Load Profiles and Household Energy Use

(Source: National Grid, UK)

Earlier this week I attended a fascinating workshop on household energy practises at Durham University (hosted and organised by Harriet Bulkeley and her research team). The workshop was for an Social Science Advisory Group, which has been established to advise on Northern Powergrid and British Gas’s Customer Led Network Revolution. This scheme centres around the largest smart-grid project in the UK (involving 14,000 homes and costing £54 million to implement). While our discussions were broad ranging and considered the potential impacts on smart meeting and In-House Energy Displays on household energy usage, one of the most interesting things about the workshop for me was the perspective it provided on the processes that are driving the restructuring of the domestic and commercial energy market in the UK. 

While the move towards smart-grids and meters is, of course, being driven by a desire to reduce, in aggregate, household energy use and thus help the UK along the road to a lower carbon economy, it is also being conditioned by issues of daily household demand.

The diagram above is a load profile of energy use across the UK over the past 7 days (these profiles are available from the National Grid). What this load profile reveals are the daily fluctuations that exist in British energy use (with the expected peaks in the morning and evening periods). It is interesting to note that with the onset of the low carbon, electric economy, these peak energy use periods are likely to see more energy demand being placed upon them (as people plug in their electric cars after returning home from a long day of work). Given the great pressures that such load profiles place on energy supply networks during peak periods, energy suppliers are not only interested in how to make the home more energy efficient, but also how to redistribute energy use throughout the day.

The redistribution of energy use has, of course, been a long-time concern of energy suppliers. As a previous user of storage heaters I was able to make the most of the low, off-peak energy tariffs associated with the Economy Seven initiative. But current discussions about the timing of domestic energy practise have interesting implications for behaviour change policies. It appears that shifting people’s TV watching practises from the peak evening slot of 7-9pm will be difficult, as will moving the timing of when people cook their evening meals. There may be more flexibility, however, as to precisely when people choose to take a bath/shower or put their washing machines on. New tariffs are being used to incentivise off-peak energy use, but as all UK homes join smart grids over the next decade, it will be interesting to see just how flexible our domestic energy use routines actually are.

Mark

PPPOPP theories: the Power of Popular Psychology over Public Policy

It is intriguing to note how influential ideas translate into actually existing public policies which have very real impacts both on specific individuals and the wider population. And so, not satisfied with having designed a highly scientific diagrammatic model (see this earlier post), a useful mnemonic or acronym is also indispensable. Hence PPPOPP. Eventually, these insights will all come together in my forthcoming best-selling title: How to Change Other People’s Behaviour, essential reading for all those who wish to preserve their own intransigence.

Understanding Behaviour Change involves not only tracing its roots, in terms of the academic theories, disciplines and evidence marshalled in its development as a distinct set of policy solutions.  We also need to examine how and why particular sets of ideas get adopted and others not. In addition, looking at Behaviour Change in its wider context, it is possible to identify broader trends in the governance of the human subject which are worthy of more detailed analysis. As a start, then, it is worth considering how Behaviour Change fits in conceptually and methodologically with the movement for positive psychology, wellbeing and happiness, and to remember some more acronyms…

Libertarian Paternalism is of course a term which sounds far too jargonistic for some. But NUDGE, that is very easy to say. Cheating slightly, NUDGE summarises a suite of recommendations derived from the field of behavioural economics, standing for:

iNcentives   

Understanding Mappings           

Defaults       

Give Feedback                

Expect Error 

Structure complex choices

Meanwhile MINDSPACE, a framework and toolkit developed by the Institute for Government and Cabinet Office derives its themes from a wider spectrum of the behavioural sciences of decision-making, standing for:

Messenger  

Incentives   

Norms                     

Defaults       

Salience      

                                                                  Priming       

                                                                  Affect   

                                                                  Commitment     

                                                                  Ego

And PERMA denotes a set of ideas from positive psychology gaining increasing attention amongst policy strategists, politicians, and an emergent ‘happiness industry’. This one forwards an argument for the power of a mind trained in optimism to overcome adverse circumstances, from the work of Martin Seligman (author of Flourish, 2011), and stands for:

