Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think - Using Experiments to Change Civic Behaviour (PDF)

1 Nudging and Thinking...

1 Nudging and Thinking What is a nudge strategy and what is a think strategy? In this chapter we compare and contrast these approaches to changing civic behaviour. We argue that even though the two strategies draw on different traditions of research, they are both a response to a shared understanding of the human predicament, which is that people are boundedly rational. Individuals seek to economize on the use of information, even when seeking to reflect on big problems of the day as well as when deciding to carry out a routine civic action. We then ask whether policy-makers should be trying to stimulate civic behaviour. Are efforts to involve citizens more in public life too paternalistic and limiting of individual freedom? What people do in civil society, it could be argued, is up to them and is not for the state to dictate. We try to address this issue head on by arguing that shifting the architecture for citizens’ individual and collective choices is as appropriate and legitimate an act for government as passing laws and regulations or creating systems of taxes and charges. Government is about citizens agreeing to tie their collective hands for collective benefit. Laws exist to protect our property and freedom, and taxes are there to pay for services societies think should be collectively provided. If supporting civic behaviour brings similar collective benefits then there appears no reason to rule it out, although other forms of policy intervention are also desirable and some checks and balances are needed on what can be done. Copyright © 2011. Bloomsbury Publishing. All rights reserved. How to change civic behaviour: nudge and think strategies Understanding what motivates people and what drives their behaviour is self-evidently central to policy-making. If policy-makers are trying to change human society for the better then they are likely to have some theory of what it is that makes human beings tick. Social scientists have not yet produced a fully evidenced understanding of human behaviour, but research to date has produced at least two schools of thought that can be identified. The key issue from the point of view of policy-makers is which school to side with. In this chapter we make the argument for looking at civic behaviour through the summary ideas of nudge and think. Nudge is about giving information and social cues so as to help people do positive things for themselves and society. 9 John, Peter, et al. Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think : Using Experiments to Change Civic Behaviour, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kingston/detail.action?docID=773602. Created from kingston on 2023-09-24 23:30:52.  10 NUDGE, NUDGE, THINK, THINK Think argues it is possible to get citizens to think through challenging issues in innovative ways that allow for evidence, and the opinions of all, to count. These ideas draw on different traditions of research and theory, which are explored in this chapter. The two approaches of nudge and think are different. For the decision-makers, they represent different models of how to intervene in society at large. The book by Thaler and Sunstein (Thaler and Sunstein 2008) called Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness deserves particular credit because, along with associated publications by its authors, it has done much to set out so clearly the possibilities of tackling issues of behaviour change in new ways. Nudge offers a valuable framework for changing the choice architecture of citizens in order to achieve alterations in their behaviour and attitudes, which would constitute improvements for them and for society as a whole. Nudge summarizes ideas that are current in the work of behavioural economics, which draws extensively on assumptions from psychology about heuristics and which has been applied to a range of current problems, such as understanding contributions to pension schemes. Researchers using this approach argue that citizens can be offered a choice architecture that encourages them to act in a way that achieves benefits for themselves and for their fellow citizens. This is often about the provision of information, and how it may be structured or framed to achieve effects on individual behaviour. This relatively new social-science thinking has started to influence policy-makers. A valuable account of how nudge ideas have been taken up in practice, and how they could be taken further, is provided in a 2010 report by the Institute of Government for the UK Cabinet Office seeking to encourage policy- makers to think beyond the tools of regulation, law and financial incentives. The report contends: Copyright © 2011. Bloomsbury Publishing. All rights reserved. For policy-makers facing policy challenges such as crime, obesity, or environmental sustainability, behavioural approaches offer a potentially powerful new set of tools. Applying these tools can lead to low cost, low pain ways of nudging citizens – or ourselves – into new ways of acting by going with the grain of how we think and act. This is an important idea at any time, but is especially relevant in a period of fiscal constraint. (Dolan, Hallsworth, Halpern and King 2010: 7) Nudging is emerging as an important strategy for public authorities to adopt for changing civic behaviour. The good news, according to Thaler and Sunstein, is that policy-makers may be successful in nudging citizens into John, Peter, et al. Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think : Using Experiments to Change Civic Behaviour, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kingston/detail.action?docID=773602. Created from kingston on 2023-09-24 23:30:52.  NUDGING AND THINKING 11 civic behaviour if they take into account the cognitive architecture of choice that faces citizens and work with, rather than against, the grain of biases, hunches and heuristics. Whilst not denying the power of sticks and carrots in changing behaviour, they argue for the relevance of insights from cognitive psychology privileging the design of those interventions that recognize that citizens are boundedly rational decision-makers. The recommendation is that governments think of default options when they offer citizens choices. An alternative strategy for transforming civic behaviour – labelled as think – emerges from the deliberative turn that has dominated democratic theory over the last couple of decades. While there are a number of different conceptions of deliberative democracy, they share a common insight: the legitimacy of politics rests on public deliberation between free and equal citizens. Deliberative theorists recognize that preferences are not independent of institutional settings. In fact, institutional settings play a role in shaping preferences. As such, decision-making procedures should not just be concerned with simply aggregating pre-existing preferences (for example, voting), but also with the nature of the processes through which they are formed. Legitimacy rests on the free flow of discussion and exchange of views in an environment of mutual respect and understanding. Underpinning this conception of politics is a particular theory of civic behaviour that has an epistemic and moral dimension. Free and equal public deliberation has an educational effect as citizens increase their knowledge and understanding of the consequences of their actions. But the value of deliberation does not simply rest on the exchange of information. The public nature of deliberation is crucial. Because citizens are expected to justify their perspectives and preferences in public, there is a strong motivation to constrain self-interest and to consider the public good. Miller refers to Copyright © 2011. Bloomsbury Publishing. All rights reserved. the ‘moralising effect of public deliberation’ (Miller 1992: 61), which tends to eliminate irrational preferences based on false empirical beliefs, morally repugnant preferences which no one is willing to advance in the public arena and narrowly self-interested preferences. Citizens are given the opportunity to think differently and in so doing, deliberative theorists argue, they will witness a transformation of (often ill-informed) preferences. Deliberative democrats provide a clear account of civic behaviour: under deliberative conditions citizens’ behaviour is shaped in a more civic orientation as they consider the views and perspectives of others. For many deliberative theorists, this makes deliberation (or a think strategy) particularly pertinent for including those whose voices are not often heard, and for dealing with particularly contentious public policy issues (Gutmann and Thompson 1996). John, Peter, et al. Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think : Using Experiments to Change Civic Behaviour, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kingston/detail.action?docID=773602. Created from kingston on 2023-09-24 23:30:52.  12 NUDGE, NUDGE, THINK, THINK Theories of deliberative democracy are often charged with being far too utopian in their ambition: their aim appears unrealistic if it is to imbue all of politics with the virtues of mutual respect and understanding (Shapiro 2005). But more recent work has been more practical in its objectives, with democratic theorists and political scientists turning their attention to the empirical question of the conditions under which the norms and procedures of deliberation (or something close to deliberation) can be realized. There has been particular interest in forms of empowered participatory governance (Fung and Wright 2003) and democratic innovations (Smith 2009) that aim to increase and deepen citizen participation in political decision-making processes. A shared starting assumption: bounded rationality Nudge and think are distinctive strategies but crucially the starting point for both is the recognition that people are boundedly rational. Citizens – those in government and those in civil society – are decision-makers constrained by the fundamental human problem of processing information, understanding a situation and determining consequences. There are limits to their cognitive capacity and the world is a complex place to understand: ‘Humans are goal directed, understand their environment in realistic terms, and adjust to changing circumstances facing them. But they are not completely successful in doing so because of the inner limitations. Moreover, these cognitive limitations make a major difference in human affairs – in the affairs of individuals and in the affairs of state and nation.’ (Jones 2001: 21). Decision- making is conditioned by the cognitive limitations of the human mind. Individuals reason, but not as heroic choice-makers. When faced with a decision they do not think about every available option nor always make a Copyright © 2011. Bloomsbury Publishing. All rights reserved. great choice that is optimal to their utility, as assumed by many economists. Their cognitive inner world helps them to focus on some things and ignore others and it is driven by habits of thought, rules of thumb and emotions. Rationality is bounded by this framing role of the human mind. People will search selectively, basing that search on incomplete information and partial ignorance, but terminate it before an optimal option emerges, and will choose instead something that is good enough. This is not to say that the behaviour of agents needs to be judged as irrational. On the contrary, people are rational in the sense that behaviour is generally goal-oriented and, usually, they have reasons for what they do. It is just that rationality rests on the interaction of the cognitive structure and the context in which individuals are operating, and as a result sometimes they make poor quality decisions. John, Peter, et al. Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think : Using Experiments to Change Civic Behaviour, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kingston/detail.action?docID=773602. Created from kingston on 2023-09-24 23:30:52.  NUDGING AND THINKING 13 The starting point for our understanding in this area is the pioneering work of the Nobel Prize-winning Herbert Simon who produced his powerful insights over sixty years ago (Simon 1945/1997). Decision-making is conditioned by the structure of the human mind and the context in which people operate. Decision-makers rarely comprehensively perceive the environment and weigh up all options against their preferences in the context of incentives and constraints, and then efficiently choose the options that maximize these preferences. Decision-makers have to deal with the external environment and their inner world, their cognitive architecture. The inner world helps them to focus on some things and ignore others and it is driven by habits of thought, rules of thumb and emotions. Rationality is bounded by this framing role of the human mind. A second point, strongly emphasized by Simon, is that actors gain their purpose in this complex world of information processing through sub-goal identification (Simon 1945/1997). Individuals identify with institutions or, more broadly, cultures of which they become part and internalize the aims of these social groups (Goodin 2004). More broadly, people are social animals who often look to know what the rules are in different situations and ask how it is that people are supposed to behave. Individuals search for the rules of appropriate behaviour rather than just maximize their utility (March and Olsen 1989). Nudge and think constitute different responses to the challenge of bounded rationality. A standard assumption of much government policy- making in the past is that ‘if we provide the carrots and sticks, alongside accurate information, people will weigh up the revised costs and benefits of their actions and respond accordingly’ (Dolan et al. 2010: 8). An awareness of bounded rationality indicates that there are obvious limits to the chances of Copyright © 2011. Bloomsbury Publishing. All rights reserved. such strategies succeeding. Operating with an awareness of the implications of bounded rationality would appear to be advantageous. So nudge tries to go with the grain of human behaviour: understand the short cuts and heuristics that people use to make decisions and then seek to bend or influence their environment – choice architecture, to use the jargon – to get behaviour that is more beneficial for society and the individual. Since individuals make decisions in the present – the here and now – nudge strategies are about creating the conditions to make better choices in the moment. A nudge strategy advocates working by understanding the way that rationality is bounded and then nudging citizens in the right direction. In contrast, a think strategy suggests that a public agency can seek to create the right institutional framework so that an individual can overcome John, Peter, et al. Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think : Using Experiments to Change Civic Behaviour, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kingston/detail.action?docID=773602. Created from kingston on 2023-09-24 23:30:52.  14 NUDGE, NUDGE, THINK, THINK some aspects of their bounded rationality. If bounded rationality is heightened by lack of information and lack of attention to the viewpoints of others, then public agencies might create the conditions in which these are taken on board, in this way nudging citizens to think. This could be a fusion of our two strategies. Overall, a think strategy aims to promote free and fair deliberation between citizens. As Fearon comments, ‘democratic deliberation has the capacity to lessen the problem of bounded rationality: the fact that our imaginations and calculating abilities are limited and fallible’ (Fearon 1998: 49). Deliberation offers the conditions under which actors can widen their own limited and fallible perspectives by drawing on each other’s knowledge, experience and