Paper by Cristina Bicchieri and Eugen Dimant: “Nudging is a popular approach to achieving positive behavior change. It involves subtle changes to the decision-making environment designed to steer individuals towards making better choices. Norm-nudging is a type of behavioral nudge that aims to change social expectations about what others do or approve/disapprove of in a similar situation. Norm-nudging can be effective when behaviors are interdependent, meaning that their preferences are influenced by others’ actions and/or beliefs. However, norm-nudging is not a one-size-fits-all solution and there are also risks associated with it, such as the potential to be perceived as manipulative or coercive, or the difficulty to effectively implement interventions. To maximize the benefits and minimize the risks of using social information to achieve behavior change, policymakers should carefully choose what behavior they want to promote, consider the target audience for the social information, and be aware of the potential for unintended consequences…(More)”.
Judging Nudging: Understanding the Welfare Effects of Nudges Versus Taxes
Paper by John A. List, Matthias Rodemeier, Sutanuka Roy & Gregory K. Sun: “While behavioral non-price interventions (“nudges”) have grown from academic curiosity to a bona fide policy tool, their relative economic efficiency remains under-researched. We develop a unified framework to estimate welfare effects of both nudges and taxes. We showcase our approach by creating a database of more than 300 carefully hand-coded point estimates of non-price and price interventions in the markets for cigarettes, influenza vaccinations, and household energy. While nudges are effective in changing behavior in all three markets, they are not necessarily the most efficient policy. We find that nudges are more efficient in the market for cigarettes, while taxes are more efficient in the energy market. For influenza vaccinations, optimal subsidies likely outperform nudges. Importantly, two key factors govern the difference in results across markets: i) an elasticity-weighted standard deviation of the behavioral bias, and ii) the magnitude of the average externality. Nudges dominate taxes whenever i) exceeds ii). Combining nudges and taxes does not always provide quantitatively significant improvements to implementing one policy tool alone…(More)”.
Five Enablers for a New Phase of Behavioral Science
Article by Michael Hallsworth: “Over recent weeks I’ve been sharing parts of a “manifesto” that tries to give a coherent vision for the future of applied behavioral science. Stepping back, if I had to identify a theme that comes through the various proposals, it would be the need for self-reflective practice.
Behavioral science has seen a tremendous amount of growth and interest over the last decade, largely focused on expanding its uses and methods. My sense is it’s ready for a new phase of maturity. That maturity involves behavioral scientists reflecting on the various ways that their actions are shaped by structural, institutional, environmental, economic, and historical factors.
I’m definitely not exempt from this need for self-reflection. There are times when I’ve focused on a cognitive bias when I should have been spending more time exploring the context and motivations for a decision instead. Sometimes I’ve homed in on a narrow slice of a problem that we can measure, even if that means dispensing with wider systemic effects and challenges. Once I spent a long time trying to apply the language of heuristics and biases to explain why people were failing to use the urgent care alternatives to hospital emergency departments, before realizing that their behavior was completely reasonable.
The manifesto critiques things like this, but it doesn’t have all the answers. Because it tries to both cover a lot of ground and go into detail, many of the hard knots of implementation go unpicked. The truth is that writing reports and setting goals is the easy part. Turning those goals into practice is much tougher; as behavioral scientists know, there is often a gap between intention and action.
Right now, I and others don’t always realize the ambitions set out in the manifesto. Changing that is going to take time and effort, and it will involve the discomfort of disrupting familiar practices. Some have made public commitments in this direction; my organization is working on upgrading its practices in line with proposals around making predictions prior to implementation, strengthening RCTs to cope with complexity, and enabling people to use behavioral science, among others.
The truth is that writing reports and setting goals is the easy part. Turning those goals into practice is much tougher; as behavioral scientists know, there is often a gap between intention and action.
But changes by individual actors will not be enough. The big issue is that several of the proposals require coordination. For example, one of the key ideas is the need for more multisite studies that are well coordinated and have clear goals. Another prioritizes developing international professional networks to support projects in low- and middle-income countries…(More)”.
Misunderstanding Misinformation
Article by Claire Wardle: “In the fall of 2017, Collins Dictionary named fake news word of the year. It was hard to argue with the decision. Journalists were using the phrase to raise awareness of false and misleading information online. Academics had started publishing copiously on the subject and even named conferences after it. And of course, US president Donald Trump regularly used the epithet from the podium to discredit nearly anything he disliked.
By spring of that year, I had already become exasperated by how this term was being used to attack the news media. Worse, it had never captured the problem: most content wasn’t actually fake, but genuine content used out of context—and only rarely did it look like news. I made a rallying cry to stop using fake news and instead use misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation under the umbrella term information disorder. These terms, especially the first two, have caught on, but they represent an overly simple, tidy framework I no longer find useful.