Positive emotion   

Engagement           

Relationships         

Meaning     

Accomplishment

Leaving aside the issue of how all these kinds of knowledges reconfigure the human subject as an object of governance, just for now, let us consider instead some other psychological insights on ‘fluency’ which may have implications for the popularity of popular psychology in public policy. With thanks to Psychologist, Will Matthews for pointing me towards this area (have a look at his interesting work on the psychophysics of price). Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer’s 2006 research has shown how stock market prices are correlated with the pronouncability of their names. Hence, easy to pronounce stocks consistently out-performed those with ‘disfluent’ names.  If it is not too much of a leap then, we might speculate that academic evidence presented as an easy to say acronym  will have much more impact on time-pressed professionals than, say, a paper entitled ‘Reflections on the rescientisation of decision making in British Public Policy’, or RRDMBPP (and that’s only half a title).  Well of course there’s a lot more to it than that, but it is worth bearing in mind when you find yourself marketing, branding and ‘impacting’ your next research project.

Jessica

A ‘3E’ model of soft-paternalism

It seems that no ‘policy relevant’ research is complete without its own easy to remember, easy to say, easy to spell mnemonic or catchy abbreviation for you to take away and apply to all manner of related and not-so-related scenarios (more on the status of mnemonics in public policy later), so here is ours:

Another triangle

The UK Sustainable development strategy (2005, see also DEFRA 2007) developed the well-known ‘4Es’ framework (enabling, engaging, encouraging and exemplifying), only to be trumped by the Cabinet Office/Institute for Government’s ‘6Es’ model (adding explore and evaluate). But we have come up with our own ‘3Es’ to throw into the mix of important things beginning with E: efficacy, ethics and empowerment. Here I provide a quick summary as a taster for the analytical model we are developing in our forthcoming book, Changing Behaviours. On the Rise of the Psychological State, to be published in 2013 by Edward Elgar.

Efficacy

No we haven’t gone all instrumentalist on you. Our concern with efficacy is not to ask ‘does behaviour change work’, since there are plenty of people asking such a question. Rather, throughout our research we have sought to interrogate the grounds for evaluation as presented in behaviour change policies. First, this raises a concern with the monetisation of behaviour change outcomes in terms of VFM (value for money) or ROI (return on investment). Whilst these are clearly important where spending of public funds is concerned, we urge those evaluating behaviour change policies to consider alternative outcomes in terms of the quality of public deliberation engendered by such interventions.  Secondly, we want to draw attention to the need for long-term and large-scale measures of success, which may in fact defy measurement within the terms or resources of a single intervention. We are concerned to show how behaviour change evaluations may be based on a narrow conception of the times and spaces of decision-making, unable and unwilling to account for the socio-technical, cultural and environmental drivers of meaningful and sustainable social change.

Ethics

Of course we are banging on about ethics like there’s no tomorrow, since this is notably absent from the other E models, and because it is the element most likely to evade measurement and audit.   Three main issues are worth considering, though there are no doubt many more. First, what is the political legitimacy of those designing behaviour change? Where novel governmental tactics exist to explicitly target the collective subconscious, where is the infrastructure to monitor and check this form of ‘psychocratic power’? Secondly, in the settling of new defaults, norms and social goods, how are notions of evidence, expertise and status advanced? I.e. who gets to say what is a desired behavioural outcome in any given situation? Related to this is a third concern, that in targeting behavioural interventions at those behaviours, segmented groups and individuals deemed less rational, does the behavioural agenda itself create and irrational an risky underclass, echoing previous examples of victim-blaming in public policy? This circularity issue is well known to students of political theory, and it remains crucial to ask whether and how behaviour change produces vulnerable subjects.

Empowerment

Finally, we argue that it is essential to evaluate behaviour change policies in terms of their potential for empowering citizens to develop the capacity to act in the future. We have identified that one of the unintended consequences of the sum total of behaviour change interventions is that the homo economicus presumed in prior economic accounts of decision-making is being replaced by a more psychologically inspired vision of the citizen fool. Following on from this is a perceived requirement for policy makers to create foolproof geographies based on naïve conceptions of time and space. And finally that such a decision-making environment removes opportunities for social learning. In its place, we argue for public policy interventions which value more-than-rational forms of decision-making, sensitive to inexpert knowledges, a wider spectrum of what counts of evidence and a more ambitious attitude to the possibility of social change.

