, and Romania). This dual dynamic of convergence and strain creates a complex governance landscape in which behavioral approaches must operate.

Layered onto this is the enduring post-Soviet and post-communist legacy that continues to influence both institutional behavior and citizen–state relations. Historical experiences of centralized authority, limited civic participation, and institutional opacity have shaped patterns of trust, compliance, and public engagement. These contextual features may complicate behavioral interventions that rely on assumptions of high institutional trust, voluntary cooperation, or strong civic norms.

At the same time, the region is marked by acute geopolitical tensions and hybrid threats, most visibly the war against Ukraine and persistent Russian interference across neighboring states. These dynamics generate heightened uncertainty, mistrust, and polarization—conditions under which conventional policy tools often prove insufficient. Addressing challenges such as disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation increasingly requires the integration of behavioral science and insights from neuroscience, particularly in understanding how citizens process risk, credibility, and identity-based narratives under stress.

In the remainder of this article, we reflect on both the opportunities and the challenges of applying a behavioral insights for policy approach in Central and Eastern Europe, where behavioral governance remains at a relatively early stage of institutionalization. We do so by illustrating notable recent public policy applications that highlight how behavioral insights can be adapted to complex and high-stakes environments in CEE. Building on our examples, we argue for the need to expand the reach of behavioral insights beyond the West—including to Eastern Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, and large parts of Asia—while recognizing that successful adoption requires careful contextualization.

Behavioral approaches cannot simply be transplanted; they must be tailored to local institutional structures, political cultures, and lived realities. Ultimately, extending behavioral insights beyond Western settings will require a shift in mindset among citizens, practitioners, and policymakers alike — a shift that the current moment makes both necessary and timely. Most behavioral evidence has been generated in contexts where daily life is stable and institutions are predictable. Ukraine in mid-2022 was neither. With the full-scale invasion ongoing, evacuation became a decision made under fear, ambiguity, and real loss: leaving home, jobs, family, and sometimes the ability to return. Martinez et al. (2025) illustrate how behavioral science can contribute to behavior change in CEE by taking a classic policy question—how to motivate people to act in times of crises and close the intention-behavior gap—and testing it where the stakes are existential, particularly when lessons from disaster evacuation in wealthy countries may not travel well. In a war context, threats are intentional, information is contested, and the personal costs of leaving are far more ambiguous than in natural disaster evacuations.

Martinez et al. (2025) conducted a large survey experiment in July 2022 with Ukrainian adults in regions exposed to invasion and shelling. Participants viewed different versions of an official-style evacuation notice and then judged its effectiveness. The design is policy-facing: it does not merely vary wording but tests a practical element that governments can modify immediately — whether the message includes a clear evacuation plan. The results challenge the idea that crisis communication is primarily about rhetorical framing. Variations emphasizing gains, losses, living conditions, or military considerations did not significantly affect perceived effectiveness. What mattered was practical agency. When the notice included a clear plan—how to join an organized evacuation, what to do next, and what support was available—participants rated it as more effective. In a context where households face transport constraints and coordination problems, the most persuasive message is one that makes action feel feasible.

This is behavioral science at its most useful: not “nudging” with slogans but diagnosing the bottleneck. The study distinguishes preference-based reluctance (people could leave but choose not to) from constraint-based reluctance (people wish to leave but do not believe they can do so safely or independently). The plan treatment addresses the second mechanism directly. It reduces ambiguity, lowers the psychological cost of decision-making, and transforms a frightening instruction into actionable steps—increasing perceived control.

The relevance of the Eastern European context is not limited to the region itself. While evacuation decisions everywhere involve fear, uncertainty, and loss, the wartime and geopolitically fragile conditions observed in Ukraine provide an especially valuable setting for testing which behavioral strategies remain effective under extreme stress, contested information, and disrupted logistics. This matters not only for understanding policy in CEE, but also for generating insights that may prove useful in WEIRD countries should they face comparable crises, which is a likely scenario given the current geopolitical context. In this sense, Eastern Europe serves both as an underexplored policy context and as a forward-looking laboratory for behavioral preparedness more broadly.

Importantly, while we emphasize the underutilisation of behavioral insights in CEE, this should not be taken to imply that such approaches are entirely absent from the region. On the contrary, a growing body of work demonstrates increasingly that behavioral interventions have already been successfully applied across several policy domains, including tax compliance, misinformation, energy use, and pro-environmental behavior. These early applications, though still relatively limited in scale and visibility, provide important proof of concept and highlight both the feasibility and policy relevance of behaviorally informed interventions in CEE contexts.

For example, another area of application is tax compliance, where behavioral interventions are especially tractable given their incentive-compatible nature and clear administrative outcomes. Jamison et al. (2021) report on a field experiment conducted in collaboration with the Latvian State Revenue Service where behaviorally informed reminder emails sent to previously non-compliant self-employed individuals significantly increased timely tax declaration submissions, with the most effective message increasing compliance by 9.4%. This illustrates how relatively low-cost, scalable interventions can yield meaningful improvements in administrative performance, particularly in settings characterized by large informal economies.

