Ralph Hertwig and Till Grüne-Yanoff in Perspectives on Psychological Science: “In recent years, policy makers worldwide have begun to acknowledge the potential value of insights from psychology and behavioral economics into how people make decisions. These insights can inform the design of nonregulatory and nonmonetary policy interventions—as well as more traditional fiscal and coercive measures. To date, much of the discussion of behaviorally informed approaches has emphasized “nudges,” that is, interventions designed to steer people in a particular direction while preserving their freedom of choice. Yet behavioral science also provides support for a distinct kind of nonfiscal and noncoercive intervention, namely, “boosts.” The objective of boosts is to foster people’s competence to make their own choices—that is, to exercise their own agency. Building on this distinction, we further elaborate on how boosts are conceptually distinct from nudges: The two kinds of interventions differ with respect to (a) their immediate intervention targets, (b) their roots in different research programs, (c) the causal pathways through which they affect behavior, (d) their assumptions about human cognitive architecture, (e) the reversibility of their effects, (f) their programmatic ambitions, and (g) their normative implications. We discuss each of these dimensions, provide an initial taxonomy of boosts, and address some possible misconceptions….(More)”.
The Nudging Divide in the Digital Big Data Era
Julia M. Puaschunder in the International Robotics & Automation Journal: “Since the end of the 1970ies a wide range of psychological, economic and sociological laboratory and field experiments proved human beings deviating from rational choices and standard neo-classical profit maximization axioms to fail to explain how human actually behave. Behavioral economists proposed to nudge and wink citizens to make better choices for them with many different applications. While the motivation behind nudging appears as a noble endeavor to foster peoples’ lives around the world in very many different applications, the nudging approach raises questions of social hierarchy and class division. The motivating force of the nudgital society may open a gate of exploitation of the populace and – based on privacy infringements – stripping them involuntarily from their own decision power in the shadow of legally-permitted libertarian paternalism and under the cloak of the noble goal of welfare-improving global governance. Nudging enables nudgers to plunder the simple uneducated citizen, who is neither aware of the nudging strategies nor able to oversee the tactics used by the nudgers.
The nudgers are thereby legally protected by democratically assigned positions they hold or by outsourcing strategies used, in which social media plays a crucial rule. Social media forces are captured as unfolding a class dividing nudgital society, in which the provider of social communication tools can reap surplus value from the information shared of social media users. The social media provider thereby becomes a capitalist-industrialist, who benefits from the information shared by social media users, or so-called consumer-workers, who share private information in their wish to interact with friends and communicate to public. The social media capitalist-industrialist reaps surplus value from the social media consumer-workers’ information sharing, which stems from nudging social media users. For one, social media space can be sold to marketers who can constantly penetrate the consumer-worker in a subliminal way with advertisements. But also nudging occurs as the big data compiled about the social media consumer-worker can be resold to marketers and technocrats to draw inferences about consumer choices, contemporary market trends or individual personality cues used for governance control, such as, for instance, border protection and tax compliance purposes.
The law of motion of the nudging societies holds an unequal concentration of power of those who have access to compiled data and who abuse their position under the cloak of hidden persuasion and in the shadow of paternalism. In the nudgital society, information, education and differing social classes determine who the nudgers and who the nudged are. Humans end in different silos or bubbles that differ in who has power and control and who is deceived and being ruled. The owners of the means of governance are able to reap a surplus value in a hidden persuasion, protected by the legal vacuum to curb libertarian paternalism, in the moral shadow of the unnoticeable guidance and under the cloak of the presumption that some know what is more rational than others. All these features lead to an unprecedented contemporary class struggle between the nudgers (those who nudge) and the nudged (those who are nudged), who are divided by the implicit means of governance in the digital scenery. In this light, governing our common welfare through deceptive means and outsourced governance on social media appears critical. In combination with the underlying assumption of the nudgers knowing better what is right, just and fair within society, the digital age and social media tools hold potential unprecedented ethical challenges….(More)”
Responding to problems: actions are rewarded, regardless of the outcome
Asmus Leth Olsen at Public Management Review: “When faced with a problem, policymakers have a choice of action or inaction. Psychological research shows varying results on how individuals evaluate (in)actions conditional on the subsequent outcome. I replicate, generalize, and extend this research into a public management setting with two independent experiments embedded in a nationally representative sample of Danish citizens (n = 2,007).