Jessica

Mindful of Nudge

I managed to catch the last episode of Matthew Taylor’s BBC Radio 4 series Brain Culture: Neuroscience and Society today. While covering a range of neuro-paternalistic themes, one particular issue stood out for me. Focusing on the links between neuroscience and behaviour change policies, this final episode explored the emergence of Mindfulness Training. Mindfulness approaches combine Buddhist practices with psychological insights into human behaviour in order to enable people to better understand the nature of their everyday experiences and emotional lives. It was suggested that Mindfulness Training could enable people to become more aware of the limitations of their own conscious capacities and to live more neurologically adept lives.

On the other side of the neurological battlefield are the techniques associated with the Nudge. In this particular episode, the so neurological skeptic Raymond Tallis suggested that there is a real danger that such behaviour changing techniques could see human subjects becoming the “play-things of our evolved Brains.”

It appears that a quiet neurological war may be underway in the UK (and indeed elsewhere). While the field of conflict clearly cannot be reduced to the garrisons of Mindfulness and Nudge, remembering that the political and social implications of current developments in that behavioural sciences are open to contestation is a useful starting point for public debate on the subject.

Mark W.

House of Lords Inquiry on Behaviour Change reports that nudging is not enough

Today the House of Lords Science and Technology Sub-Committee published its extensive report on behaviour change, which was reported in headline news in between yet more revelations about News International and the phone hacking scandal.

The main points reported were:

-          That whilst nudging is a useful tool for changing behaviours, particularly in the health sector, it is not a substitute for government regulation – it needs to be used within a framework of more traditional legislative and financial tools;

-          That the Coalition Government have been rather too keen to promote nudging as a soft, cheap alternative to more regulatory and infrastructural provisions;

-          That there is not enough evidence on how behaviour change can be effective at the scale of governing whole population – it is not adequate to aggregate research findings from individuals without proper evidence of the real impacts on the population;

-          That there is a need to appoint an independent Chief Social Scientist to advise government on the social effects of behaviour change initiatives, to promote behaviour change across government and to provide an evidence base of successful interventions.

The report goes much further in considering how appropriate the pilot projects of the Behavioural Insight Team might be, specifically how Government should be working with businesses and voluntary organisations, provides guidance on evaluating behaviour change interventions, and discusses the ethics of such programmes according to (a) their intrusiveness, and (b) their transparency.

This is a much welcome corrective to the apparently unbridled popularity of the behavioural sciences amongst contemporary public policy-makers.  The report goes some way to questioning not only the definition of a ‘nudge’, but also the certainty of the ‘sciences of human behaviour’ (p9), and subjects the methods and evidence of behavioural scientists to critical scrutiny.

But the main question immediately raised for me is ‘what is a Social Scientist?’ What is this person going to do and will they be expected to provide definitive answers to Government’s still narrow questions around behaviour change. Will they be charged with generating their own questions?  Given that there is little agreement within the Social Sciences around even what counts as true evidence and appropriate methodologies, let alone the practical and ethical bases for evaluating policy, how will the Chief Social Scientist adequately represent Social Science?  With the notable exception of Professor Elizabeth Shove, it seemed that most of the academic witnesses giving evidence to this Inquiry were behavioural scientists, social psychologists, public health psychologists and medical scientists – already coming to the table with very particular epistemological and methodological assumptions about human behaviour not shared by Social Scientists across the board.  So who will the Chief Social Scientist be and will they be able to ask difficult questions of value, interests and political struggle within a technocratic search for effective policy levers? I like Bent Flyvberg’s take on this – see Making Social Science Matter (2001).

Jessica

From Neuroknitting to Neurocapitalism

My attention was recently drawn to the Knit a Neuron project at Bristol University established by Anne Cooke and Helen Featherstone.  The project, aimed at public engagement with science, invited participants to craft a brain cell in the rich artistic medium of wool. This turns out to be a larger movement which goes far beyond philosophical wooliness to rethinking the relationship between art and science. (Have a look also at the Art-Science research project being conducted by Aberystwyth colleagues Deborah Dixon, Libby Straughan and Harriet Hawkins.) And just last weekend, there was a ‘cosmic craft’ event at the Science Museum where people collectively experimented with knitting the solar system and geometric shapes.

