written into the constitution (Susanti, 2008), but those rulings had little impact on primary and secondary school quality and student achievement (World Bank, 2013).

The reasons disadvantaged students fare worse in schools involve a complex array of factors and certainly include issues of access, infrastructure, and trained and motivated teachers. In addition, there are interventions, rooted in social psychology and behavioral science, that could improve educational outcomes at relatively low cost. These include automatically enrolling parents in high-frequency, actionable information on their child’s school achievement (Bergman, LaskyFink, & Rogers, 2017). They also involve the beliefs and mental models students bring to school. Including the idea of reframing ability and intelligence as malleable, rather than fixed, increased student test scores in Peru significantly, yielding the equivalent of four months of additional learning at a cost of $0.20 per student (Outes, Sanchez, & Vakis, 2017). There are also proven techniques for overcoming stigma. Helping minority students in the United States resist their own self-stereotyping improved grades, with the result that they were more likely to graduate from college, relative to students in a control group, years later (Yeager, Purdie, Vaughns, Hooper & Cohen, 2017).

Public health is another area where behavioral interventions can address SE rights. The Indian Supreme Court has issued rulings limiting the availability of alcohol and restricting space for the consumption of tobacco (Shankar & Mehta, 2008; Yamin & Gloppen, 2011). One review found that “the large evidence base from Stage II randomized clinical trials [using cognitive behavioral therapy] indicates a modest effect size with evidence of relatively durable effects, but limited diffusion in clinical practice, as is the case for most empirically validated approaches for mental health and addictive disorders” (Carroll & Kiluk, 2017). There is suggestive evidence that group therapy may be also useful in smoking cessation (Stead, Carroll & Lancaster, 2017).

The Supreme Courts of Argentina and India have been involved in a number of cases regarding pollution, factory emissions, cookstove conversion, and environmental health (Bergallo, 2011; Mehta & Shankar, 2008). Again, insights from behavioral sciences and behavioral economics might contribute to remedies in these cases. Benchmarking consumers’ energy and water consumption to their neighbors can sustainably lower energy and water use (Allcott & Rogers, 2014; Datta et al., 2015; Brick, De Martino & Visser, 2017). Behavioral interventions can be useful for enhancing the uptake of clean cooking stoves (Rosenthal et al., 2017).

On nutrition, the Supreme Court of India issued a landmark ruling on the right to food, converting eight food distribution schemes into constitutional requirements and setting up a Commission to monitor their implementation and expansion (Parmar & Wahi, 2011). Effective behavioral interventions to increase birthweight and reduce malnutrition include the use of personal coaching for breastfeeding promotion (Leite, Puccini, Atalah, Alves Da Cunha, & Machado), mass media campaigns in Uganda (Gupta, Katende & Bessinger, 2004), peer groups to encourage breast feeding in Nigeria (Flax, et al., 2017), triggering social norms with the use of Community Led Total Sanitation in India and Indonesia (Cameron, Olivia & Shah, 2019; Patil et al., 2014), making chlorine dispensers salient (Kremer, Miguel, Mullainathan, Null, & Zwane, 2011), coaching for early childhood stimulation in Jamaica (Gertler et al, 2014), and microincentives for vaccine completion in India (Banerjee, Duflo, Glennerster & Kothari, 2010).

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