Both disinformation and misinformation describe false or misleading claims, but disinformation is distributed with the intent to cause harm, whereas misinformation is the mistaken sharing of the same content. Analyses of both generally focus on whether a post is accurate and whether it is intended to mislead. The result? We researchers become so obsessed with labeling the dots that we can’t see the larger pattern they show.
By focusing narrowly on problematic content, researchers are failing to understand the increasingly sizable number of people who create and share this content, and also overlooking the larger context of what information people actually need. Academics are not going to effectively strengthen the information ecosystem until we shift our perspective from classifying every post to understanding the social contexts of this information, how it fits into narratives and identities, and its short-term impacts and long-term harms…(More)”.
An Audit Framework for Adopting AI-Nudging on Children
Paper by Marianna Ganapini, and Enrico Panai: “This is an audit framework for AI-nudging. Unlike the static form of nudging usually discussed in the literature, we focus here on a type of nudging that uses large amounts of data to provide personalized, dynamic feedback and interfaces. We call this AI-nudging (Lanzing, 2019, p. 549; Yeung, 2017). The ultimate goal of the audit outlined here is to ensure that an AI system that uses nudges will maintain a level of moral inertia and neutrality by complying with the recommendations, requirements, or suggestions of the audit (in other words, the criteria of the audit). In the case of unintended negative consequences, the audit suggests risk mitigation mechanisms that can be put in place. In the case of unintended positive consequences, it suggests some reinforcement mechanisms. Sponsored by the IBM-Notre Dame Tech Ethics Lab…(More)”.
The Untapped Potential of Computing and Cognition in Tackling Climate Change
Article by Adiba Proma, Robert Wachter and Ehsan Hoque: “Alongside the search for climate-protecting technologies like EVs, more effort needs to be directed to harnessing technology to promote climate-protecting behavior change. This will take focus, leadership, and cooperation among technologists, investors, business executives, educators, and governments. Unfortunately, such focus, leadership, and cooperation have been lacking.
Persuading people to change their lifestyles to benefit the next generations is a significant challenge. We argue that simple changes in how technologies are built and deployed can significantly lower society’s carbon footprint.
While it is challenging to influence human behavior, there are opportunities to offer nudges and just-in-time interventions by tweaking certain aspects of technology. For example, the “Climate Pledge Friendly” tag added to products that meet Amazon’s sustainability standards can help users identify and purchase ecofriendly products while shopping online [3]. Similarly, to help users make more ecofriendly choices while traveling, Google Flights provides information on average carbon dioxide emission for flights and Google Maps tags the “most fuel-efficient” route for vehicles.
Computer scientists can draw on concepts from psychology, moral dilemma, and human cooperation to build technologies that can encourage people to lead ecofriendly lifestyles. Many mobile health applications have been developed to motivate people to exercise, eat a healthy diet, sleep better, and manage chronic diseases. Some apps designed to improve sleep, mental wellbeing, and calorie intake have as many as 200 million active users. The use of apps and other internet tools can be adapted to promote lifestyle changes for climate change. For example, Google Nest rewards users with a “leaf” when they meet an energy goal…(More)”.
The Curious Side Effects of Medical Transparency
Essay by Danielle Ofri: “Transparency, Pozen told me, “invites conceptual confusion about whether it’s a first-order good that we’re trying to pursue for its own sake, or a second-order good that we’re trying to use instrumentally to achieve other goods.” In the first case, we might feel that transparency is an ideal always worth embracing, whatever the costs. In the second, we might ask ourselves what it’s accomplishing, and how it compares with other routes to the same end.
“There is a standard view that transparency is all good—the more transparency, the better,” the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, an associate professor at the University of Utah, told me. But “you have a completely different experience of transparency when you are the subject.” In a previous position, Nguyen had been part of a department that had to provide evidence that it was using state funding to satisfactorily educate its students. Philosophers, he told me, would want to describe their students’ growing reflectiveness, curiosity, and “intellectual humility,” but knew that this kind of talk would likely befuddle or bore legislators; they had to focus instead on concrete numbers, such as graduation rates and income after graduation. Nguyen and his colleagues surely want their students to graduate and earn a living wage, but such stats hardly sum up what it means to be a successful philosopher.
In Nguyen’s view, this illustrates a problem with transparency. “In any scheme of transparency in which you have experts being transparent to nonexperts, you’re going to get a significant amount of information loss,” he said. What’s meaningful in a philosophy department can be largely incomprehensible to non-philosophers, so the information must be recast in simplified terms. Furthermore, simplified metrics frequently distort incentives. If graduation rates are the metric by which funding is determined, then a school might do whatever it takes to bolster them. Although some of these efforts might add value to students’ learning, it’s also possible to game the system in ways that are counterproductive to actual education.