What has this got to do with soft paternalism, behaviour change, and this here geography-inspired blog, I hear you ask.  Interestingly, a group of geographers (Doreen Jakob, Hayden Lorimer, Kendra Strauss and Nicola Thomas) has recently instigated a novel discussion on the Geographies of Craft and Crafting, which is to be a conference session at the 2011 Association of American Geographers Annual Conference. This exciting session will examine, amongst other things, the re-emergence of craft as a cultural and economic movement; craft, labour and social reproduction; and ‘craftivism’ and the politics of craft and crafting.

Yes, but what has that got to do with soft paternalism and changing cultures of governing? The advent of neural knitting may be just another incarnation of the ‘new neuros’ currently sweeping political, economic, cultural and social explanation.  It will not have escaped your attention that the neurosciences have acquired something of an elite status in contemporary thought – both academic and popular. Neuroscientific expertise is mobilised in all manner of ways, from neuroeducation, neuromarketing to neuroeconomics. And public policymakers are increasingly looking to neuroscientific insights in developing more supple and sophisticated forms of governing which go with the grain of human cognition, as noted in the Cabinet Office/Institute for Government’s 2010 publication, MINDSPACE.  Even human geographers are in on it, with ‘geographers of affect’ readily adopting neural explanations of (pre-)cognition, embodied and emotional rationalities, and economic geographers adopting evolutionary, neurobiological and behavioural revelations in their accounts of – for instance – the global financial crisis, or the location of firms.

My question is whether all these new neuros add up to something called neurocapitalism – one in which the economic orthodoxies of capitalism are re-imagined through the biological certainties of the brain sciences (arguably economic and biological theories have always been closely intertwined). If so, should we be worried about it? Could neurocapitalism produce new neuro-citizens?  Do behaviouralist cultures of governing reinforce economic inequalities by segmenting irrational and rational publics? Are fears (or so-called ‘neurophobias’) of strategies of intervention, manipulation and management of the emotions and decision making justified? If the debate about human consciousness is over (as some prominent neuroscientists would have us believe), then why do we keep on acting as if we are active subjects able to make history, change futures and refuse to submit?

Is neuroknitting a slippery slope…?

Jessica

A dollar won is twice as sweet as a dollar earned

So said Paul Newman as pool player Fast Eddie Felson in the 1980s movie ‘The Color of Money’. Fast Eddie was referring to playing a game of skill but the truism in there about the sensation of winning, of beating the odds, sums up the allure of gambling.

Gambling, or ‘gaming’ as it has been rebranded, is the ultimate exemplar of an entire industry predicated on the assumptions of behavioural economics.

Gambling is inherently irrational. You choose to gamble to win. Yet the thrill comes with knowing there’s a real chance of losing, that you pit yourself either against other people or ‘lady luck’. Indeed that thrill is at the heart of gambling and the reason many of us do it again and again even when we are losing believing it is just a ‘streak of bad luck’ and ‘bound to change’ at some point (the gamblers fallacy). The pattern of neurological stimulation that gambling engenders can be habit forming, even addictive. There are the rituals and build up to the gambling event, the tension rising as, suddenly, … ‘they’re off!’ … the ball spinning round and round before imperceptibly it begins to roll slower and slower until … the last card is drawn … the die is cast… the share price is fixed … the last scratch on the card made … and the outcome rests in the hands of fate. Will the climax be a flush of elation or the flop of failure? That release when the games outcome is finally known can be intoxicating!

Indeed an entire multibillion dollar gambling industry exists that is based on these most irrational of decisions – you hand over your money to someone else on the promise that if something extremely improbable was to happen, like the roulette ball landing in the number you have chosen and not one of the other 36 it could have done, then you would get more cash back. In terms of ‘nudging’ gambling provides a brilliant example of an industrial choice architecture that encourages people to do something completely irrational and against their own best interests, to seek out risk against the odds in a system designed to ensure the house does not loose. And because gambling has long been considered a potential social vice leading to excessive risk taking, government has also long sought to regulate it (for example in bacchanalian Rome and paternalist Victorian Britain).