capabilities. The odds of good judgements increase for two reasons: deliberation can be additively valuable in the sense that one actor is able to offer an analysis or solutions that had not occurred to others; or it can be multiplicatively valuable in that deliberation could lead to solutions that would not have occurred to the participants individually (Fearon 1998: 50). Nudge and think have a shared starting point but present a different dynamic for change. They appeal to the different sensibilities citizens have about what is politically possible and acknowledge the extent of social change that different kinds of people think can be achieved. This chapter explores those differences before returning to the issue of whether, and how, to go about changing civic behaviour. Nudge: from psychological insight into intervention Nudge strategies build on cognitive short cuts or social influences to develop an intervention which will shape civic behaviour. We briefly outline some examples of the approach below. Copyright © 2011. Bloomsbury Publishing. All rights reserved. Cognitive-driven interventions Prospect theory (Kahneman and Tversky 1979; Thaler 1980) concerns the endowment effect, which suggests that when individuals are already in possession of something, they are very reluctant to lose it. Cognitively, it is more important for people to hold on to what they have (that is, to prevent loss) than to gain something extra. Experimental research backs up this theory and demonstrates that ownership matters in people’s valuation of a good, with owners placing higher value on the traded good than buyers do (Kahneman, Knetsch and Thaler 1990). In public policy this translates into designing behavioural change strategies to emphasize losses rather than gains. Where people feel that they have something to lose, they may be more John, Peter, et al. Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think : Using Experiments to Change Civic Behaviour, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kingston/detail.action?docID=773602. Created from kingston on 2023-09-24 23:30:52.  NUDGING AND THINKING 15 inclined to do something to prevent the loss occurring. For instance, smoking cessation policies that highlight years of life lost through smoking are more effective than those highlighting years gained by quitting. In a similar way, fines are likely to be a more powerful motivator for changing behaviour than rewards (Dawney and Shah 2005). Another facet of cognitive architecture that displays less than fully rational behaviour is the use of psychological discounting (Frederick, Loewenstein and O’Donoghue 2002). This theory suggests that immediacy is a major factor in our responsiveness to offers. We place more weight on the short- term than on the long-term effects of our decisions. If people are about to gain something, they would rather do so now than later. If they have to feel pain, they would rather experience it some time in the distant future. Behavioural economists use this principle to explain why people often make imperfect economic decisions. Hyperbolic discounting occurs when we place a ‘high discount rate over short horizons and a relatively low discount rate over long horizons’ (Laibson 1997: 445). In other words, people overweigh short-term consumption while discounting the greater long-term gains that could be made by delaying consumption, creating outcomes that are suboptimal both from an individual and a collective perspective. It is this that makes many people reluctant to save for their retirement or inclined to ignore the long- term effects of a poor diet or exercise regime. Since we are all living longer, this psychological predisposition is one that public policies should address. Commitment mechanisms can be built into public policies to redress our propensity for short-term gratification and procrastination (O’Donoghue and Rabin 1999). One example of this, which displays promising results, is a pension savings programme built on a buy-now-pay-later principle in which employees have to commit to incremental savings with a two-year payment Copyright © 2011. Bloomsbury Publishing. All rights reserved. holiday to begin with (Thaler and Bernartzi 2004). Discounting is a feature of analysis by economists as well, but the psychological literature suggests that people discount in a less consistent and rational way than some economists, working with formally derived micro-foundations, recognize. A closely related phenomenon is our propensity for maintaining the status quo (Samuelson and Zeckhauser 1988). Limited by time, intellectual energy and resources, the majority of people, most of the time, prefer not to change their habits unless they really have to. Research verifies that when confronted with a complex or difficult decision, and in the absence of full information about all the alternatives, individuals will often stick with their current position (Choi, Laibson, Madrian and Metrick 2003). A powerful mechanism that can be used by policy-makers is to alter the choice architecture by shifting John, Peter, et al. Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think : Using Experiments to Change Civic Behaviour, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kingston/detail.action?docID=773602. Created from kingston on 2023-09-24 23:30:52.  