Bio-social Methods Workshop Commentary and Presentations

Bio-Social Methods for a Vitalist Social Science

Institute of Advanced Studies Workshop, University of Birmingham

16th July 2013

A workshop commentary written by Dr Bryony Enright is available here (PDF).

Some interesting quotes on the concept of the bio-social can be found here (Powerpoint).

Presentations and audio recordings of presentations will be added as available below:

Nudging Into Subjectification (Powerpoint)

Dr John Cromby, Loughborough University (AUDIO)

 

 

Porosity, Virality and the Study of Contagion (Prezi Presentation)

Professor Steve Hinchliffe, University of Exeter (AUDIO)

 

Experimental Entanglements in Cognitive Neuroscience (LINK)

Dr Felicity Callard, Durham University and Dr Des Fitzgerald, Aarhus University

 

Nanny, Nudger or Therapist? Therapeutic Approaches to Behaviour Change in an age of ‘Vulnerability’

Professor Kathryn Ecclestone, University of Sheffield (AUDIO)

 

Using Mindfulness Training in Pro-environmental Behaviour Change (Powerpoint)

Rachel Lilley, Aberystwyth University (AUDIO)

 

What is Impact? Producing Modest and Vulnerable Knowledge

Dr Megan Clinch, The Open University

 

 

Nudge Meets RCT: Evidence-based Manipulation for the Public Good? (POWERPOINT)

Professor Martyn Hammersley, The Open University (AUDIO)

 

Closing Remarks

Dr Jessica Pykett, University of Birmingham (AUDIO)

 

Changing Behaviours: On the Rise of the Psychological State will be published by Edward Elgar in 2013

Photo: Trodel, Creative Commons 2.0

A significant but, for many people, imperceptible force has been quietly reshaping the operational logics of many states since the turn of millennium. This largely intellectual force has centred on nothing less than the nature of the human subject, the relationship between our conscious and sub-conscious selves, and the complex interface between the rational and irrational. This political trend has manifested itself in the increased significance of Behaviour Change policies. 

Our forthcoming book, Changing Behaviours, charts the emergence of Behaviour Change policies in the UK under New Labour and the Coalition Government. By tracing the influence of the behavioural sciences on Whitehall policy makers, it explores a new psychological orthodoxy in the practices of governing. Chapters examine the impact of Behaviour Change policies in the fields of health, personal finance and the environment.  The book analyses how the nature of the human subject itself is re-imagined through Behaviour Change, and develops an analytical framework for evaluating the ethics, efficacy and potential empowerment of Behaviour Change.

Changing Behaviours is based on a three year research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust, which examined the social, political and ethical significance of Behaviour Change policies in a range of spheres, including gambling and saving behaviours, urban design, school food, alcohol policies and household energy consumption. Through these case studies, we provide original evidence of the potential impact of the behaviour change agenda on different social groups and on wider society, and we discuss in detail how Behaviour Change policies are understood and contested by different individuals and groups.

Our aim in the book is to raise broader questions about the impact of behaviour change on the democratic process, governance and state-citizen relations. By providing a critical analysis of the place of ‘nudge’ policies in a broader political landscape we seek to show how nudge policies re-conceptualize human action, and we trace the intellectual roots of nudge in terms of its links with emerging academic fields of behavioural economics, user-centred (and ‘persuasive’ technological) design principals and, increasingly, neuroscience. We consider questions about the way in which such policies imagine the rationality and political agency of the human subject.  As Human Geographers, we are particularly concerned with unpacking the place of the loose political philosophy of ‘libertarian paternalism’, through which Behaviour Change policies have found political purchase. We therefore situate the Behaviour Change agenda within the history and geography of ‘neoliberalism’. Through its engagement with contemporary social policies and practice, the book also builds on understandings of the politics of ‘neuroliberalism’ – based on governing neurological or psychological subjects.

