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

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

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

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

Behaviour change agendas and the ‘re-scientisation’ of decision-making

Governments have always been interested in shaping people’s behaviour, but under New Labour, we have seen the proliferation of government documentation, think tank reports and cross-departmental seminars on the topic of governing through behaviour change. Soft paternalism can be seen as a key component of this broader governmental agenda.

The academic roots of soft paternalism can be traced to the influence of US-based behavioural economists, neuroscientists and psychologists developing theoretical insights on, and new empirical observations of decision-making.  Ideas from these disciplines have become part of the received lexicon in policy-making circles, and are used in the design of more effective policy instrumentation.

Policy strategists have been particularly interested in how these disciplines have re-thought both culture and nature. First, in exploring the socio-psychological dynamics and ecological, behavioural resources required to achieve cultural change, and secondly, through a radical break with the decision-making models of ‘rational economic man’, being replaced by a human nature which is described as ‘predictably irrational’ (Ariely, 2008).

With the advent of a new Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government, we shall be monitoring developments in the behaviour change agenda with interest.  What will be the key differences between a soft paternalist justification of New Labour’s ‘Active Government’ and its use in realising what Cameron has termed ‘Big Society’?

What practical, political and ethical issues are raised in the interpretation and use of the behavioural sciences by parties across the political spectrum and what are the risks and opportunities posed by the gradual replacement of homo economicus with homo psychologicus?

Jessica

Clocky and soft paternalist time

Meet Clocky. Clocky is a new type of alarm clock that has been specifically designed to ensure that you can no longer just ignore your morning wake-up call. As with all alarm clocks, you set Clocky before you go to bed: the difference is that come morning time you cannot simply turn Clocky off, roll over, and return to your repose.  This is because Clocky uses it wheels to throw itself off your bedside table, run away and hide. You thus have to reluctantly get out of bed and search for Clocky before it can be  turned off. It is hoped that by the time you have gone through this process of early morning exercise you are much less likely to return to bed and oversleep your alarm!

Clocky is part of a growing array of technologies and techniques that are now being used throughout the world to nudge people into making better and more productive decisions. As with deciding on a responsible time to get up in the morning the night before, we often find that when  people have time to reflect upon what is the best course of action they make fairly sensible decisions. Problems are said to occur, however, when time is tight, emotions are running high, or we are really enjoying a lie-in.

Mark

Social marketing and segmenting publics

The Department of Health’s White Paper, Choosing Health: making healthy choices easier (HMSO, 2004) sets out an agenda for enabling people to make ‘healthy’ decisions – presented as an appropriate route through the extremes of paternalism on the one hand and an unfettered market on the other. Choosing Health can therefore be understood as part of a wider move towards a self-consciously soft form of paternalism in UK public health policy. Public information, encouragement and shaping “the commercial and cultural environment we live in so that it is easier to choose a healthy lifestyle” are some of the means by which the UK Government defines its role in prompting behavioural changes regarding health.

This is not simply the promotion of ‘informed choice’, but involves explicit attempts to reconfigure the environment in which people make health-related decisions – whether conscious, habitual or emotionally-driven. The realisation of soft paternalism in health behaviours is enabled by the tools and techniques of segmentation and social marketing, which are used in “creating a demand for health choices”. The relatively new disciplinary area of social marketing (see for example, the Institute for Social Marketing, Stirling) draws on recent psychological and behavioural insights about the socio-cultural nature of the decision-maker, their tendency towards following social norms, their systematic biases, and their fallibility in the face of complex, long-term decision-making. Segmenting involves dividing the public into categories such as ‘discovery teens’, ‘younger settlers’, ‘older jugglers’ or ‘active retirement’. In addition to tailoring messages in this way, social marketing aims to use the ‘4Ps’, known as the marketing mix: product, price, place, promotion in order to achieve a ‘social good’ such as a changing damaging behaviours, breaking bad habits and changing attitudes.

This approach requires new infrastructures of governing. Research centres such as the National Social Marketing Centre (NSMC) deploy the very same tactics themselves in order to ‘socially market’ social marketing (French, 2008; Ambitions for Health, 2009). Corporate sponsorship is mobilised in order to extend the distribution channels for health promotion – for instance, within the ‘5 a day’ or ‘Change4Life’ campaigns. And Social Marketing advisors are now embedded in government departments such as DEFRA and the Department for Health, developing segmented approaches to government policy.