Transparency is often portrayed as objective, but, like a camera, it is subject to manipulation even as it appears to be relaying reality. Ida Koivisto, a legal scholar at the University of Helsinki, has studied the trade-offs that flow from who holds that camera. She finds that when an authority—a government agency, a business, a public figure—elects to be transparent, people respond positively, concluding that the willingness to be open reflects integrity, and thus confers legitimacy. Since the authority has initiated this transparency, however, it naturally chooses to be transparent in areas where it looks good. Voluntary transparency sacrifices a degree of truth. On the other hand, when transparency is initiated by outside forces—mandates, audits, investigations—both the good and the bad are revealed. Such involuntary transparency is more truthful, but it often makes its subject appear flawed and dishonest, and so less legitimate. There’s a trade-off, Koivisto concludes, between “legitimacy” and “the ‘naked truth.’ ”..(More)”.
What Makes People Act on Climate Change, according to Behavioral Science
Article by Andrea Thompson: “As the world hurtles toward a future with temperatures above the thresholds scientists say will lead to the worst climate disruptions, humanity needs to take all the actions it can—collectively and as individuals—to bring planet-warming emissions down as quickly as possible. Governments and companies need to do the lion’s share of the work, but ordinary people will also need to make changes in their everyday lives. A crucial question has been how best to spur people toward more climate-friendly behaviors, such as taking the bus instead of driving or reducing home energy use.
New research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA pooled the results of 430 individual studies that examined environment-related behaviors such as recycling or choosing a mode of transportation—and that looked into changing those behaviors through several interventions, including financial incentives and educational campaigns. The authors analyzed how six different types of interventions compared with one another in their ability to influence real-world behavior and at how five behaviors compared in terms of how easy they were to change.
As can be seen in the graphic below, financial incentives and social pressure worked better at changing behaviors than did education or feedback (for example, reports of one’s own electricity use). The results reinforced what environmental psychologists have found when looking at these interventions in isolation…(More)”.
Behavioral Economics: Policy Impact and Future Directions
Report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: “Behavioral economics – a field based in collaborations among economists and psychologists – focuses on integrating a nuanced understanding of behavior into models of decision-making. Since the mid-20th century, this growing field has produced research in numerous domains and has influenced policymaking, research, and marketing. However, little has been done to assess these contributions and review evidence of their use in the policy arena.
Behavioral Economics: Policy Impact and Future Directions examines the evidence for behavioral economics and its application in six public policy domains: health, retirement benefits, climate change, social safety net benefits, climate change, education, and criminal justice. The report concludes that the principles of behavioral economics are indispensable for the design of policy and recommends integrating behavioral specialists into policy development within government units. In addition, the report calls for strengthening research methodology and identifies research priorities for building on the accomplishments of the field to date…(More)”.
The Real Opportunities for Empowering People through Behavioral Science
Essay by Michael Hallsworth: “…There’s much to be gained by broadening out from designing choice architecture with little input from those who use it. But I think we need to change the way we talk about the options available.
Let’s start by noting that attention has focused on three opportunities in particular: nudge plus, self-nudges, and boosts.
Nudge plus is where a prompt to encourage reflection is built into the design and delivery of a nudge (or occurs close to it). People cannot avoid being made aware of the nudge and its purpose, enabling them to decide whether they approve of it or not. While some standard nudges, like commitment devices, already contain an element of self-reflection, a nudge plus must include an “active trigger.”
A self-nudge is where someone designs a nudge to influence their own behavior. In other words, they “structure their own decision environments” to make an outcome they desire more likely. An example might be creating a reminder to store snacks in less obvious and accessible places after they are bought.
Boosts emerge from the perspective that many of the heuristics we use to navigate our lives are useful and can be taught. A boost is when someone is helped to develop a skill, based on behavioral science, that will allow them to exercise their own agency and achieve their goals. Boosts aim at building people’s competences to influence their own behavior, whereas nudges try to alter the surrounding context and leave such competences unchanged.
When these ideas are discussed, there is often an underlying sense of “we need to move away from nudging and towards these approaches.” But to frame things this way neglects the crucial question of how empowerment actually happens.
Right now, there is often a simplistic division between disempowering nudges on one side and enabling nudge plus/self-nudges/boosts on the other. In fact, these labels disguise two real drivers of empowerment that cut across the categories. They are:
- How far a person performing the behavior is involved in shaping the initiative itself. They could not be involved at all, involved in co-designing the intervention, or initiating and driving the intervention itself.
- The level and nature of any capacity created by the intervention. It may create none (i.e., have no cognitive or motivational effects), it may create awareness (i.e., the ability to reflect on what is happening), or it may build the ability to carry out an action (e.g., a skill).
The figure below shows how the different proposals map against these two drivers.
A major point this figure calls attention to is co-design, which uses creative methods “to engage citizens, stakeholders and officials in an iterative process to respond to shared problems.” In other words, the people affected by an issue or change are involved as participants, rather than subjects. This involvement is intended to create more effective, tailored, and appropriate interventions that respond to a broader range of evidence…(More)”.