Finally, we propose a new analytical model through which to develop critical, challenging and supplementary perspectives on Behaviour Change. The book provides a model of ‘efficacy, ethics and empowerment’ to critically evaluate policies which are self-styled to change people’s behaviour. Efficacy calls scholars and practitioners of Behaviour Change to expand and extend effectiveness measures beyond questions of ‘what works’ in favour of wider-reaching questions of democratic legitimacy, long-term sustainability and a fuller understanding of the complex social drivers of ‘sensible’ behaviour. Ethics refers to a need to establish a set of checks and balances on the kinds of psychological, psychographic and geo-demographic power used in the fulfilment of Behaviour Change interventions. We ask, for instance, whether the behavioural agenda itself creates an irrational and risky underclass, echoing previous examples of victim-blaming in public policy. Our third analytical tranche, empowerment, serves to shed light on the potential for Behaviour Change policies to enable citizens to develop the capacity to act in the future, with a key emphasis on the community contexts and social infrastructures required to enable more- than-rational forms of decision-making. In this sense, we question whether the Behaviour Change agenda should be considered incompatible with wider cuts in the funding of civil society organizations, welfare and state institutions.

Throughout the book, a core concern for us in the context of the contemporary challenges facing higher education research in general has been to show the value of a strongly social theoretic approach, countering prevailing trends towards a (re-)turn to behaviouralism with the UK social sciences.

Can behavioural science help us to resist temptation? Governing by nudges

Behaviour Change tactics are often aimed at encouraging citizens to resist various temptations associated with over-consumption (e.g. of unhealthy food, cigarettes, carbon, credit). In our research we have argued that much more attention needs to be paid to the unintended consequences of nudge tactics as they re-configure the politics and ethics of government intervention, the ‘time-spaces’ of decision making and our conceptions of the human subject itself.

It is widely recognised that governments have always been in the business of changing behaviour. But the more recent growth in enthusiasm for nudge tactics based on a loose political philosophy of ‘soft’ or ‘libertarian’ paternalism raises new questions about policy tools and levers intended to both improve welfare and increase freedom of choice.  Furthermore, given the new found dominance of psychological and behavioural science knowledges, the Behaviour Change agenda demands that we interrogate what counts as research evidence in the justification of new policy techniques.

The House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee Inquiry on Behaviour Change reported in 2011 that not enough was known about how governments can change or influence behaviour at a population level; most of the available research is conducted exclusively on individuals, and it is simply inadequate to aggregate these findings up to social groups, communities and whole nations.  Our research project, ‘The time-spaces of soft paternalism’, conducted by Human Geographers at Aberystwyth University and funded by the Leverhulme Trust for 3 years, has examined precisely the question of the underlying principles and collective effects of the Behaviour Change agenda in the UK. Far from a neutral set of benign policy techniques which can be deployed by parties of any political persuasion, our research has found a concerted movement towards the deployment of sophisticated psychological powers in order to govern individual and societal ‘temptations’. These research insights can be usefully split into three headings:

The politics and ethics of government intervention

There are several different nudge techniques which fall along a spectrum of political and ethical acceptability. These range from psychographic and geodemographic profiling in social marketing campaigns, design initiatives focussing on spatial arrangements (e.g. the layout of school canteens), to administrative techniques that attempt to encourage optimal behaviours (e.g. presumed and differed consent in organ donation schemes; favourable default positions on company pension options).  Clearly some are aimed at compensating for our all too human behavioural flaws and apparently self-defeating behaviours, whilst others are intended to cultivate a more reflective approach to reasoned and reasonable decision making.  Hence, these distinct typologies of nudge require not only strategies for enabling, engaging, exemplifying and encouraging more ‘sensible’ behaviours, but they also necessitate ‘ethical proofing’.  This requires policy makers and indeed politicians to build ethical considerations into Behaviour Change initiatives from the outset.  Though not a comprehensive list, a starting point would be to judge each nudge from the perspective of:

(a)    its openness or degree of consent secured – how far are individuals and society aware of any attempts to change their behaviours, through subtle environmental or administrative cues?