Both experiments show that actions are evaluated more positively than inactions – regardless of the outcome. This finding runs contrary to the inaction (or omission) bias but is consistent with evidence on a “norm of action”, in response to poor performance in political–administrative settings….(More)”
Nudges in a post-truth world
Neil Levy at the Journal of Medical Ethics: “Nudges—policy proposals informed by work in behavioural economics and psychology that are designed to lead to better decision-making or better behaviour—are controversial. Critics allege that they bypass our deliberative capacities, thereby undermining autonomy and responsible agency. In this paper, I identify a kind of nudge I call a nudge to reason, which make us more responsive to genuine evidence. I argue that at least some nudges to reason do not bypass our deliberative capacities. Instead, use of these nudges should be seen as appeals to mechanisms partially constitutive of these capacities, and therefore as benign (so far as autonomy and responsible agency are concerned). I sketch some concrete proposals for nudges to reason which are especially important given the apparent widespread resistance to evidence seen in recent political events….(More)”.
Some Countries Like ‘Nudges’ More Than Others
Cass Sunstein at Bloomberg: “All over the world, private and public institutions have been adopting “nudges” — interventions that preserve freedom of choice, but that steer people in a particular direction.
A GPS device nudges you. So does a reminder from your doctor, informing you that you have an appointment next Wednesday; an automatic enrollment policy from your employer, defaulting you into a 401(k) plan; and a calorie label at fast-food restaurants, telling you that a cheeseburger won’t be great for your waistline.
Recent evidence demonstrates that nudges can be amazingly effective — far more so, per dollar spent, than other tools, such as economic incentives. But a big question remains: Across different nations, do nudges have the same impact? Here’s a cautionary note.
One of the most famous success stories in the annals of nudging comes from the U.K. To encourage delinquent taxpayers to pay up, British officials simply informed them, by letter, that the overwhelming majority of British taxpayers pay their taxes on time.
It worked. Within just a few weeks, the letters produced millions of dollars in additional revenue. Consistent with standard findings in behavioral science, recipients of the letters didn’t like learning that they were deviating from the social norm. Like most of us, they didn’t want to be creeps or shirkers, and so they paid up.
For other nations, including the U.S., that was an intriguing finding. So our Department of Treasury tried the same approach. It sent letters to delinquent taxpayers, informing them (accurately) that 91 percent of American taxpayers pay on time. On the basis of the British data, the expectation was that a lot of people would be ashamed, and pay their taxes.
Except they didn’t. The U.S. Treasury didn’t get any more money.
How come? It’s reasonable to speculate that in the U.S., delinquent taxpayers just don’t care about the social norm. If they learn about it, they still aren’t motivated to pay.
This finding demonstrates that different groups can react very differently to nudges. It’s well known that when people are told that they are using more energy than their neighbors, they scale back — so that information is an effective nudge. But a study in California suggests that things are a bit more complicated….
In general, we don’t yet have a lot of evidence of international differences on the impact of nudges. But it would be surprising if such evidence doesn’t start to accumulate. Wherever people begin with strong preferences, and don’t like the direction in which they are being nudged, nudges are going to have a weaker effect.
For many nudges, that’s just fine. Actually, it’s part of the point….(More)”.
Shaping space for civic life: Can better design help engage citizens?
Patrick Sisson at Curbed: “…The Assembly Civic Engagement Survey, a new report released yesterday by the Center for Active Design, seeks to understand the connections between the design of public spaces and buildings on public life, and eventually create a toolbox for planners and politicians to make decisions that can help improve civic pride. There’s perhaps an obvious connection between what one might consider a better-designed neighborhood and public perception of government and community, but how to design that neighborhood to directly improve public engagement—especially during an era of low voter engagement and partisan divide—is an important, and unanswered, question….
One of the most striking findings was around park signage. Respondents were shown a series of three signs, ranging from a traditional display of park rules and prohibitions to a more proactive, engaging pictograph that tells parkgoers it’s okay to give high-fives. The survey found the simple switch to more eye-catching, positive, and entertaining signage improved neighborhood pride by 11 percent and boosted the feeling that “the city cares for people in this park” by 9 percent. Similar improvements were found in surveys looking at signage on community centers.
According to Frank, the biggest revelation from the research is how a minimum of effort can make a large impact. On one hand, she says, it doesn’t take a genius to realize that transforming a formerly graffiti-covered vacant lot into a community garden can impact community trust and cohesion.
What sticks out from the study’s findings is how little is really necessary to shift attitudes and improve people’s trust in their neighborhoods and attitudes toward city government and police. Litter turned out to be a huge issue: High levels of trash eroded community pride by 10 percent, trust in police by 5 percent, and trust in local government by 4 percent. When presented with a series of seven things they could improve about their city, including crime, traffic, and noise, 23 percent of respondents chose litter.
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In short, disorder erodes civic trust. The small things matter, especially when cities are formulating budgets and streetscaping plans and looking at the most effective ways of investing in community improvements….
