Book by James Perry: “Almost three decades ago, James Perry created the first survey instrument to measure public service motivation. Since then, social and behavioural scientists have intensively studied the motivating power of public service. This research relating to public service motivation, altruism and prosocial motivation and behaviour has overturned widespread assumptions grounded in market-orientated perspectives and produced a critical mass of new knowledge for transforming the motivation of public employees, civil service policies and management practices. This is the first study to look systematically across the different streams of research. Furthermore, it is the first study to synthesize the research across the applied questions that public organizations and their leaders confront, including: how to recruit ethical and committed staff; how to design meaningful public work; how to create work environments that support prosocial behaviour; how to compensate employees to sustain their public service; how to socialise employees for public service missions; and how to lead employees to engage in causes greater than themselves….(More)”
Getting Everyone Vaccinated, With ‘Nudges’ and Charity Auctions
Richard Thaler at the New York Times: “The good news is that safe and effective vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer appear to be on the way soon and that more are likely to follow.
The bad news is an usual combination: There won’t be enough vaccine on hand to meet initial demand, yet there is also a need to urge everyone to get shots.
I have some suggestions: An unusual type of charity auction, a bit of technology and a few nudges can help….
Economic theory offers a standard method for dealing with shortages. It is, basically: Let markets work. This would mean that those willing to pay the most would get the vaccine first.
Wisely, policymakers are not following this course. Nurses, other frontline workers and most nursing home residents could not win a bidding battle with billionaires. And, to be clear, they should not have to!
Yet there is a small but useful role that prices might play in determining who gets priority in the second round of vaccines, after the first 20 million people have gotten their shots.
At that point, perhaps sometime early this winter, suppose a small proportion of doses are sold in what would amount to a charity auction.
Who might be the winning bidders? Very wealthy individuals and high-tech companies are likely to account for some of the demand, along with businesses that employ high-profile talent like professional athletes and entertainers.
Just imagine how much the National Basketball Association, whose season will start around Christmas, would be willing to pay to ensure that none of its players or staff would be infected! The same goes for Hollywood studios and television production companies that are eager to go back to work.
The prospect of selling off precious vaccine to celebrity athletes and entertainers, hedge fund magnates and high-tech billionaires may strike you as utterly immoral, exacerbating the inequality this disease has already inflicted. But before you dismiss this idea as outrageous, let me make three points.
First, the very purpose of the charity auction would be to redistribute money from the rich to the poor….(More)”.
Intentional and Unintentional Sludge
Essay by Crawford Hollingworth and Liz Barker: “…Both of these stories are illustrations of what many mums and gym–goers may have experienced across the United Kingdom and United States as they tried to cope with the pandemic. We, along with other behavioral scientists, would label both as sludge—when users face high levels of friction obstructing their efforts to achieve something that is in their best interest, or are misled or encouraged to take action that is not in their best interest.
We can think of what the English mum goes through as unintentional sludge—friction due to factors like rushed design, poor infrastructure, and inadequate oversight. The mother is trying to access a benefit that will help her and which she has a right to claim, and which the government genuinely wants her to access. Yet multiple barriers prevented her from accessing the voucher that would help feed her children. Millions of parents found themselves in this situation as schools closed in England earlier this year. All over the country schools ended up paying for food parcels and gift vouchers out of their own budgets to help families who were going hungry.
What the New York gym-goer faces is different. It is intentional sludge—friction put in place knowingly to benefit an organization at the expense of the user. The gym doesn’t want him to cancel the membership, which would mean lost revenue. Even absent the pandemic, the policy would be considered unnecessarily difficult to cancel. The gym’s hope is that people forget, give up, or don’t bother canceling in person or over the phone, or that it takes them longer to do so. This translates into revenue for them, without any of the costs of providing a service. Stories like this have resulted in class-action lawsuits against companies that make it overly difficult or impossible to cancel gym memberships. One lawsuit alleged that one large gym company was stealing over $30 million per month from customers….(More)”.
A nudge helps doctors bring up end-of-life issues with their dying cancer patients
Article by Ravi Parikh et al: “When conversations about goals and end-of-life wishes happen early, they can improve patients’ quality of life and decrease their chances of dying on a ventilator or in an intensive care unit. Yet doctors treating cancer focus so much of their attention on treating the disease that these conversations tend to get put off until it’s too late. This leads to costly and often unwanted care for the patient.Related:
This can be fixed, but it requires addressing two key challenges. The first is that it is often difficult for doctors to know how long patients have left to live. Even among patients in hospice care, doctors get it wrong nearly 70% of the time. Hospitals and private companies have invested millions of dollars to try and identify these outcomes, often using artificial intelligence and machine learning, although most of these algorithms have not been vetted in real-world settings.
In a recent set of studies, our team used data from real-time electronic medical records to develop a machine learning algorithm that identified which cancer patients had a high risk of dying in the next six months. We then tested the algorithm on 25,000 patients who were seen at our health system’s cancer practices and found it performed better than relying only on doctors to identify high-risk patients.
But just because such a tool exists doesn’t mean doctors will use it to prompt more conversations. The second challenge — which is even harder to overcome — is using machine learning to motivate clinicians to have difficult conversations with patients about the end of life.
We wondered if implementing a timely “nudge” that doctors received before seeing their high-risk patients could help them start the conversation.
To test this idea, we used our prediction tool in a clinical trial involving nine cancer practices. Doctors in the nudge group received a weekly report on how many end-of-life conversations they had compared to their peers, along with a list of patients they were scheduled to see the following week who the algorithm deemed at high-risk of dying in the next six months. They could review the list and uncheck any patients they thought were not appropriate for end-of-life conversations. For the patients who remained checked, doctors received a text message on the day of the appointment reminding them to discuss the patient’s goals at the end of life. Doctors in the control group did not receive the email or text message intervention.
