Pro-Social Behaviour

Project briefing

The RSA's pro-social behaviour programme will examine the best evidence and thinking about positive behaviour change and what implications this has for institutions and policy interventions. The programme is underpinned by the RSA's belief that in order to achieve the society most of us say we want, citizens need to play a greater role: that we need to be more self sufficient, altruistic or other regarding and engaged.

The first stage of this programme is to work with Manchester City Council, developing our thinking while looking at the practical implications this could have in a local authority context.

What is the problem?

Understandably, a lot of time and effort is dedicated to trying to understand the causes of and most appropriate responses to anti-social behaviour.  While anti-social behaviour has become part of the popular lexicon, embedded by increased public, media and policy focus on the issue, "pro-social" remains jargon largely associated with social and behavioural psychology.

The RSA believes that if we are to meet the challenges ahead - whether nationally or locally - then this needs to change. This will require the development of the notion of pro-social strategies that place much greater emphasis on the voluntary action of people, individually and collectively, to play their part.

The RSA believes that such strategies will require a much broader debate and richer understanding - in particular amongst those working at the local level - about the formation and functioning of social norms, how these change and their relationship to our attitudes and actions and external interventions.

Our response

There is evidence that central and local government has begun to think more deeply about these issues and what implications they have for policy and practice. While this is welcome there is a need to avoid simply bolting "behaviour change" on to an existing set of assumptions, working practices and institutions which remain unreformed.

The RSA pro-social programme aims to challenge this approach and to suggest that a more radical rethinking and reengineering is required. In short, we need to move from a government-centric to a citizen-centric model of social change.