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Giving cities direction as well as data
Beyond connecting the dots, Frank wants to give planners rationale for their actions. Telling designers that placing planters in the middle of a street can beautify a neighborhood is one thing; showing that this kind of beautification increases walkability, brings more shoppers to a commercial strip, and ultimately leads to higher sales and tax revenue spurs action and innovation.
Frank gives the example of redesigning the streetscape in front of a police station. The idea of placing planters and benches may seem like a poor use of limited funds, until data and research reveals it’s a cost-effective way to encourage interactions between cops and the community and helps change the image of the department….(More)”
Towards Crowd-Scale Deliberation
Paper by Mark Klein: “Let us define deliberation as the activity where groups of people (1) identify possible solutions for a problem, (2) evaluate these alternatives, and (3) select the solution(s) that best meet their needs. Deliberation processes have changed little in centuries. Typically, small groups of powerful players craft policies behind closed doors, and then battle to engage wider support for their preferred options. Most people affected by the decisions have at best limited input into defining the solution options. This approach has become increasingly inadequate as the scale and complexity of the problems we face has increased. Many important ideas and perspectives simply do not get incorporated, squandering the opportunity for far superior outcomes. We have the potential to do much better by radically widening the circle of people involved in complex deliberations, moving from “team” scales (tens of participants) to “crowd” scales (hundreds, thousands, or more).
This is because crowd-scale interactions have been shown to produce, in appropriate circumstances, such powerful emergent phenomena as:
- The long tail: crowd-scale participation enables access to a much greater diversity of ideas than would otherwise be practical: potentially superior solutions “small voices” (the tail of the frequency distribution) have a chance to be heard .
- Idea synergy: the ability for users to share their creations in a common forum can enable a synergistic explosion of creativity, since people often develop new ideas by forming novel combinations and extensions of ideas that have been put out by others.
- Many eyes: crowds can produce remarkably high-quality results (e.g. in open source software) by virtue of the fact that there are multiple independent verifications – many eyes continuously checking the shared content for errors and correcting them .
- Wisdom of the crowds: large groups of (appropriately independent, motivated and informed) contributors can collectively make better judgments than those produced by the individuals that make them up, often exceeding the performance of experts,because their collective judgment cancels out the biases and gaps of the individual members…
Our team has been developing crowd-scale deliberation support technologies that address these three fundamental challenges by enabling:
- better ideation: helping crowds develop better solution ideas
- better evaluation: helping crowds evaluate potential solutions more accurately
- better decision-making: helping crowds select pareto-optimal solutions…(More)”.
Should Governments Invest More in Nudging?
Shlomo Benartzi, John Beshears, Katherine L. Milkman et al in Psychological Science: “Governments are increasingly adopting behavioral science techniques for changing individual behavior in pursuit of policy objectives. The types of “nudge” interventions that governments are now adopting alter people’s decisions without coercion or significant changes to economic incentives. We calculated ratios of impact to cost for nudge interventions and for traditional policy tools, such as tax incentives and other financial inducements, and we found that nudge interventions often compare favorably with traditional interventions. We conclude that nudging is a valuable approach that should be used more often in conjunction with traditional policies, but more calculations are needed to determine the relative effectiveness of nudging….(More)”.
How to increase public support for policy: understanding citizens’ perspectives
Peter van Wijck and Bert Niemeijer at LSE Blog: “To increase public support, it is essential to anticipate what reactions they will have to policy. But how to do that? Our framework combines insights from scenario planning and frame analysis. Scenario planning starts from the premise that we cannot predict the future. We can, however, imagine different plausible scenarios, different plausible future developments. Scenarios can be used to ask a ‘what if’ question. If a certain scenario were to develop, what policy measures would be required? By the same token, scenarios may be used as test-conditions for policy-measures. Kees van der Heijden calls this ‘wind tunnelling’.
Frame-analysis is about how we interpret the world around us. Frames are mental structures that shape the way we see the world. Based on a frame, an individual perceives societal problems, attributes these problems to causes, and forms ideas on instruments to address the problems. Our central idea is that policy-makers may use citizens’ frames to reflect on their policy frame. Citizens’ frames may, in other words, be used to test conditions in a wind tunnel. The line of reasoning is summarized in the figure.
Policy frames versus citizens’ frames
The starting-points of the figure are the policy frame and the citizens’ frames. Arrow 1 and 2 indicate that citizens’ reactions depend on both frames. A citizen can be expected to respond positively in case of frame alignment. Negative responses can be expected if policy-makers do not address “the real problems”, do not attribute problems to “the real causes”, or do not select “adequate instruments”. If frames do not align, policy-makers are faced with the question of how to deal with it (arrow 3). First, they may reconsider the policy frame (arrow 4). That is, are there reasons to reconsider the definition of problems, the attribution to causes, and/or the selection of instruments? Such a “reframing” effectively amounts to the formulation of a new (or adjusted) policy-frame. Second, policy-makers may try to influence citizens’ frames (arrow 5). This may lead to a change in what citizens define as problems, what they consider to be the causes of problems and what they consider to be adequate instruments to deal with the problems.