Behavioral approaches have also been applied to challenges such as misinformation and social resilience. In a prosocial fake news intervention with durable effects (Orosz et al., 2023) using randomized controlled trial in Hungary show that leveraging prosocial motivations—specifically, encouraging individuals to help less digitally literate family members—can improve fake news detection and reduce susceptibility to misleading information. Importantly, these effects persisted over time, suggesting that interventions grounded in social identity and interpersonal responsibility may have durable impacts even in information environments characterized by low trust and high exposure to disinformation.

Taken together, this emerging evidence base suggests that CEE is not merely a context in which behavioral approaches could be applied, but one in which they are already producing meaningful results across diverse domains. At the same time, the relative scarcity, fragmentation, and limited visibility of these efforts reinforce our central argument: that there remains substantial untapped potential to scale, systematize, and embed behavioral insights more deeply into policymaking across the region.

Discussion

More broadly, the contribution of our article is twofold. First, we call for expanding the behavioral evidence base beyond WEIRD settings in a substantively meaningful way: behavior shifts when environments are shaped by intentional threats, contested information, and fragile logistics. At the same time, as emerging evidence from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) shows, behavioral interventions can be effective across a range of policy domains even outside crisis settings—from improving tax compliance to strengthening resilience against misinformation. Taken together, these findings suggest that the challenge is not whether behavioral insights “work” in CEE, but how they can be systematically adapted, scaled, and embedded within more complex and constrained institutional environments.

Second, we point to a behavioral preparedness agenda. In crises, effective interventions may be those that simplify coordination, pre-commit plans, and connect citizens to credible support channels—rather than those that merely reframe risk. The Ukrainian evacuation case illustrates this under extreme conditions, but complementary evidence from domains such as tax compliance and misinformation reinforces the same underlying principle: behavioral interventions are most effective when they reduce friction, increase perceived agency, and translate intentions into clear, actionable steps.

The implications extend beyond evacuation. Eastern Europe faces overlapping risks: geopolitical shocks, energy disruptions, cyberattacks, and high-velocity disinformation. Across these domains, awareness campaigns often overinvest in persuasion (“be careful”) and underinvest in execution (“here is exactly what to do, and here is the support to do it”). Evidence from across the region—whether increasing timely tax declarations through behaviorally informed communication or improving fake news detection through prosocial engagement—points in a consistent direction. The lesson is pragmatic: resilience is strengthened when desired behaviors are made easy to perform under stress and in everyday governance alike—through rehearsable checklists, secure defaults, simple reporting pathways, and communications that provide credible plans rather than abstract warnings.

To summarize, Eastern Europe remains an underexplored region for the application of Behavioral Science. Despite institutional and economic reforms since the early 2000s, there has been no systematic effort to develop or embed behavioral science in policymaking across the region—neither through dedicated governmental behavioral units nor through sustained academic–policy collaboration capable of translating scientific insights into practice. This absence represents both a gap and an opportunity.

Emerging international experience suggests that countries need not start from scratch in addressing this gap. As documented recently by the World Bank the World Health Organization. (2024)) recently, governments have operationalised behavioral insights through several institutional models, including units embedded within ministries, centrally located teams working across policy domains, and partnerships with external organizations. For example, Slovakia has established a behavioral insights function within its health system, illustrating how such approaches can be integrated into sectoral policymaking in the region.

Several concrete avenues, therefore, exist for advancing the field. One involves working directly with policymakers to demonstrate the tangible benefits of behaviorally informed and pre-tested policies, improving effectiveness and public outcomes. Another involves developing structured models of cooperation between policymakers and academics so that behavioral insights are embedded throughout the policy cycle rather than appended as an afterthought. Similar engagement with legislators could ensure behavioral considerations inform not only policy implementation but also legislative drafting. Finally, supporting the development of university courses in behavioral economics and applied behavioral sciences more generally would build local capacity, address knowledge gaps, and cultivate a new generation of practitioners. Taken together, these steps outline a clear agenda for strengthening the relevance and impact of Behavioral Science in Eastern Europe.

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Footnotes

Edited by: Ximeng Fang, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

Reviewed by: Michał Krawczyk, European Commission, Belgium

Iman Sen, University of Maryland, College Park, ND, United States

Footnotes

With a view to encourage the use of Behavioral Science for policy in Central & Eastern Europe, a two-day workshop/conference titled “Behavioral Insights for Policy” was organized in Chişinău, Moldova on 3 and 4 July. Rachel Coyle, MBE (BIT) and Roman Sheremeta were the keynote speakers. The workshop/conference offered a platform for panel discussions on the use of behavioral insights to counter misinformation, or to increase public trust in institutions, as well as to promote energy efficiency. The participants presented contributions to aspects related to the role of behavioral insights in tax compliance, payments for municipal services, resource management, or awareness of corruption and attitudes toward socio-economic inequality. This was the first event on behaviorally informed public policies to take place in this region addressing this specific non-WEIRD context and needs which are summarised in this perspective.