Social Marketing is just one of the ways in which libertarian paternalist policies aim to shape decision-making environments. Its growth and potential impact requires sustained interrogation: what are the political implications of differentiating publics using segmentation models – does this create new forms of public value or constrain public solidarity and accountability in public services? Does social marketing constitute new governable subjects, seeking a more consumerist relation to the state and public services? Does this kind of psychological profiling reduce human character to the realm of socio-demographic modelling, limiting the range of alternative identities which can then be taken up? What about the irony that the rampant consumerism created through commercial marketing is now being utilised to counteract some of the problems that it produced? Or as author of VirtualPolitik, Elizabeth Losh, puts it, how can the government be both media-maker and regulator? And perhaps most critically, in transposing corporate methodologies into state practice and policy making itself, do we enjoy a more personalised debate about the delineation of public goods, or is this question sidelined by a concern instead for the differentiation of the public good for segmented publics?

Jessica

Big brother isn’t watching you…you are

Speed cameras, safety cameras, speed guns, camera vans – call them what you will. They are there to provide a disincentive and punishment for those motorists who break the speed limit.  The aim is to save lives, and managing speed is seen as the principal means by which to reduce road accidents and fatalities. Are they a new technology of libertarian paternalism?  A new breed of speed cameras called ‘speed activated signs’ aims to ‘help drivers choose appropriate speeds’ (DfT, 2000). These cameras reflect back to you how fast you are going, so that you (and the drivers behind you) can reconsider how fast you want to be driving.  ‘Do you really want to be going that fast?’ ‘Do you want everyone else to know that you’re breaking the limit?’

This soft paternalist intervention is not immediately punitive or harsh, but is part of a wider initiative to change public attitudes to speeding, and to dispel some of the myths surrounding speeding, which are key to the Department for Transport’s road safety strategy. Knowing that drivers are well-aware of the risks of speeding, potential fines and legal penalties, the task for the government of speed on the roads is to try to understand and intervene in people’s perceptions and motivations for speeding.  Encouraging slower speeds through canny urban design, hazard warnings and traffic calming are one way of shaping the way in which people drive. Another is the promotion of ‘smoother, more careful and less aggressive driving styles’, and rehabilitation courses for errant drivers who have been caught speeding.

Changing our relationship to cars is of course part of a wider set of strategies and initiatives prompting more environmental behaviours.  In this case, rather than protecting you directly from harm, speed activated signs seek to help you to protect yourself and others by encouraging you to slow down and think (or think and slow down).

Jessica

The maternal state: the gendered politics of soft paternalism

Is the state becoming too much like your nanny? Does it act like your dad or more like your uncle? Does it tell you what to do, protect you from harm, or nurture you just like a mother? Which familial figure should the state aspire to be in relation to the cultivation of citizens and the appropriate extent of government regulation?

The justifications for libertarian paternalism are sometimes based on insights from highly gendered accounts of human behaviour derived from behavioural economics, popular psychology and neuroscience. The Cabinet Office discussion paper, Personal Responsibility and Changing Behaviour: the state of knowledge and its implications for public policy (2004) seeks political justification for this new form of governing from a rather narrow range of psychological and neuroscientific theories.  Insights from feminist psychology, political theory, and philosophy are notably absent.

In a recent publication from the Royal Society for the Arts, Manufacturing and Commerce (RSA), for example, an excerpt from Jonah Lehrer’s New York Times bestseller, The Decisive Moment (2009) is accompanied by a garish full-page illustration of a stiletto, embedded with metaphors of conspicuous consumption, vice and unclean living – make-up, perfume, cigarettes, mobile phones, cocktails, credit cards and baby bottles [!?].  In describing the division between reason and feeling ‘proven’ by the new neurosciences and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) technologies, Lehrer deploys a sexualised discourse of temptation, impulsiveness, indulgence and enticement to account for the way in which the ‘emotional brain’ fools the rational mind into increasingly damaging levels of debt.

Whilst feminists have somewhat rejected the need for a ‘theory of the state’ as a blunt and abstract instrument, unpacking the concept of the state and its practices of governing from a feminist perspective is an important task. Questioning the claims of the ‘new neurosciences’ and the appeal to popular psychology and business innovation literature is an equally pressing concern, where state policies are being designed around novel messages from this work.  As feminist sociologist of science, Hilary Rose has pointed out, understanding the social context of consciousness has been a critical oversight of the neurobiological approach.  Others have challenged common interpretations of neuroscientists such as Damasio and LeDoux where the importance of pre-cognitive and automated modes of thinking is inflated, particularly where such authors are used to derive political projects in cultural theory and human geography (Papoulias and Callard, 2010).

Jessica