Two cases: support for victims and confidence in the judiciary
To apply our framework in practice, we developed a three-step method. Firstly, we reconstruct the policy frame. Here we investigate what policy-makers see as social problems, what they assume to be the causes of these problems, and what they consider to be appropriate instruments to address these problems. Secondly, we reconstruct contrasting citizens’ frames. Here we use focus groups, where contrasting groups are selected based on a segmentation model. Finally, we engage in a “wind tunnelling exercise”. We present the citizens’ frames to policy-makers. And we ask them to reflect on the question of how the different groups can be expected to react on the policy measures selected by the policy-makers. In fact, this step is what Schön and Rein called “frame reflection”….(More)”.
Policymakers around the world are embracing behavioural science
The Economist: “In 2013 thousands of school pupils in England received a letter from a student named Ben at the University of Bristol. The recipients had just gained good marks in their GCSEs, exams normally taken at age 16. But they attended schools where few pupils progressed to university at age 18, and those that did were likely to go to their nearest one. That suggested the schools were poor at nurturing aspiration. In his letter Ben explained that employers cared about the reputation of the university a job applicant has attended. He pointed out that top universities can be a cheaper option for poorer pupils, because they give more financial aid. He added that he had not known these facts at the recipient’s age.
The letters had the effect that was hoped for. A study published in March found that after leaving school, the students who received both Ben’s letter and another, similar one some months later were more likely to be at a prestigious university than those who received just one of the letters, and more likely again than those who received none. For each extra student in a better university, the initiative cost just £45 ($58), much less than universities’ own attempts to broaden their intake. And the approach was less heavy-handed than imposing quotas for poorer pupils, an option previous governments had considered. The education department is considering rolling out the scheme….
Some critics feared that nudges would do little good, and that their effects would fade over time. Others warned that governments were straying perilously close to mass manipulation. More recently, some of the findings on which the behavioural sciences rest have been questioned, as researchers in many fields have sought to replicate famous results, and failed.
By and large those doubts have been allayed. Even if specific results turn out to be mistaken, an experimental, iterative, data-driven approach to policymaking is gaining ground in many places, not just in dedicated units, but throughout government.
Nudging is hardly new. “In Genesis, Satan nudged, and Eve did too,” writes Cass Sunstein of Harvard University. From the middle of the 20th century psychologists such as Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo showed how sensitive humans are to social pressure. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky described the mental shortcuts and biases that influence decision-making. Dale Carnegie and Robert Cialdini wrote popular books on persuasion. Firms, especially in technology, retail and advertising, used behavioural science to shape brand perception and customer behaviour—and, ultimately, to sell more stuff.
But governments’ use of psychological insights to achieve policy goals was occasional and unsystematic. According to David Halpern, the boss of BIT, as far as policymakers were concerned, psychology was “the sickly sibling to economics”. That began to change after Mr Sunstein and Richard Thaler, an economist, published “Nudge”, in 2008. The book attacked the assumption of rational decision-making inherent in most economic models and showed how “choice architecture”, or context, could be changed to “nudge” people to make better choices…..
Now many governments are turning to nudges to save money and do better. In 2014 the White House opened the Social and Behavioural Sciences Team. A report that year by Mark Whitehead of Aberystwyth University counted 51 countries in which “centrally directed policy initiatives” were influenced by behavioural sciences. Non-profit organisations such as Ideas42, set up in 2008 at Harvard University, help run dozens of nudge-style trials and programmes around the world. In 2015 the World Bank set up a group that is now applying behavioural sciences in 52 poor countries. The UN is turning to nudging to help hit the “sustainable development goals”, a list of targets it has set for 2030….
Among the most effective nudges are “social” ones: those that communicate norms or draw on people’s networks. A scheme tested in Guatemala with help from the World Bank and BIT tweaked the wording of letters sent to people and firms who had failed to submit tax returns the previous year. The letters that framed non-payment as an active choice, or noted that paying up is more common than evasion, cut the number of non-payers in the following year and increased the average sum paid. And a trial involving diabetes shows that it matters to nudge at the right moment. In 2014 Hamad Medical Corporation, a health-care provider in Qatar, raised take-up rates for diabetes screening by offering it during Ramadan. That meant most Qataris were fasting, so the need to do so before the test imposed no extra burden….(More)”.