46. Human Behaviour with Dame Theresa Marteau

Theresa Marteau is a British health psychologist, professor, and director of the Behaviour and Health Research Unit at the University of Cambridge. Her initial research concerned communicating risk information and found out that people usually don’t change their behaviours despite receiving any form of information about preventable diseases like type 2 diabetes or certain types of cancer. Hence, she decided to redirect her focus on the non-conscious rather than conscious processes that could improve people’s health behaviours e.g. reducing glass size to reduce alcohol consumption. Through that research, she’s demonstrated that it is the change in government policies or population-level interventions - putting nudge theory into practice - that present a potential for the improvement in our