These debates have often been bound up with conceptions of competence and class, that some categories of people (for Victorian patricians this was the ‘working classes’) are more prone to giving in to their vices and need protecting from themselves. More recently government has sought to even turn vice into virtue by legitimising some forms of gambling and positively encouraging its conversion to ‘gaming’ (a form of mass entertainment) through directing the profits of gambling to providing social goods through taxation of gambling profits and more recently the National Lottery.

Now behavioural economics suggests ways of interpreting and even explaining people’s gambling behaviours. It points to the way people proportionately discount distant rewards in the future more than those that are nearer (termed hyberbolic discounting). In other words, in making choices we will tend to choose imminent smaller rewards and immediate gratification over greater deferred ones. This ‘shortsighted brain’, as Natasha Schull and Caitlin Zaloom (2011) describes future discounting, sits at the heart of the problems of liberal governance – how do we tackle climate change or personal investment in pensions when we choose behaviours that reward us now, when our supposedly rational brain reaches irrational conclusions? Because in addition to future discounting we also overestimate the probability of winning or have an over confident belief in our skill than is actually the case. If we can impose an illusion of control on our gambling, for example by releasing the dice ourselves or timing the press of the button ‘just right’, we can manufacture a fiction that somehow we are playing the slot machine rather than the machine playing us. We tend to emphasise our victories and small successes and loose sight of the losses. Similarly we believe that some numbers are ‘lucky’, that in playing a game of chance a pattern is present behind the randomness. So we stick to ‘our’ lottery numbers and bet repeatedly on those numbers for fear that if we change them our investment in them will have been wasted.

Significantly the gambling industry knows all this. It is designing ever more sophisticated apparatus to help people spend their money or time; be it in banks of multi-line slot machines, Fixed Odds Betting Terminals, increasing online and mobile means of making ever more diverse types of bet, the development of ‘player tracking systems’ that monitor players’ preferences, play style, wins and losses, spending across gaming platforms and gaming locations, allowing gambling corporations to better target resources to extracting that cash, appealing to massively differentiated gaming markets (social bingo, solitary poker) – and all embedded in immersive real and virtual environments that stimulate and satiate the punter in equal measure. In exchange the punter is entertained. They may experience the thrill of the win, however small it may be, however much rationally they know that the house always wins in the end. Seemingly we are content to pay out £5.7 billion per year* for this neurological stimulation.

So in a real sense the gambling industry has been a laboratory of behavioural economics for decades, indeed millennia. More recently the way in which it operates has leapt into the 21^st century the sites of gambling given a makeover, the machines and software mentioned above found in betting shops, bingo halls and increasingly in the living room.  At the same time the logic of behavioural economics is also informing the way policies are developed to limit or ameliorate the potential harm of ‘gambling gone bad’ to individuals and society. In the UK this has mainly been through the practice of self-exclusion, where punters voluntarily exclude themselves from gambling places (real and online) for a fixed period of time to try and get their habit under control. But the gaming industry and regulators have also seen the potential for technology, particularly in the online world, to increase the nudgeability of people to police themselves. For example online industry best practice includes mechanisms for age verification, ‘reality checks’ and the use of ‘defaults’ such as time and deposit limits to ensure gambling remains gaming, reminders that require players to acknowledge how long they have been playing and confirm they wish to continue, and an ability to self-exclude.

The internet and the rise of ‘social gaming’ has meant not only is ‘real gambling’ now more available in more places, (the development of mobile apps to enable sports betting and mobile casino gaming on the move makes it available in all places at all times), but increasingly people can play risk free ‘simulated gambling’ games at any age. Simulated gambling has long been a means of promoting products; from collecting cards and bottle tops to win prizes in the 20^th century to texting a code from a drinks can or getting a Monopoly scratch card on your burger box. While it is tempting to look at online gambling as the most obvious growth market and means for normalising gambling as an everyday social activity if we look around us we see it has become much more pervasive than that. In today’s consumer culture such marketing and social network based gambling really is everywhere, a supplementary tool for increasing sales and promoting brand loyalty, a background habit to our virtual lives. Indeed ‘social gaming’ on websites like Facebook has increasingly tapped into the demand for simulated gambling with games such as Zynga Poker, online ‘slots’ machines, and scratchcards all prominently promoted. These are games you can play for free in a limited manner or use your credit card to purchase additional ‘credits’, where you are not playing to win money but to win more credits or to progress in the game. Quite how that embedding of ‘gambling as gaming’ into the social lives of us all is changing our relationship to gambling and the space-times of our own decision making is surely a question we would do well to begin asking.