As we reported in JAMA Oncology, 15% of doctors who received the nudge text had end-of-life conversations with their patients, compared to just 4% of the control doctors….(More)”.
Behavioral Science and Public Policy
Paper by Cass R. Sunstein: “Behavioral science is playing an increasing role in public policy, and it is raising new questions about fundamental issues – the role of government, freedom of choice, paternalism, and human welfare. In diverse nations, public officials are using behavioral findings to combat serious problems – poverty, air pollution, highway safety, COVID-19, discrimination, employment, climate change, and occupational health. Exploring theory and practice, this Element attempts to provide one-stop shopping for those who are new to the area and for those who are familiar with it. With reference to nudges, taxes, mandates, and bans, it offers concrete examples of behaviorally informed policies. It also engages the fundamental questions, include the proper analysis of human welfare in light of behavioral findings. It offers a plea for respecting freedom of choice – so long as people’s choices are adequately informed and free from behavioral biases….(More)”.
Technology and Democracy: understanding the influence of online technologies on political behaviour and decision-making
Report by the Joint Research Center (EU): “…The report analyses the cognitive challenges posed by four pressure points: attention economy, platform choice architectures, algorithmic content curation and disinformation, and makes policy recommendations to address them.
Specific actions could include banning microtargeting for political ads, transparency rules so that users understand how an algorithm uses their data and to what effect, or requiring online platforms to provide reports to users showing when, how and which of their data is sold.
This report is the second output from the JRC’s Enlightenment 2.0 multi-annual research programme….(More)”.
How Cape Town Used Behavioral Science to Beat Its Water Crisis
Article by Ammaarah Martinus and Faisal Naru: “In March 2018, the metropolitan government of Cape Town, on South Africa’s Western Cape, announced that it had avoided “Day Zero”—the day the dams supplying the city would have reached 13.5 percent capacity, the point at which the water supply to most of the city would be turned off. Earlier in the year, the city had been forecast to hit Day Zero on April 22, 2018.
Fortunately, it didn’t come to this. The city managed to develop a successful water savings campaign which stopped the taps from running dry in Cape Town. Had this not occurred, residents would have had faced severe restrictions on water use and their daily habits would have been upended. For instance, they would have had to visit water collection sites to service their basic needs.
The city’s bold and comprehensive communication strategy around Day Zero, which focused on changing behaviors and implementing clever nudges, was a big part of the success story. Here’s how it unfolded….(More)
Behavioral nudges reduce failure to appear for court
Paper by Alissa Fishbane, Aurelie Ouss and Anuj K. Shah: “Each year, millions of Americans fail to appear in court for low-level offenses, and warrants are then issued for their arrest. In two field studies in New York City, we make critical information salient by redesigning the summons form and providing text message reminders. These interventions reduce failures to appear by 13-21% and lead to 30,000 fewer arrest warrants over a 3-year period. In lab experiments, we find that while criminal justice professionals see failures to appear as relatively unintentional, laypeople believe they are more intentional. These lay beliefs reduce support for policies that make court information salient and increase support for punishment. Our findings suggest that criminal justice policies can be made more effective and humane by anticipating human error in unintentional offenses….(More)”
Dispatches from the Behavioral Scientists Fighting Coronavirus in the Global South
Introduction by Neela Saldanha & Sakshi Ghai: “We are in the middle of a global pandemic, one that has infected more than 35 million people worldwide and killed over 1 million. Almost nine months after the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus a “public health emergency of international concern,” the primary strategies we have to prevent the spread of an invisible and often deadly virus are behavioral—keeping a distance, wearing masks, washing hands. No wonder behavioral science has been thrust into the spotlight. Behavioral scientists have been advising national and local governments, as well as health institutions around the world about the best ways to help people collectively adhere to new behaviors.
Although the pandemic rages globally, 7 of the 10 worst outbreaks in the world are in countries in the Global South. These countries have very different social, cultural, and economic contexts from those in the Global North. Mitigating the pandemic in these countries is not simply a matter of importing recommendations from the north. As Saugato Dutta pointed out, “advice that can seem grounded in universal human tendencies must be careful not to ignore the context in which it is applied.”
What are the elements of context that we need to attend to? What issues are behavioral scientists in Nairobi or New Delhi grappling with as they tackle the virus? What can we learn from the interventions deployed in Brazil or in the Philippines? And how can these lessons inspire the rest of the world?
We thought the best way to understand these questions was simply to ask behavioral scientists in those countries. And so, in this special collection, we have curated dispatches from behavioral scientists in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and South America to learn what’s different about tackling coronavirus.
Our goal is to learn from the work they have done, understand the unique challenges they face, and get their view on what behavioral science needs to focus on to benefit the 80 percent of the world population that lives in these countries. We also hope that this collection will spark ideas and seed collaborations among behavioral scientists in the Global South and North alike. The current situation demands it….(More)”.
Can fake news really change behaviour? Evidence from a study of COVID-19 misinformation.
Paper by Ciara Greene and Gillian Murphy: “Previous research has argued that fake news may have grave consequences for health behaviour, but surprisingly, no empirical data have been provided to support this assumption. This issue takes on new urgency in the context of the coronavirus pandemic. In this large preregistered study (N = 3746) we investigated the effect of exposure to fabricated news stories about COVID-19 on related behavioural intentions. We observed small but measurable effects on some related behavioural intentions but not others – for example, participants who read a story about problems with a forthcoming contact-tracing app reported reduced willingness to download the app. We found no effects of providing a general warning about the dangers of online misinformation on response to the fake stories, regardless of the framing of the warning in positive or negative terms. We conclude with a call for more empirical research on the real-world consequences of fake news….(More)”