(b)   its democratic credentials – how far are citizens involved in actively shaping the contexts in which they make decisions (for instance, global energy markets). Are opportunities given for public deliberation on the very nature of the social goods to be promoted through nudges? How can the nudger be held accountable in a democratic forum (whether the nudger is government or otherwise)?

(c)    its effects on personal responsibility – is it indeed fair to assert that actors living in unequal contexts should be held personally responsible for the behaviour in question? Is it fair to ask people on vastly different incomes to save, even proportionately, for their pensions?

 The ‘time-spaces’ of decision making

Secondly, Behaviour Change policies and initiatives have drawn on academic disciplines which remain far from uncontested.  It has been argued, for instance, that the behavioural economic and psychological science approaches are based on narrow assumptions about the very ‘time-spaces’ of decision making. To clarify, on the one hand, such disciplines re-imagine decision-making as a highly immediate, responsive and impulsive activity hampered by cognitive flaws which limit our abilities to make long-term decisions. And on the other hand, they are primarily concerned with decision-making which takes place at a highly localised scale – one of Thaler and Sunstein’s (2008) famous examples being to encourage healthy eating by placing fruit at eye-level. In promoting an account of decision-making as both immediate and proximate, attention is drawn away from the wider contexts which frame decisions.  There is little attention paid, therefore, to the way in which decisions can be limited by socio-economic contexts, unequal access to the resources and knowledges required to make decisions, and the much longer running historical contexts in which decisions are ascribed as ‘sensible’. Nudges can therefore be guilty of de-historicising the role that culture, society, economic circumstance and the state have played in shaping behavioural norms and constructing those temptations to be resisted.  Hence, notions of willingness, harm, choice, welfare, health, environmental awareness, wealth and happiness are divorced from the very political processes of norm-formation which make certain behaviours acceptable and others transgressive. Again, these insights urge us to question what kind of research counts as evidence to be used in designing Behaviour Change policies, and raises the need to widen the scope of research expertise beyond the behavioural sciences.  There is also a need to be wary of any account of decision making which appears to equate freedom, and associated democratic rights, with acts of choice, since choice is no guarantor of substantive freedom.

 

Conceptions of the human subject

Following from these principles of decision making are novel claims about the human condition as characterised by a sense of irrationality, flaws and inherent biases in thinking processes.  But we must also consider the cumulative effect of Behaviour Change policy initiatives as they become more commonplace in contemporary UK policy making.  In deconstructing ‘homo economicus’ on which classical decision theories were arguably based, and replacing this conception with those derived from psychological knowledges, nudges risk creating an ‘irrational underclass’ of people judged to be too weak willed to behave appropriately.  Nudges tend to demote the emotional or inexpert drivers of decision making as problems to be overcome. In targeting particular segmented social groups, they can have the affect of stigmatising certain people as less than rational and seemingly uneducable. In creating decision-making environments intended to be ‘fool-proof’, nudges may indeed contribute to the cultivation of fools. Citizens may develop a more acute sense of vulnerability which reduces their abilities to hold governments and other nudgers to account. In addition, by focussing on individual behaviours, nudges reframe social problems as issues of psychological pathology. This limits the ethical and political scope for strong governmental action in the spheres of social and spatial inequalities – and encourages ‘bite sized’ discrete policy remedies for structural problems.  Finally, in their focus on rationalising the irrational aspects of decision making and compensating for the emotional drivers of behaviour, Behaviour Change policies can have unequally gendered effects, subordinating the female citizen to a masculinist rational frame. This makes assumptions about both the determinants of decision making and the selective acceptability of social goods or norms to be cultivated through nudges. It is these social goods and norms which, in a democracy, should never be beyond question.