* the Gross Gambling Yield of the gambling industry as calculated by the Gambling Commission’s Industry Statistics 2009/10.

Marc Welsh

Shallow and Deep Paternalism

In a blog post on the 6th August 2009 (Sticks, stones and lexical nudges) I was critical of the Institute for Public Policy Research’s Warm Words publication (2006). This report suggested that if we could somehow change the “linguistic landscape” associated with climate change—largely from alarmism to pragmatic optimism— we could more effectively get people to change their climatic behaviours. My critique argued that such linguistic nudges embodied superficial attempts to short-circuit the climate change debate through a process of sub-conscious subterfuge. The good news is that things appear to be improving within the field of environmental behaviour change. The recent publication of the report Common Cause: The Case for Working with Our Cultural Values appears to signal a shift from addressing the surface framing of climate change to its deep psychological resonance.

Common Cause was published by a collection of Environmental NGOs in September 2010 and was written by Tom Crompton, a ‘Change Strategist’ at WWF-UK. According to the Common Cause report: ‘It seems that individuals are often predisposed to reject information when accepting it would challenge their identity and values. Campaigning approaches that rely on the provision of information may well work for people whose existing values are confirmed through accepting, and acting upon, that information. But for others, the same information (for example, about the scale of the challenge that climate change presents) may simply serve to harden resistance to accepting new government policies or adopting new private sphere behaviours’ (2010: 9).

The ideas presented in Common Cause have been influenced by the work of George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist at the University of California Berkeley. In particular the Report draws on Lakoff’s distinction between deep and surface frames. Surface framing involves the use of key words and phrases to guide the ways in which people approach and understanding an issue. Deep frames on the other hand relate to the ‘cognitive structures held in long-term memory’ (2010: 42). The crucial insight of Lakoff’s work is the emphasis it places on the interrelationships between deep and surface frames. According to Lakoff, the success of surface frames (like the climate crisis), in guiding and shaping human behaviour, depends on the ways in which they resonate with deeper frames and associated values. The compelling argument of Common Cause is that people are failing to take action on climate change because the climate change message is at fundamental odds with our deep frames and associated sense of self.

The message of the Common Cause report is of great value to those interested in how to transform our individual and collective relationships with the environment. While there are some who still wait for definitive proof from science of the climate crisis, I personally feel that science may have taken us as far as it can. The point is that even if the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change could tomorrow produce a definitive consensus on the exact nature and consequences of climate change it would be unlikely to significantly shift behaviour. As Common Cause points out, the scientific message on climate change has to resonate with our deep frames. To these ends, it is clearly important to consider why it is that we value the accumulation of wealth, gratuitous consumption, and economic measures of success, despite their deleterious consequences for our climate, so much. It is clearly these values that should be the target of environmental behaviour change policies in the future. It is, of course, precisely these values that the Transition Culture, Degrowth, and Voluntary Simplicity Movements have already been focusing upon.

The more cynical among us can quite fairly argue that surely the problems of climate change are quite enough to have to deal with, without also having to initiate a fundamental shift in the nature of human values as well. This may, however, be the real challenge of climate change.

Mark

House of Lords Inquiry: The Ethics of Behaviour Change

What can a geographer tell the House of Lords? This is what I was asking myself on the train to London a couple of weeks ago, when I was lucky enough to be invited to participate in a seminar with the Select Committee on Science and Technology Sub-Committee for their inquiry into behaviour change. The other 12 or so participants included philosophers, bioethicists, a health psychologist, Lords and Baronesses, and the sub-committee staff. Astonishingly, I was the only human geographer. The aim of the seminar was to discuss the ethics of behaviour change. Some of the questions we were asked to consider were:

-          Is the prevention of harm to others the only purpose for which the Government can intervene against an individual’s will? Can the Government ever intervene against the will of the individual to protect that individual himself [sic]?

-          What should count as ‘harm to others’? e.g. harms to society, to the world climate, to future generations?

