Examining behaviour insights and current practice around behaviour change in sport, culture and community activities.

We are delighted with the success of this conference, which was aimed at strategic leads from sport, culture and community sectors and associated activity providers. Held on Friday 2nd December 2016 at The Fielder Conference Centre in Hatfield, feedback from the 120 delegates was extremely positive.

The focus of the conference was on how to increase the impact of the work of organisations by developing their understanding of human behaviour. The conference included sessions by experts in the field of psychology and behavioural insights, giving delegates an unmissable opportunity to consider how to engage with the public, improve the uptake of services, and increase the impact of their work.

View the speaker biographies follow, and presentation slides and handouts used during the conference can be downloaded from the list below:

Conference Programme

Keynote 1: Prof Richard Wiseman: Public Engagement - Maximising Potential Recommended reading: 59 Seconds: Think a little, change a lot

Keynote 2: Dr Angel Chater: Behaviour Change Intervention Design, Delivery and Evaluation: What you really need to know when developing services

Presentation: Sanjeev Kumar: Making connections/working together: Social Prescription Luton Doccument upload to follow...

Workshop 1: Changing behaviour in the real world: What to do and how to do it

Workshop 2: A Behavioural Insights Approach to population level behaviour change

The conference was organised and part-funded by a working group made up of representatives from the Hertfordshire Sport and Physical Activity Partnership, Hertfordshire County Council, Creative Hertfordshire, the Hertfordshire Sports Development Officers Group and the Hertfordshire Association of Cultural Officers.

Speaker and Presenter Biographies:

Professor Richard Wiseman

Richard Wiseman possesses Britain’s only Professorship in the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire. This is where he researches a diverse range of topics including luck, self-help, illusion and persuasion. His work has been published in some of the world’s leading academic journals and cited in over 20 introductory textbooks.

Richard has also written several best-selling books that have been translated into over 30 languages, including The Luck Factor, Quirkology, and 59 Seconds and his psychology-based YouTube videos have received over 45 million views!

Richard is the most followed British psychologist on Twitter and was recently listed in the Independent On Sunday’s top 100 people who make Britain a better place to live. More than 2 million people have taken part in his mass participation experiments and he has served as creative consultant to popular personalities and TV shows such as Derren Brown and MythBusters. Richard is an Honorary Fellow of the British Science Association.


Dr Angel Chater

Dr Angel Chater is a Chartered Psychologist, an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society and a Registered Health Psychologist and Sport and Exercise Psychologist with the Health and Care Professions Council. She is a Reader in Health Psychology and Behaviour Change at the University of Bedfordshire, situated within the Institute for Sport and Physical Activity Research. She is also an Honorary Senior Lecturer in Health Psychology and Behavioural Medicine at UCL School of Pharmacy.

In her roles, she integrates health psychology into non-psychology curriculum, CPD training and applied health research, with a focus on communication skills, behaviour change interventions and adolescent health. She is the UK National Delegate for the European Health Psychology Society and the Chair Elect for the Health Psychology in Public Health Network. She is passionate about the scientific application of health psychology to public health and its role in intervention design.


Neil Howlett

Neil Howlett conducts research in the area of physical activity and behaviour change as a Research Fellow in the Department of Psychology and Sport Sciences at the University of Hertfordshire. Neil is in the process of completing a PhD investigating the most effective ways of encouraging inactive adults to participate in more physical activity. He is also principal investigator on a both Department of Health-funded and Lottery funded evaluations of a programme aimed at parents of children who are at risk of obesity for the charity HENRY.

Additionally Neil has helped in the design, implementation and evaluation of the Sport England-funded Active Herts project. His role has involved adding evidence-based behaviour change techniques to the intervention content, training physical activity specialists, and adding key theoretical drivers of physical activity as outcome measures.


Amanda Bunten

Amanda Bunten works as a Behavioural Insights Research Analyst for Public Health England’s Behavioural Insights team. She has approximately 8 years of experience working in public health championing and demonstrating the importance of health psychology in public health working in local and national government. Amanda previously worked as a public health strategist for the City of London and London Borough of Hackney working in health prevention and protection, developing strategies to address local health challenges, commissioning services, and responding to local outbreaks.

She joined PHE as the ambition of this new organisation struck a chord with her passion to reduce health inequalities, translate evidence into practice and influence policy. Her current role involves providing behaviour change advice, delivering training, and designing and testing behaviour change interventions through the application of behavioural science theory to improve population level health. The aim is to drive scalable change through the translation of evidence into practice whilst informing policy. She holds an MSc in Health Psychology, is a member of the BPS and is currently the Policy Officer for the Division of Health Psychology.

She is due to submit her Doctorate portfolio shortly with the aim to become an accredited health psychologist registered with the HCPC. She will then be one of the very few health psychologists working to influence policy across government.