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

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

House of Lords Select Committee on behaviour change

Some 15 years after the publication of Missionary Government, in which Demos outlined a visionary programme for re-imagining the role of government in changing cultures and behaviours, the House of Lords has launched a Science and Technology Sub-Committee on behaviour change, led by Baroness Neuberger.

The Sub-Committee are this week hearing evidence from prominent civil servants including David Halpern, who has formerly worked for Tony Blair’s Strategy Unit, the Institute for Government and is now said to be part of Cameron’s ‘nudge unit‘, Karen Hancock and David Bartholemew from the Department of Education, and Rachel McCloy from the Government Economic and Social Research team.

Evidence will relate to current research developments in behaviour change, evaluation of government interventions and the ethical and social concerns raised by novel and innovative approaches to changing behaviour.

After two years’ of research into the politics and ethics of behaviour change interventions in public policy, we have provided evidence to the Sub-Commitee relating to how behaviour change policies problematise the threshold between the UK state and its citizens.  We reported specifically on the contribution of critical social science research to understanding and interrogating the ethical and practical basis for behaviour change interventions.

Our evidence raises concerns about the wide-spread adoption of psychological, neuroscientific and behavioural-economic explanations of human behaviour within the civil service. We point towards the limited conception of personhood contained within such disciplines, and draw attention to ongoing debates and contestation around key behavioural concepts and processes, arguably brushed over in the enthusiastic adoption of behaviour change. We raise questions about which disciplines and forms of evidence are valued above others and why.

The use of behaviour change initiatives necessitates analytical research which interrogates the unintended and wider consequences of government interventions aimed at shaping the behaviours, attitudes and identities of citizens, and requires institutions which assist citizens in holding government to account. We highlight concerns about whether these governmental and non-governmental institutions can be adeqately supported in the contexts of a smaller and weaker public sector.

Serious consideration should be given to the kinds of behavioural norms promoted in such interventions. As such, we recommend that behaviour change interventions need to be audited in ethical, political and social terms: what types of behaviour, identities and attitudes are being promoted, and in what ways can these be said to be beyond political contestation? What kind of behaviours and identities are demonised or marginalised and what are the potential side-effects of so doing? What types of behaviours/identities are absent from the intervention and why? Who gets to decide which behaviours are to be encouraged and which prohibited, and how are these decisions arrived at?

We will be watching closely as the evidence is debated.  Further written evidence has already been submitted by the DEA, which argues for more empowering styles of intervention –  opposing the ‘nudge’ appraoch to that of deliberate and deliberative educational strategies. Submissions have also been prepared by the Wellcome Trust, the British Academy, and the Sustainable Devlopment Commission.

Jessica

DIY Streets and Community-Based Nudges

Every now and again you have one of those life affirming days when you realize what life could be like if we lived under slightly different circumstances. I had just one of those days recently when I visited the residents of Beech Croft Road in North Oxford. I was on Beech Croft Road to witness the commencement of a new DIY street project. Initiated by local residents, and inspired and funded through Sustrans’ DIY Streets programme, the Beech Croft Road scheme has two broad goals: 1) to slow down traffic travelling along the road; 2) and to make the road a space that is shared between cars and the local community, and not simply given over to traffic movement functions.

On arrival, as a somewhat awkward stranger of the street, local residents immediately drew me into discussion about what was going on. It was assumed that I was a passing local, but when it emerged that I had travelled from Aberystwyth to see what was happening people seemed please that word of their project had spread so far. The road had been closed for the day to allow for two main activities.

First was the street transformation. The residents were trialling the introduction of a series of street objects that were designed to act as psychological prompts to change driver behaviour. The first of these was a psychological speed bump that was to be painted on the road. Based on an attractive geometric pattern that mirrored the Victorian paving that had been used on several properties of the street, the psychological speed bump took some careful planning by the residents, as they worked all day, and through the heat, to see it to completion. Other objects that were to be introduced included street planters and bike racks, that would be collectively used to break-up the linearity of the road and again slow traffic.

The second main activity of the day was the street party. This brought more residents to the street, partly to cast an eye over the new objects that had appeared on their road, but also to engage in a lively game of egg-flinging, a community barbeque, and to partake of the rapidly constructed cocktail bar.

The DIY Street initiative has been inspired by a series of community movements, planning philosophies and environmental concerns. These movements range from the community-based street reclamations instigated by City Repair in Portland, Oregon, to the “shared space” planning practices of the Dutch engineer Hans Monderman. What they have in common, however, is the realization that for too long our streets and roads have been designed with the dominant aim of facilitating efficient transportation and linear mobility. This process has had the twin effects of fragmenting communities whose only shared public space is a road; and of making roads less safe – as traffic speeds have increased along easy to navigate mono-functional highways.