-          To what extent is it the responsibility of the Government to reduce inequalities as a means of changing behaviour, and by what means are they permitted to do this?

-          What makes a policy intervention coercive and how is this related to the restriction of choice?

What is human behaviour?

Some lengthy and fascinating debates ensued as to whether we can really consider people to be autonomous agents, able to make rational decisions according to their will. One model of human behaviour was put forward, which outlined two kinds of will: the reflective system (of stated preferences) and the impulsive system (of automatic, subconscious responses). Reference was made to the ‘fundamental attribution error’ by which people end up thinking that they are entirely rational – always attributing their will to the reflexive mind. And we discussed the differences between stated preferences and so called ‘real preferences’. We were also reminded of powerful ‘priming’ effects of preference-formation, through advertising or even government-led social marketing. Because of the cognitive overload associated with the complexity of daily life, for instance, even a government advert warning of the harms of drinking will only ‘prime’ people to think of just having a drink. All of this seemed to suggest that humans are fundamentally flawed, presumably justifying behaviour change interventions which intervene against the will of the individual in order to protect themselves from what they really (should?) want.

Norm-formation and the construction of the will

And this is where I started to worry once more about the dominance of behavioural science understandings of the human within this whole agenda for behaviour change, nudging and libertarian paternalism. For isn’t this whole approach aimed at preventing ‘stupid people’ from doing ‘stupid things’? In other words, behaviour change is for the weak-willed, but not for ‘us’? It struck me that whilst behavioural science research is enjoying a renaissance, unrivalled popularity and political kudos, critical social science research is suffering something of a funding crisis at a time when it could never be more necessary.  So for example, whilst the behavioural sciences promise to provide (effective, timely and cost-efficient) solutions to these human flaws, don’t we need strong social scientific, arts and humanities research to help us to understand how we arrive at these particular, partial, and contextual conceptions of the human? Are there not more than two-dimensions to the human will; the production and reproduction of the will itself?  And the problematisation of those (often specific groups to be targeted) deemed to be without will? Rather than obsess about how we can use social norms and networks to change behaviours (as in the example of college students being told that most other college students don’t drink as much as them), should we not be trying to interrogate instead the complex, culturally, geographically and historically-specific processes of norm-formation itself?

Critical geographies of human behaviour

As it turns out then, geographers do have something to say to Lords about behaviour. Primarily that theories, models and explanations of human behaviour, however ‘scientific’ they purport to be, always come with political, ethical, social, cultural and economic baggage. And geographers are famous for trying to tackle all these things at once within a discipline which proclaims to ‘write the world’.  Three limits to behavioural science are worth pointing out:

-          It may be that the reflexive/intuitive model of human behaviour only applies in specific times, spaces or situations, and that even cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, psychologists and behavioural economists have no privileged insight into the relationship between (ir)rational decision-making and time-space contexts (see José Bermudez, 2009).

-          Behavioural science cannot tell us what people ‘really’ want, or what we should collectively or individually do or desire.  Nor can it help us to answer the question of whether Governments are responsible for reducing inequalities as one means of changing behaviour. This is political question which surely does require some form of rationalising debate, i.e. the justification of reducing, eliminating or promoting inequality with reasons and with reference to the actual effects of your position on different people’s lives. Of course as a geographer, it is difficult to see how one can defend inequality and absolve Government of responsibility for it, since multiple indices of inequality can be clearly mapped, spatial injustices indentified, and since people have no control (reflexive or impulsive) over where they are born. An appreciation of the situated nature of human behaviour also opens up new questions about how the person itself is socially/geographically constituted, and points to the potential problem of government interventions which seek to shape particular kinds of persons who must then somehow hold that government to account.

