About the report
From 2016 to 2018, in partnership with the Junior Researcher Programme, the Policy Research Group produced an annual report highlighting where psychological research is, or may soon be, making an impact on policy. With over 30 early-career researchers involved in producing each compilation, Insights for Impact presents a selection of recent research alongside PRG tools used for assessing evidence in policy applications. The aim is to engage a wide audience on the potential for applications across diverse populations. Following the publication of the textbook Behavioral Insights for Public Policy: Concepts and cases, the last Insights report was completed in 2018.
2018
The 2018 impact report on cases from Cambridge and around the world is here.
2017
The 2017 impact report on cases from the Department of Psychology is available here.
2016
For the inaugural version of the report from 2016, we provide both the full document plus extensive details about the process, underlying references, and additional material for further reading.
Full report (online reader, pdf) | ![]() |
Archive - Decisions | |
Archive - Cognition & neuroscience | |
Archive - Illness & disorder | |
Archive - Big Data | |
Archive - Health & well-being | |
Archive - Insights with impact |
Quality assessment of selected insights
Please note that studies included in this report are not necessarily endorsed by the PRG or any contributors to the work. They are intended for the purposes of generating discussion in the field. We recognise some topics may be highly sensitive and, in some instances, results highly debated. For this reason, we do not provide prescriptive applications of insights but rather on raising important questions related to their implications. As such, we acknowledge future work may show other findings or, indeed, refute extracted results here. In any case, these would still fall in line with the general purpose of the report, which is to illuminate insights for wider debate and consideration for possible applications. We make no direct endorsement of any single study and remain steadfast in the view that the scientific community is currently the ultimate resource for robust evidence compilation prior to application. We invite peers of the academic community as well as policymakers to provide any such comments to that effect via ResearchGate.