Behavioral Science Finds a Testing Ground in Eastern Europe’s Crisis Zones

Behavioral science has quietly become one of the most influential exports of modern governance. Since the United Kingdom and the United States pioneered dedicated nudge units more than a decade ago, governments across the wealthy democratic world have embedded insights from psychology and economics into tax letters, health reminders, and energy bills. Yet a new opinion article published in Frontiers in Behavioral Economics argues that this policy revolution has left a vast region behind, and that the oversight is costing both science and society. According to authors Sanchayan Banerjee of King’s College London, Rustam Romaniuc of Montpellier Business School, and Natalia Voutova of the Council of Europe, Central and Eastern Europe remains strikingly underrepresented in behavioral public policy research, despite offering some of the most demanding and instructive conditions under which behavioral tools have ever been tested.

The authors’ central claim is deceptively simple: behavioral insights work everywhere, but the evidence base that supports them was built almost entirely in WEIRD societies, shorthand in psychology for Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic populations. Early critics once dismissed behavioral regulation as an artifact of affluent nations, and even within rich democracies the approach has often been confined to small innovation units vulnerable to budget cuts and administrative reshuffling. The article contends that this narrow provenance is not merely an academic inconvenience. Most behavioral evidence was generated in contexts where daily life is stable and institutions are predictable, conditions that simply do not hold in much of the world, and increasingly fail to hold anywhere.

Central and Eastern Europe presents a governance landscape of unusual complexity. Several countries, including Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia, and the states of the Western Balkans, are actively aligning with European Union frameworks, regulations, and democratic norms. Others, including Hungary, Slovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Bulgaria, and Romania, are already EU members yet grapple with democratic backsliding, declining trust in public institutions, and citizen disengagement. Layered onto this dual dynamic of convergence and strain is the enduring post-communist legacy: historical experiences of centralized authority, limited civic participation, and institutional opacity have shaped patterns of trust, compliance, and public engagement in ways that can complicate interventions relying on assumptions of high institutional trust or strong civic norms.

Then there is the geopolitical overlay. The war against Ukraine and persistent Russian interference across neighboring states generate heightened uncertainty, mistrust, and polarization, conditions under which conventional policy tools often prove insufficient. Countering disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation increasingly requires integrating behavioral science with insights from neuroscience, particularly to understand how citizens process risk, credibility, and identity-based narratives under stress. For the authors, this makes the region not just a candidate for behavioral policy but a critical testing ground that reveals which interventions survive when institutions are fragile and information itself is contested.

The most striking evidence comes from wartime Ukraine. In July 2022, researchers conducted a large survey experiment with Ukrainian adults in regions exposed to invasion and shelling, published by Martinez and colleagues in The Economic Journal. Participants viewed different versions of an official-style evacuation notice and judged its effectiveness. The design was deliberately policy-facing: rather than merely varying rhetorical wording, it tested a practical element governments could modify immediately, namely whether the message included a clear evacuation plan. The results upended conventional crisis-communication wisdom. Variations emphasizing gains, losses, living conditions, or military considerations did not significantly affect perceived effectiveness. What mattered was practical agency. When the notice explained how to join an organized evacuation, what to do next, and what support was available, participants rated it as substantially more effective.

The authors interpret this as behavioral science at its most useful: not nudging with slogans but diagnosing the bottleneck. The study distinguishes preference-based reluctance, where people could leave but choose not to, from constraint-based reluctance, where people wish to leave but do not believe they can do so safely or independently. The plan treatment addresses the second mechanism directly, reducing ambiguity, lowering the psychological cost of decision-making, and transforming a frightening instruction into actionable steps that increase perceived control. In wartime, threats are intentional, information is contested, and the personal costs of leaving are far more ambiguous than in natural-disaster evacuations, which is precisely why lessons from wealthy countries may not travel well. The findings suggest that in crisis, the most persuasive message is the one that makes action feel feasible.

Crucially, the region is not starting from zero. The article catalogs a growing body of behavioral interventions already producing measurable results across Central and Eastern Europe. In Latvia, a field experiment conducted with the State Revenue Service found that behaviorally informed reminder emails sent to previously non-compliant self-employed individuals significantly increased timely tax declarations, with the most effective message lifting compliance by 9.4 percent. In Hungary, a randomized controlled trial published in Scientific Reports showed that a prosocial fake news intervention, which encouraged people to help less digitally literate family members spot misleading content, improved fake news detection and reduced susceptibility to disinformation, with effects that persisted over time. Both cases demonstrate that low-cost, scalable interventions can yield meaningful gains even in settings characterized by large informal economies and information environments marked by low trust.

From this emerging evidence base, the authors draw two broader conclusions. First, the behavioral evidence base must expand beyond WEIRD settings in a substantively meaningful way, because behavior shifts when environments are shaped by intentional threats, contested information, and fragile logistics. Second, they propose a behavioral preparedness agenda: in crises, effective interventions are those that simplify coordination, pre-commit plans, and connect citizens to credible support channels, rather than those that merely reframe risk. Across domains from evacuation to taxation to misinformation, the consistent principle is that interventions succeed when they reduce friction, increase perceived agency, and translate intentions into clear, actionable steps. Awareness campaigns, the authors suggest, chronically overinvest in persuasion, telling people to be careful, and underinvest in execution, telling people exactly what to do and what support exists.

The implications reach well beyond evacuation. Eastern Europe faces overlapping risks from geopolitical shocks, energy disruptions, cyberattacks, and high-velocity disinformation, and the pragmatic lesson applies across all of them: 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. The region’s underexplored status represents both a gap and an opportunity, since despite institutional and economic reforms since the early 2000s there has been no systematic effort to embed behavioral science in policymaking, whether through dedicated governmental units or sustained academic-policy collaboration.

The path forward, the authors argue, need not start from scratch. International experience documented by the World Bank and the World Health Organization shows that governments have operationalized behavioral insights through several institutional models, including units embedded within ministries, centrally located teams working across policy domains, and partnerships with external organizations. Slovakia, notably, has already established a behavioral insights function within its health system. Concrete avenues include working directly with policymakers to demonstrate the benefits of pre-tested policies, building structured cooperation between policymakers and academics so behavioral insights inform the entire policy cycle rather than arriving as an afterthought, engaging legislators so behavioral considerations shape not just implementation but legislative drafting, and developing university courses in behavioral economics to cultivate a new generation of local practitioners. A first regional step has already been taken: a two-day workshop titled Behavioral Insights for Policy, held in Chișinău, Moldova, in July, brought together academics and practitioners to discuss countering misinformation, building public trust, and promoting energy efficiency, the first event of its kind addressing this specific non-WEIRD context. For a discipline built on the premise that small changes can make a big difference, the biggest change may be where the science is allowed to prove itself.

Subject of Research: Application of behavioral insights to public policymaking in Central and Eastern Europe

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

Article References: Banerjee, S., Romaniuc, R., & Voutova, N. (2026). Beyond the West: behavioral insights for policymaking in Central and Eastern Europe. Frontiers in Behavioral Economics, 5, Article 1813982. https://doi.org/10.3389/frbhe.2026.1813982

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frbhe.2026.1813982

Keywords: behavioral insights, behavioral public policy, Central and Eastern Europe, nudge theory, Ukraine evacuation, tax compliance, misinformation, WEIRD populations, crisis communication, governance, behavioral economics, policy design