Taking a much broader view of the population-wide political and ethical consequences of policies based on behavioural insights provides us with a difficult set of questions which require sustained political debate.  The sometime confusion of nudges as an end rather than a means closes down this debate. Critical social science research can therefore illuminate the need for Parliamentarians to maintain a healthy scepticism of the scientific claims which underpin behaviour change. For whilst nudging gives government a toolkit for producing ‘sensible’ citizens, nudges do not get us any closer to the question of how we should live nor which temptations should be governed.

Jessica

A body politic – the right to make live and let die

Most political geographers would get the allusion of the title. The first part is to the 17^th century world of sovereignty, rights and social contract theory of Thomas Hobbes. For Hobbes peace would be secured when “a multitude of men, united as one person by a common power” choose to covenant their individual power to the ‘body politic’ by relinquishing some of their rights to a sovereign (the right to make war or take life for example) [see Hobbes 1640, Chp XIX, para 8].

The second part references Michel Foucault’s biopower where the claim to legitimacy by ‘the state’ is based on the guarding and fostering of productive life (see Foucault “Society Must Be Defended, Lectures 1975-76”, page 241) and the commensurate extension of state control over the biological. Foucault argued that in modernity man’s existence as biological (in contrast to legal or political) beings becomes the target of state strategies (biopower). He distinguished two forms of biopower: anatomo-politics and biopolitics – the former targeting the individual subject, the human body, the latter targeting man as a collectivity, the population as a body politic.

Concern with life and death of the individual and population comes to the fore in the questions around organ donation, revealing tensions between the body-politic and the politics of the body .

Defaults, organs and the state

Sadly it is statistically likely that three people in the UK died today awaiting a suitable donor.

As Rhys, Jessica and Mark noted in their article “Geographies of Soft Paternalism”, published earlier this year, “organ donation has become an intensive site for soft paternalist policy experimentation […] One classic tool of soft paternalism [that] has been controversially proposed as an ultimate solution to organ donation shortfalls: the re-setting of the organ donation default.” [draft for Geog Compass viewed here]

In the UK this default is based on the notion that the body is gifted, that is it is voluntarily made available for use after death through an act of conscious choice. So we have an opt-in system where people choose to enter their names on an Organ Donor Register. Doing so is simple, via phone, online or at various sites that we all visit such as the doctors surgery. Yet despite the ease and our consistent collective affirmation that organ donation is a good thing and we would like to be an organ donor in reality only about a quarter of us have done it. This coupled with increasing surgical advances, problems of organ compatibility, and the increase in demand (as life style related conditions like diabetes, liver and heart disease continue to rise) has seen year on year repeated headlines about soaring waiting list times.

Switching to a system based on ‘presumed consent’, (where the citizen is entered onto the register and has to opt-out of it) has been debated in the UK for years. It is common in much of Europe and seems to result in higher donor rates but local and cultural factors may be equally significant.

In nudge terminology this is changing the default option, a powerful tool for changing behaviour because the default position is what happens when you have a choice but choose to do nothing. The rationale for the presumed consent default is that numerous surveys show wide public support and a willingness to be entered on the register of organ donors but that that support is not reflected in the number who actually make the effort to place themselves on it. Why this is the case is varied, with the failure to follow through on stated preferences ranging from irrationality and insecurity – that doctors will not work as hard to save a patient, or an aversion to thinking about ones own death – to simple inertia – people are not motivated enough to enact their preferences by seeking out a means of entering their name on the donor register

But messing with the body, or more precisely the corpse, is a provocative act that turns the body into a site of contestation between state and citizen. In particular some argue that subtle changes in the default position like this reflects the over-reaching of the state and people’s loss of control over their own bodies following death. Indeed in the absence of actual consent the autonomy of the individual, the patient, is undermined. As such changing the default for organ donation raises fundamental questions about legitimate state action and personal freedom.