-          Nor do scientific models of human behaviour give us any indication to the ethical or political criteria by which any targeted behaviour change interventions can be judged or justified. Part of our discussion covered the thorny issue of coercion, and it was put to the seminar group that many promoters of nudge seek to defend its libertarian credentials by ensuring the criteria of an absence of coercion. But in a stimulating discussion of the relationship and distinctions between coercion, coercive backing, choice and (equal, substantive, unlimited, maximal and non-domination) freedom, we were urged to consider criteria other than simplistic notions of coercion for evaluating the ethics of behaviour change.  It was pointed out that Governments (and others) are in the business of coercing (left, right and centre).  I would agree, and certainly would see the role of Government as an arbiter of competing wills, preferences, choices and ‘freedoms’. So what other criteria should we be considering in the ethical-proofing of these so-called nudges? Degree of consent, opportunities for deliberation, accountability of nudger, degree of possible responsibility (given the contextual limits on choice) – these would be good places to start. But for me, the most important criteria is whether the initiative (and indeed whole behaviour change agenda) gives people the opportunity to further develop their competency to act in the future. I.e. is the nudge educational? No one seems to be too bothered about this question as yet, but it is surely at the heart of governmental interventions in the sphere of human behaviour.

I was pleasantly surprised both to be invited to this seminar, and by the fact that the Sub-Committee saw the ethics of behaviour change as important enough to warrant a seminar. But I remain sceptical as to whether such a seminar will have equal weighting with the evidence sessions hearing from behaviour change practitioners and experts.  It is important to bear in mind that nudge is a means, not an end.  Despite all its scientific credentials and apparently new insights into how we behave, it does not get us any closer to the question of how we should live. And one question thus remains, is there a consultant philosopher in the Nudge Unit?

Jessica
ref: José Luis Bermùdez (2009) Decision Theory and Rationality. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Debtogenic Landscapes

Come take a walk with me along Tottenham’s High Street in the north London Borough of Haringey. On leaving the train at Seven Sisters tube station you encounter a landscape that is a world away from a typical street scene in central London. Gone are the Starbucks coffee shops and Pizza Express restaurants, replaced by a mix of international money transfer centres and mini-marts. Haringey is actually one of the poorest districts in Great Britain: with low average household income and high rates of unemployment. There is, however, one thing that Haringey is a national leader in, and that is its concentration of bookmakers and gambling establishments. The district is home to a cluster of 72 betting shops, with one 300-metre stretch of road alone being occupied by nine bookmakers. It is, in some ways difficult to understand why the gaming industry should target poor areas like this – why not target the most affluent areas, where presumably the largest stakes could be waged? It appears, however, that betting shops do well in more deprived districts because poverty makes the attraction of even relatively small gambling gains much more enticing. This exploitative logic presumably also extends to the greater opportunities that the unemployed have to visit bookmakers throughout much of the day.   The concentration of betting shops in Haringey has rightly become a major concern for local MP David Lammy, former London Mayor Ken Livingstone, and the local council.

The situation in Haringey, and what is being done to address the problem, raises important issues concerning choice architectures and behaviour change policies. Having recently visited Haringey, I believe that care needs to be taken when suggesting that a high concentration of gambling establishments leads to a kind of irresistible choice architecture for low income communities. There can be little doubt that the rise of ambient gambling environments, with their seductive advertising messages, makes it far easier for anyone to fall into the gambling habit – and the betting shops of Haringey were certainly doing a healthy trade when I passed them at mid afternoon. But resisting the spread of gaming gentrification through recourse to the impacts of such establishments on the behaviours of low income populations runs the real risk of (admittedly unwittingly) constructing a kind of irrational underclass, who are somehow unable to resist the temptation to gamble. This is precisely the problem that lies at the heart of government self-exclusion schemes, where problems gamblers can (in their more clear-thinking states) register to be excluded from betting-shops when temptation runs too high. My point is that we are all subject to the temptations to gamble, admittedly in very different ways and for varying reasons. The increasing spread of ambient gambling opportunities is thus a problem in medium and high- income communities, particularly when it targets younger members of the community. Further more, it is clear that if the gaming industry targets poor neighbourhood, other debt-inducing activities (including the use of credit cards, the promotion of expensive holidays, or loans for home improvements) can be found in most communities. We increasingly live in what I would describe as debtogenic landscapes: places that are specifically design to encourage us to spend beyond our means. Politicising these landscapes could provide a unifying movement that questions why credit, debt and gambling have become so necessary to so many people. It could also provide a way of connecting the important issues that are being raised in Haringey with a broader national discussion on the connections between poverty, a living wage, and the dangers of debt.  These are issues that can so easily get glossed over within the fairly narrow discussions of choice architectures and psychology that characterise the behaviour change debate.

Mark