Researcher · Cambridge, UK · Behaviour & policy
The same person makes a different choice once you change the room they are standing in.
Charles Brendon researches how individuals respond to different environments, incentives and interventions, and how behavioural evidence can inform more effective approaches to prevention, regulation and harm reduction.
His particular interest is gambling, a setting where those questions are unusually well documented and unusually consequential.
- Field
- Behavioural science and decision-making
- Applied to
- Public policy, regulation and consumer protection
- Focus
- Gambling and gambling-related harm
- Educated
- Psychological & Behavioural Sciences, Cambridge
Behaviour is far more sensitive to context than most policy assumes.
University of CambridgeAbout Charles
Charles Brendon is a researcher specialising in behavioural science, decision-making and public policy, with a particular interest in gambling and gambling-related harm. A graduate in Psychological & Behavioural Sciences from the University of Cambridge, he examines how individuals respond to different environments, incentives and interventions, and how behavioural research can inform more effective approaches to prevention, regulation and harm reduction.
His starting point is an observation with awkward consequences for policy. Change the default, the friction, the framing or the feedback, and the same individual will reliably choose differently. That makes the design of an environment a policy instrument in its own right, and it makes careful measurement the only honest way to find out whether an intervention did anything at all.
Charles publishes his research and commentary here at charlesbrendon.net and can be found online as @chbrendonuk.
- Education
- Psychological & Behavioural Sciences, University of Cambridge
- Fields
- Behavioural science, decision-making, public policy
- Focus
- Gambling, consumer protection and harm reduction
- Online
- @chbrendonuk
Why gambling
Gambling provides a valuable setting for understanding decision-making and consumer behaviour in a complex and highly regulated environment. Four questions define the work.
Gambling is not interesting because it is unusual. It is interesting because it is an unusually clear view of ordinary decision-making, recorded in detail, inside a market the state already regulates.
Working note- 01
Gambling-related harm
Who is harmed, by what, and at what point along the way. Harm is unevenly distributed and poorly captured by headline participation figures, so the research question is where the risk actually concentrates and what precedes it.
- 02
Consumer protection
What protection looks like when the product is legal, widely used and designed to be engaging. The interesting cases are the ones where a safeguard is technically present but behaviourally invisible to the person it exists for.
- 03
Responsible regulation
How rules can reduce harm without simply pushing demand somewhere less accountable. Regulation is itself a behavioural intervention, and it is subject to the same substitution and adaptation effects it is meant to manage.
- 04
Effectiveness of interventions
Whether a measure changed behaviour, or only changed what was reported. Deposit limits, breaks in play, self-exclusion and messaging all make plausible claims, and each needs to be tested rather than assumed.
Environments, incentives, interventions
-
01
Environments
The architecture around a choice: defaults, friction, availability, timing and framing. Much of what looks like settled preference is the shape of the environment showing through, which is why one rule can produce different behaviour in different settings.
-
02
Incentives
How people weigh cost, reward, risk and delay, and how badly that weighing goes when outcomes are uncertain and feedback is noisy. An incentive that looks decisive on paper often loses to a smaller, more immediate one in practice.
-
03
Interventions
What actually happens after a policy lands. That means comparison groups where possible, attention to who was reached and who was missed, and a willingness to report an intervention that made no measurable difference.
Behaviour and public policy
More broadly, Charles' work explores the relationship between human behaviour and public policy, with a focus on using evidence to better understand decision-making and develop practical responses to complex social challenges.
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Prevention
Acting before harm accumulates, which usually means intervening at the point of decision rather than at the point of crisis.
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Regulation
Rules written with a realistic model of how people behave, including the ways they will work around a rule they do not accept.
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Harm reduction
Reducing damage for the people already at risk, on the assumption that the behaviour will not simply stop on request.
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Evidence
Treating measurement as part of the policy rather than a report written afterwards, so that what did not work can be dropped.
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Decision-making
The common thread: how choices are actually made under uncertainty, constraint and habit, rather than how they are assumed to be made.
Get in touch
For commentary, collaboration or questions about the research.
[email protected]Or find Charles on X as @chbrendonuk