One of these was pointedly raised by the Archbishop of Wales in his Presidential Address to the Governing Body of the Church in Wales last month when he argued:

Archbishop Barry Morgan

“There is, in presumed consent, a subtle or perhaps not so subtle change of emphasis in the relationship between the individual and the State.  That is, that unless we have opted out, our organs belong to the State and the State has the right to do with them as it wills.”

His comments, which echo those of a number of other faith leaders, came following the announcement by Health Minister Lesley Griffiths last month that Wales would introduce what they call a “soft opt-out” system (a White Paper outlining the proposals is imminent). This presumes consent unless the deceased has stated a contrary view or the family object.

This stands in contrast to the Coalition Government policy which has opted for Richard Thaler’s archetypal nudge of using ‘prompted choice’ to encourage organ donation. When you register online for a new drivers licence, you are required to complete a question about organ donation. The freedom of choice remains absolute (you can answer : yes, no or “not yet”) except in so far as the citizen is required to express a choice about organ donation in order to continue with their online driving licence application

In other parts of the world experiments with incentivisation schemes are being tested. For example, Israel and Singapore are experimenting with a ‘priority allocation’ system where those already on the organ donors register are given priority on the waiting list should they need a transplant. In similar vein the Nuffield Council on Bioethics has recently suggested the state might pay the funeral expenses of the deceased who donate their organs (and rejected changing the default to an opt-out scheme).  Spain, which has the highest rate of organ donation in the world (nearly 3 times that of the UK), also has a soft opt-out system. But a key factor in its effectiveness seems to be an emphasis on “procurement” with specially trained hospital staff who will always approach relatives of the deceased to ask about donation.

The body-politic is a complex beast. Changing the default is not necessarily a panacea in itself, indeed it is far to simplistic to look at a nudge policy (like opt-in/out) in isolation and anticipate or attribute a population wide outcome to its implementation.

And this debate about the use of behavioural insights to influence what we do with our decaying empty vessels also reveals something about the governmental rationality of this ‘nudging’ by the state. It has consequences that extend beyond the seemingly party politically neutral target of the intervention. In this case the choice of ‘nudge’ may shift in un-noticed but fundamental ways the relationship between the state and citizen.

For the body-politic the covenanting of rights after death to the ‘head’ of that body – the government – may prove an exercise in biopower, of making live and letting die that provokes some serious soul searching by both state and citizen.

Whilst personally on balance I find pragmatically I agree with an opt-out system for Wales I can’t help but be a little wary of what it means for the body politic. Does an opt-out system extend the reach of the state too far into our private lives and deaths? Does it force on us the relinquishing of further rights to the state? Does it, in Foucault’s terms, reconstitute the citizens body as a subject of the state?

Marc

To Nudge, Shove or Prod – when is a bag tax not a bag tax?

From this Saturday (1^st October) all retailers in Wales will be required to charge 5 pence for every single use carrier bag it hands out [Note: the levy in Wales is not restricted to plastic bags]. Any business caught handing out bags without charging the levy face a £5,000 fine.

This will make Wales the first country in the UK to introduce such a charge. The Northern Ireland Executive is consulting on similar proposals now. Scotland and England may head in the same direction.  At a UK level plastic bag use fell quite substantially between 2006 and 2009 following a concerted effort by the Labour government, business and environmental campaigners to drive down the 11bn bags we used in 2006 to just under 6.5 bn in 2009. However that trend bottomed out and bag use rose again last year. As a result the Coalition Government is “looking carefully” at what happens in Wales with the introduction of a mandatory charge.

Although pejoratively referred to as the “Welsh bag tax” no money from the charge goes directly to the Welsh Government (VAT is collected for HM Treasury). Rather than a means of direct revenue generation instead the charge has been introduced with an explicitly behaviour change objective – to reduce the number of single use bags given out in Wales, (in 2009-10 this was estimated at 350 million bags from supermarkets alone). The Welsh Government anticipates the charge will see a 90% reduction in the number of bags distributed in Wales.