DIY Streets encourages communities to take back some degree of ownership over their streets. It is not about banning cars, but about making drivers aware that roads have more than one function. Consequently, by introducing psychological speed bumps, street arches, and various local accoutrement, DIY practitioners attempt to de-homogenise roads: to provide them with a sense of territorial distinctiveness which speaks quietly in ear of the driver, saying, “people live on this street, people like me, with children and dogs and social lives, maybe I should slow down and display the same sort of respect for this place as I would show if I was visiting someone’s home.”

As I left Beech Croft Road, passing the signs that read “Road Closed” and “Play Street,” I was struck by an interesting revelation. I had only seen Beech Croft Road as a community space that was closed to traffic. I had assumed that perhaps this was just the type of place were everyone hung out and talked to each other; invited you into their gardens for a cup of tea; pooled their toys so that visiting children could play in the street. But perhaps such forms of community behaviour are just much easier to achieve when our streets slow down and become spaces of shared endeavour.

Mark

Libertarian but not Paternal: Reflections on the UK’s New Public Health Service

For some time now we have had a strong sense that soft paternalism is less a distinct set of political practices and more a collection of tools for behaviour change that can be taken in very different political directions. Thus, while David Cameron and George Osborne’s pre-election statements clearly indicated that if elected they would deploy nudge-style techniques in their administration, it was far from certain exactly what type of politics this would lead to. As more and more statements and policy directives start to emerge from the Coalition Government it is becoming easier to discern what soft paternalism may come to embody in British politics over the next five years.

Perhaps surprisingly, it is Andrew Lansley, the Coalition’s Secretary of State for Public Health, who has been most active is revealing the key characteristics of the new government’s version of soft paternalism. In a recent speech to the UK Faculty of Public Health Conference on the 7^th July 2010, Mr Lansley set out his vision of behaviour change policy in the field of public health. This speech confirmed two things. First that government clearly intends to deploy soft paternalist tactics within its health sector reforms. Second, that it has a very specific neo-conservative take on what soft paternalism means.

It is clear that Andrew Lansley, and like minded coalitionists, feel that the particular brand of soft paternalism practised by the previous Labour government (whether it be in the form of school meal reforms or the Change4Life programme) was simply too paternalistic. Ironically reflecting on the inability of his government to pass the “Elimination of Obesity Act 2010,” Lansley outlined a paradigm shift in health policy that would invoke the power of local communities to generate and sustain the structures cultural change that health reform really needs.

While there are many sensible suggestions made within Lansley speech, one cannot help but feel that it represents another, thinly veiled, assault on the welfare state.  The role of the state within health care provision is problematised by Lansley on at least three front: 1) in the wake of public sector spending cuts we can no longer afford a heavy-handed state bureaucracy meddling in public health issues; 2) that the “nanny state” is actually not very adept at changing personal health conduct; and 3) that sometimes state intervention can make the public health situation worse (the example used here is the way in which social marketing campaigns against drinking, smoking and obesity can actually normalize these problems not stigmatize them).

Taking these points in isolation, I have to admit that there are some important issues raised here. However, when they are placed alongside Lansley’s alternative behaviour change solutions to public health reform, anyone with a belief in “progressive” brands of soft paternalist (as I have) may start to feel a little queasy. In the wake of a failing state, we are presented with less public funding for healthy living campaigns (like Change4Life), the threat of disbanding the Food Standard Agency (Ramesh, The Guardian, 12 July 2010), and an increasing role for the food and drinks industry in public health support. Perhaps the most worrying insights into what the New Public Health Service may look like, however, came in related statements made by Lansley (reported in the Telegraph, but not documented in the official manuscript of his speech). We thus hear that:

“it is perfectly possible to eat a Mars Bar, or a bag of crisps or have a carbonated drink if you do it in moderation understanding your diet and lifestyle […] Then you can begin to take responsibility for it and the companies who are selling you these things can be part of that responsibility too” (Smith, Daily Telegraph, 8^th July 2010).

Such sentiments open-up a worrying space between the corporation and the citizen, which has historically been filled by the state (see here George Monbiot’s reflections on the current round of state deregulation in the UK).

While it is always likely to be popular to talk about healthy eating in relation to choice and personal moderation, one of the reasons that soft paternalism first emerging within British health policy was because the food and drink industry had generated structures of food provision (whether it be vending machines in schools, or cleaver marketing ploys) that actually made it very difficult to eat healthily and responsibly in the first place. If the fiscally restrained state is incrementally removed from the public health sector my fear is that healthy choice options will decrease and the long-term cost of ill health will increase. It appears that British soft paternalism may be soft, but not all that paternalistic!

Mark