Michael Sanders is Professor of Public Policy at King’s College London, and Director of its Experimental Government Team. Previously, he was the first Chief Scientist of the Behavioural Insights Team (also known as the Number 10 Nudge Unit).

People are predictably irrational. I was originally interested in economics, but I got interested in behavioural economics, which seeks to understand people as they really are rather than rely on that which is easy to model mathematically. It led me down a route of exploring how people are more complicated and difficult to predict than the mathematical model suggests, but the way in which they deviate from that standard model is systematic. They are, in Dan Ariely’s coinage, predictably irrational.

Raising money can also be predictably irrational. If we understand human psychology, and human behaviour better, then the promise of that is we can run more efficient, more effective fundraising campaigns that raise more money for less spend.

And it’s not just about more efficient fundraising. Behavioural science can be valuable to charities and causes in how they deliver services more effectively. An example is a recent project we carried out, to reduce burnout among social workers who are working with homeless people. We built on a US study about 911 emergency call operators, and created our own interventions to give the social workers support, which was very successful.

The difference is being rigorous and systematic. People have always tested things. The difference with a rigorous methodology, such as with a Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT), is precision. You can have confidence that something works, or doesn’t work, and can be replicated. And the next person builds on it. That’s the amazing benefit of the scientific approach.

I’m proud of bringing the experimental method to new fields. We did a trial of family group conferences for children’s social care that showed replicable results, and led to a real increase in government investment in this intervention. That will keep children with their parents safely. We just published a paper about reducing the extent to which the police use force, without compromising police safety. The method is now being rolled out across all police forces in England and Wales.

If you really care, test. There are many fields, children’s social care, as mentioned above, for example, where people deeply care about the people they are looking after. Suggesting an RCT to test an intervention isn’t an example of emotional detachment. It is a sincere form of caring, because it tests whether your interventions really work (or don’t). Either way, you have learnt something valuable, which means the people you care about will be better looked after. Not just the young person directly in front of you, but the young people who you could be serving for the next 10 or 15 years.

I got burnt out. I had a 6-month period when I couldn’t work, because had burnt myself out. If I’d been more careful with myself, if I’d been more careful with other people, then things could have ended better.

Like youth, a PhD is wasted on the young. With a PhD, you have three or four years to really get into a topic that you’re passionate about and interested in. In my case, this was on the behavioural economics of charitable giving. I didn’t enjoy that enough at the time. I didn’t take the time to reflect on it. I didn’t take the time to feel happy about it. I tell this to my PhD students – take the time to smell the roses.

I’m not motivated by a love of maths. I’m motivated by a love of people and this being the place in the system where I can make the biggest impact.

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Cause & Effect is a series from Hope, in which leading figures who have been involved in building and promoting good causes tell us what they’ve learned from their experiences. Interview by Michael Isaacs.