Not everyone, least of all the Carrier Bag Consortium or the pressure group the Tax Payers Alliance, is happy about this new “stealth tax”. Bag tax is also criticised as rather marginal in environmental terms. They form a relatively small component of the waste stream yet have been easy for politicians, environmentalists and even big business to characterise as a major menace that everyone can tackle providing a superficial quick win and self-congratulatory slaps on the backs all round.

By pushing onto the public yet another ‘easy step’ on the path to sustainability and encouraging the consumption of ‘eco-bling‘ (as George Monbiot describes it), the fetishisation of the plastic bag menace is charged with doing little to change underlying mindsets of consumption and disposability or more damaging behaviours. But one outcome will be an additional pot of cash for environmental projects in Wales.

Revenue raised is supposed to then go to “good causes”, causes of the retailers own choosing (estimated at £3 million in the first year). The extent to which this will happen is unclear as in another ‘nudge’ the Welsh Government will not prescribe where retailers spend the additional money. It has an expectation that the proceeds of the tax will “be passed on to charities or good causes in Wales, and in particular to environmental projects”. A little wooly and light touch perhaps but this carrot is backed up with the usual governmental stick of the promise of further regulations to determine where the money is spent if Welsh business does not play ball.

Of course none of this is particularly new. Many companies such as Marks & Spencer and Ikea voluntarily introduced charges on such bags a few years ago. Other countries have either imposed an outright ban or introduced a levy upon plastic bags (e.g. China, Italy, Rwanda, South Africa, Mexico City, Washington DC, Hong Kong, Ireland).

The citizens pledge - Uttarakhand is a state in northern India

And a number of British towns and cities have tried to emulate the success of Modbury in Devon (Britain’s first “plastic bag free town”) launching voluntarist campaigns trying to persuade local retailers and consumers to switch from plastic carrier bags. With support from all 33 borough councils in London Borishas unsuccessfully spent two years promoting the idea of making “London a plastic bag free city” in time for the Olympic Games.

(2008 Survey)

 

You would think this issue would have been dealt with years ago, given explicit cross party political and public support (although nudgers would note the discrepancy between what people say and do, but see the Daily Mail/ICM Poll, 2008). Yet the lack the legal powers to impose and enforce a ban/levy coupled with the inertia and entropy inherent in much grassroots campaigning has seen many local campaigns flounder. So Wales has become the first place in the UK where the bag menace can be tackled through a combination of the nudge and the shove to try and achieve a shift in the behaviour of a population. Quite where the nudge comes in is perhaps less clear than might appear.

If this is indeed a nudge then it is really more about the state mandating the placement of a question and a consequent choice in front of the consumer where previously one did not exist. So the introduction of a charge, however small, for something that was previously a ‘free gift with any purchase’ (the cost was already factored in to retailers overheads) reframes the relative value of the bag.

A softer nudge would be training the cashier to ask you an innocuous sounding question like “Good morning, do you have your bags with you?” Underpinned by a legislative shove the Welsh Government nudge seems more of a prod that aims to inculcate a new social norm (bag for life, avoid the strife). No one has to pay the charge, they could make do without a bag or bring their own. In other words they could change their behaviour and from the Irish example it seems likely the majority will do so.

Arrggh! It's the Slovenian plastic bag monster!

Ireland married its bag tax with a large scale education programme and receipts went directly into an Environmental Fund so the link between tax and spend was clear. It is a shame Wales has been unable to do likewise. Unfortunately the awareness raising campaign in Wales has been limited so far, one consequence of which may be to compound resistance and irritation over the Welsh levy which may diminish its effectiveness. Setting the charge at the relatively low level of 5 pence may counter this, though conversely it may also make it easier for the consumer citizen to carry on as before (Ireland is increasing its charge to 22 cents as bag usage has recently begun creeping up again).

But it is an interesting experiment all the same. Watch this space to see whether this combination of nudge and shove does indeed produce a profound change in environmental behaviour of the Welsh population the government hopes for, or whether further prodding may be required …

Marc