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)”.
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)”.
Essay by Madeline Ashby: “…This contributes to what my colleague Scott Smith calls “flat-pack futures”, or what the Canadian scholar Sun-ha Hong calls “technofutures”, which “preach revolutionary change while practicing a politics of inertia”. These visions of possible future realities possess a mass-market sameness. They look like what happens when you tell an AI image generator to draw the future: just a slurry of genuine human creativity machined into a fine paste. Drone delivery, driverless cars, blockchain this, alt-currency that, smart mirrors, smart everything,and not a speck of dirt or illness or poverty or protest anywhere. Bloodless, bland, boring, banal. It is like ordering your future from the kids’ menu.
When we cannot acknowledge how bad things are, we cannot imagine how to improve them. As with so many challenges, the first step is admitting there is a problem. But if you are isolated, ignored, or ridiculed at work or at home for acknowledging that problem, the problem becomes impossible to deal with. How we treat existential threats to the planet today is how doctors treated women’s cancers until the latter half of the 20th century: by refusing to tell the patient she was dying.
But the issue is not just toxic positivity. Remember those myths about the warnings that go unheeded? The moral of those stories is not that some people are doomed never to be listened to. The moral of those stories is that people in power do not want to hear how they might lose it. It is not that the predictions were wrong, but that they were simply not what people wanted to hear. To work in futures, you have to tell people things they don’t want to hear. And this is when it is useful to tell a story….(More)”
Article by Pauline Kabitsis and Lydia Trupe: “In recent years, the field has been critiqued for applying behavioral science at the margins, settling for small but statistically significant effect sizes. Critics have argued that by focusing our efforts on nudging individuals to increase their 401(k) contributions or to reduce their so-called carbon footprint, we have ignored the systemic drivers of important challenges, such as fundamental flaws in the financial system and corporate responsibility for climate change. As Michael Hallsworth pointsout, however, the field may not be willfully ignoring these deeper challenges, but rather investing in areas of change that are likely easier to move, measure, and secure funding.
It’s been our experience working in the Global South that nudge-based solutions can provide short-term gains within current systems, but for lasting impact a focus beyond individual-level change is required. This is because the challenges in the Global South typically navigate fundamental problems, like enabling women’s reproductive choice,combatting intimate partner violence and improving food security among the world’s most vulnerable populations.
Our work at Common Thread focuses on improving behaviors related to health, like encouraging those persistently left behind to get vaccinated, and enabling Ukrainian refugees in Poland to access health and welfare services. We use a behavioral model that considers not just the individual biases that impact people’s behaviors, but the structural, social, interpersonal, and even historical context that triggers these biases and inhibits health seeking behaviors…(More)”.
Paper by Jakob Laage-Thomsen: “Recent work on consultants and academics in public policy has highlighted their transformational role. The paper traces how, in the absence of an explicit government strategy, external advisors establish different organizational arrangements to build Behavioral Insights in public agencies as a new form of administrative expertise. This variation shows the importance of the politico-administrative context within which external advisors exert influence. The focus on professional expertise adds to existing understandings of ideational compatibility in contemporary Policy Advisory Systems. Inspired by the Sociology of Professions, expertise is conceptualized as professionally constructed sets of diagnosis, inference, and treatment. The paper compares four Danish governmental agencies since 2010, revealing the central roles external advisors play in facilitating new policy ideas and diffusing new forms of expertise. This has implications for how we think of administrative expertise in contemporary bureaucracies, and the role of external advisors in fostering new forms of expertise….(More)”.
Book by František Ochrana and Radek Kovács: “Behavioral economics sees “nudges” as ways to encourage people to re-evaluate their priorities in such a way that they voluntarily change their behavior, leading to personal and social benefits. This book examines nudging as a tool for influencing human behavior in health policy. The authors investigate the contemporary scientific discourse on nudging and enrich it with an ontological, epistemological, and praxeological analysis of human behavior. Based on analyses of the literature and a systemic review, the book defines nudging tools within the paradigm of prospect theory. In addition to the theoretical contribution, Nudging also examines and offers suggestions on the practice of health policy regarding obesity, malnutrition, and especially type 2 diabetes mellitus…(More)”.
Paper by Isabelle Freiling et al: “A growing chorus of academicians, public health officials, and other science communicators have warned of what they see as an ill-informed public making poor personal or electoral decisions. Misinformation is often seen as an urgent new problem, so some members of these communities have pushed for quick but untested solutions without carefully diagnosing ethical pitfalls of rushed interventions. This article argues that attempts to “cure” public opinion that are inconsistent with best available social science evidence not only leave the scientific community vulnerable to long-term reputational damage but also raise significant ethical questions. It also suggests strategies for communicating science and health information equitably, effectively, and ethically to audiences affected by it without undermining affected audiences’ agency over what to do with it…(More)”.
Book by Sander van der Linden: “From fake news to conspiracy theories, from pandemics to politics, misinformation may be the defining problem of our era. Like a virus, misinformation infects our minds – altering our beliefs and replicating at astonishing rates. Once the virus takes hold, our primary strategies of fact-checking and debunking are an insufficient cure.
In Foolproof Sander van der Linden describes how to inoculate yourself and others against the spread of misinformation, discern fact from fiction and push back against methods of mass persuasion.
Everyone is susceptible to fake news. There are polarising narratives in society, conspiracy theories are rife, fake experts dole out misleading advice and accuracy is often lost in favour of sensationalist headlines. So how and why does misinformation spread if we’re all aware of its existence? And, more importantly, what can we do about it?…(More)”.
Editorial by Suzanne Bakken: “In this editorial, I highlight 5 papers that address innovative informatics interventions—3 research studies and 2 reviews. The papers reflect a variety of information technologies and processes including mobile health (mHealth), behavioral nudges in the electronic health record (EHR), adaptive intervention framework, predictive models, and artificial intelligence (eg, machine learning, data mining, natural language processing). The interventions were designed to address important clinical and public health problems such as adherence to antiretroviral therapy for persons living with HIV (PLWH), opioid use disorder, and pain assessment and management, as well as aspects of healthcare quality including no-show rates for appointments and erroneous decisions, waste, and misuse of resources due to EHR choice architecture for clinician orders…(More)”.
Paper by Maèva Flayelle et al: “Gaming disorder was officially recognized as a disorder of addictive behaviour in the International Classification of Diseases 11th revision in 2019. Since then, other types of potentially problematic online behaviour have been discussed as possible candidates for inclusion in the psychiatric nosography of addictive disorders. Understanding these problematic online behaviours requires further study of the specific psychological mechanisms involved in their formation and maintenance. An important but underdeveloped line of research has examined the ways in which technology design features might influence users’ capacity to exert control over how they engage with and use websites and applications, thereby amplifying uncontrolled, and perhaps addictive, use. In this Review, we critically examine the available research on the relationships between technology design features and the loss of control and harms experienced by those who engage in online video gaming, online gambling, cybersexual activities, online shopping, social networking and on-demand TV streaming. We then propose a theory-driven general taxonomy of the design features of online applications that might promote uncontrolled and problematic online behaviours…(More)”.