16 NUDGE, NUDGE, THINK, THINK the default position to maximize social welfare (Thaler and Sunstein 2008). Automatically enrolling citizens for pension savings programmes (Cronqvist and Thaler 2004) or on to organ donor registers (Johnson and Goldstein 2003; Abadie and Gay 2006) are instances where changing defaults appears to work well. A further aspect of behaviour recognized by social psychologists and relevant to the design of public services is the issue of cognitive consistency. Following Festinger (Festinger 1957), psychologists suggest that people seek consistency between their beliefs and their behaviour. However, when beliefs and behaviour clash (the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance), we frequently alter beliefs instead of adjusting behaviour. One way out of this difficulty from a behaviour change perspective is to extract commitments from people (Dawney and Shah 2005). Research indicates that when people make such a commitment they feel more motivated to adjust their behaviour to back up their expressed beliefs, particularly where commitments are made in public. Making a commitment to do something can change self-image and encourage people in future decisions to seek consistency with their previous commitments. Evidence in the field of environmental behaviour suggests that extracting public promises can help to improve composting rates and water efficiency as compared to simple information provision and advertising (McKenzie-Mohr 2000). Similar findings are reported in the area of voting behaviour, with those asked beforehand to predict their likelihood of voting more likely to vote than those not asked (Greenwald, Carnot, Beach and Young 1987; see also Smith, Gerber and Orlich 2003); and in blood donation decisions, where exposing people to what is called an active decision choice (that is actively putting the choice before them) increases blood donation rates in people who are uncertain on the subject Copyright © 2011. Bloomsbury Publishing. All rights reserved. (Stutzer, Goette and Zehnder 2006). Interventions driven by social influences However, individuals as conceived by psychologists do not live in isolation, and recognition of the interpersonal, community and social influences shaping behaviour will strengthen public service designs. Social psychologists and sociologists suggest a number of important influences (for a review see Cabinet Office 2004). For instance, perception of how people see each other, particularly peers, matters. In the context of promoting energy efficiency within offices, there is evidence that the technique of information disclosure between firms creates a race to the top amongst firms keen to display their green credentials (Thaler and Sunstein 2008). Similarly, the concept of John, Peter, et al. Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think : Using Experiments to Change Civic Behaviour, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kingston/detail.action?docID=773602. Created from kingston on 2023-09-24 23:30:52.  NUDGING AND THINKING 17 social proof suggests that when confronted with an ambiguous situation, we look to other people for cues on how to behave (Cialdini 2007). Theories of inter-group bias stress the importance of group loyalties and identifications, and experimental work indicates that strangers divided into groups can quickly form such loyalties (Tajfel, Billig, Bundy and Flament 1971) Group identities often develop, and generally speaking we are predisposed to emulate the behaviour of those with whom we identify (Tajfel and Turner 1986). Techniques that exploit these inter-group biases and loyalties have been used in policy interventions to encourage neighbourhood commitment to recycling. Such insights applied to public policy can help create policy designs that provide the opportunity for people to emulate and learn from those with whom they identify. Existing peer support and community mentoring schemes already exploit these principles. Inter-group biases can also be channelled to encourage communities to protect and steward their local environments. A further strand of work suggests that immediate social networks, based on social norms, including reciprocity and mutuality, influence individual behaviour (House 1981). Public policy instruments such as community contracts and other forms of voluntary agreements, as well as campaigns to encourage organ donation or volunteering that emphasize reciprocity or a sense of community, make use of such principles. Think in practice: from democratic theory to institutional intervention Deliberative democracy initially emerged as a highly abstract theoretical endeavour: the province of academic theorists. Since the late 1990s, however, an increasing number of political scientists and democratic theorists Copyright © 2011. Bloomsbury Publishing. All rights reserved. have begun to pay attention to the institutional conditions that can foster deliberation. It is this literature – particularly recent work on democratic innovations that aims to increase and deepen citizen participation in political decision-making (Fung 2003a; Smith 2009) – that can inform think strategies. Radically different designs have the potential to promote deliberation. One of the most commonly celebrated is participatory budgeting which emerged in Porto Alegre (Brazil) in the late 1980s, but the influence of which has been felt across Latin America, into Europe and beyond (Cabannes 2004). Similarly, a great deal of attention has been focused on mini-publics such as citizens’ juries and deliberative polling, which ensure inclusiveness by aiming to engage a random sample of citizens. Recently the impressive Citizens’ Assemblies on Electoral Reform in British Columbia and Ontario John, Peter, et al. Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think : Using Experiments to Change Civic Behaviour, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kingston/detail.action?docID=773602. Created from kingston on 2023-09-24 23:30:52.  18 NUDGE, NUDGE, THINK, THINK have expanded the imagination as to how mini-publics might be employed (Warren and Pearce 2008). And, with developments in information and communications technology (ICT), there is now growing academic and practitioner interest in the potential of, for example, online discussion forums, which in principle overcome barriers to participation associated with time and scale. While the methods of engagement differ, these innovations in citizen participation often share similar institutional characteristics that motivate a civic orientation. First, they carefully construct safe havens in which deliberation is enabled: in other words, there is a recognition that the norms and procedures of deliberation need to be nurtured and do not necessarily emerge naturally. Second, part of the motivation to participate is that citizens have a meaningful influence on significant political decisions. The unwillingness of governments to create these conditions – in particular access to influence – means that the rhetoric of deliberation and citizen engagement is undermined in practice. The evidence from studies of democratic innovations indicates that ordinary citizens are willing and able to deliberate on controversial public issues when such interventions are carefully constructed. Institutional design is crucial in altering behaviour: bringing citizens together from diverse backgrounds (often mobilizing participants from politically marginalized social groups) and constructing an environment in which contentious issues can be debated (Smith 2009). Nudging and thinking compared The starting assumption for nudge and think strategies may be the same but their responses to this challenge are dissimilar. To help clarify these Copyright © 2011. Bloomsbury Publishing. All rights reserved. differences, we set them out in Table 1.1, with the elements of each approach summarized in the two columns. This is designed to be a helpful simplification of the complexity of the two approaches. The first difference is in the underlying view of human behaviour. Nudgers tend to assume that individuals are happy to fall back on past lines of thought and behaviour unless they are encouraged to do something different. The options for change centre on reminders and cues that accept where the individual is and then put in place a choice environment whereby society might gain from the realization of these preferences. The nudge strategy plays to the role of the state as educator and the role of the policy-maker as paternalistic expert, steering citizens down paths that are more beneficial to them and society at large. Once these are known, the designer of public John, Peter, et al. Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think : Using Experiments to Change Civic Behaviour, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kingston/detail.action?docID=773602. Created from kingston on 2023-09-24 23:30:52.  NUDGING AND THINKING 19 policy can use these to good effect so that the result is hardly noticed by the individual. The nudge strategy accepts citizens as they are, and tries to divert them down new paths to make better decisions. Table 1.1 Nudge and think compared Nudge Think View of subjects Cognitive misers, users of Reasonable, knowledge hungry shortcuts, prone to flawed and capable of collective reflection sometimes befuddled thinking Costs to the Low but repeated High but only intermittently individual Primary unit of The individual The group analysis Change process Cost-benefit led shift in choice Value led outline of new shared environment policy platform Civic conception Increasing the attractiveness of Addressing the general interest positive-sum action Role of the state Customize messages, expert and Create new institutional spaces to teacher support citizen-led investigation, respond to citizens The think strategy has a different account of what makes humans tick. It assumes that the individual can step away from their day-to-day experience, throw off their blinkers and reflect on the wide range of policy choices and dilemmas. People can be knowledge hungry, learn to process new information and demands and reach new heights of reflection and judgement. The institutional setting and organization of the think has to be right, but if it is then citizens can extend their knowledge and understanding Copyright © 2011. Bloomsbury Publishing. All rights reserved. of issues and work together to find solutions. The think strategy would appear then to be more demanding than the nudge strategy in the effort required by the individual to engage. Nudge relies on the impact of any intervention being low cost. In fact, it can only work through being low cost or else the individual would not cooperate. In contrast, in order to get going, the deliberative experience requires the incurring of some considerable costs. There needs to be some investment in acquiring information and then in debating with others, often in a particular context, away from the individual’s normal environment. These costs have policy implications so they need to be seen alongside the benefit. The costs are partly a function of the unit of analysis. While both can be individually and collectively achieved, nudge is about affecting individual choices, just as John, Peter, et al. Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think : Using Experiments to Change Civic Behaviour, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kingston/detail.action?docID=773602. Created from kingston on 2023-09-24 23:30:52.  20 NUDGE, NUDGE, THINK, THINK in classical economics, though of course if the nudge is done in concert with others it stands more chance of success. Deliberation by definition cannot happen alone in spite of the powerful role that individuals play in the process. How does change come about? For both strategies, change is achieved by altering how the individual sees the attractiveness of a different course or action. The nudge strategy seeks to improve the messages that citizens receive and the opportunities they have to participate so they see the costs in different, more congenial, ways. For the deliberative democrat, the change is about tapping into and giving life to values that are discovered and brought out through debate and reflection. Once these values are uppermost, the costs and benefits to the individual will look different and the motivation to make sacrifices to achieve them will alter. This links to the civic conception implied by each approach. The nudger does not think that the individual is entirely selfish – there is a civic conception in the nudge scheme. But the civic is limited to small acts, which might amount to a bigger societal change. The deliberative democrat would not be happy unless the general interest has been considered. Civic behaviour in deliberative forums is understood in these terms. Finally, these two approaches differ as to the expected state action. For the nudger the role of state is about getting the messages right and giving low- level incentives and costs to get to the desired kind of behaviour, although it may require frequent and repeated application to be effective. The role of the policy-maker is as expert, someone who is able to say what is the best course of action and who is smart enough to design interventions that achieve these goals. These actions may be quite modest, even though they require a lot of thought, and they usually involve the modification of a routine or procedure. In contrast, for the think strategy to be successful, the policy-maker needs Copyright © 2011. Bloomsbury Publishing. All rights reserved. to be open-minded and willing to act as an organizer of citizen-driven investigation. Crucially, the state needs not only to provide institutions that can help citizens deliberate: if the strategy is to be sustainable, it has to follow up on the recommendations that emerge, otherwise participants are likely to be disempowered and further disengaged from the political process. Should public authorities change civic behaviour? So far in this introduction we have assumed that the involvement of citizens in tackling social and economic problems is desirable. But why assume that and why consider it appropriate to design policy to stimulate civic behaviour? Our starting point is that government on its own will find it hard to address some of the common challenges of society because no matter how John, Peter, et al. Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think : Using Experiments to Change Civic Behaviour, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kingston/detail.action?docID=773602. Created from kingston on 2023-09-24 23:30:52.  NUDGING AND THINKING 21 much money it throws at an issue or how many regulations it passes, many problems will not go away. In a period of fiscal austerity the spending option may no longer be easily available so governments have to rely even more than before on citizens helping themselves and others. It is also the case that governments in many modern industrial societies can no longer rely on deference and obedience to messages from a benevolent centre, as they did before. Citizens will question the authority of government or simply ignore it. One response is to involve citizens directly in public policy, so as to get their consent in such a way that they own the policies, and as a result change their behaviour in an intended direction. Another is to argue that policy- makers need to go with the grain of the way individuals make decisions. They should design solutions that encourage civic behaviour rather than act against it or crowd it out. Moreover, government policy could be improved by involving the citizens in such a way that they help public authorities adjust the implementation of public policies to reflect the particular circumstances and problems of a policy sector and locale or neighbourhood. In this way, as Braybrooke and Lindblom argue, government can become more intelligent if it is guided by responding to information, in this case from the citizens (Braybrooke and Lindblom 1963). The logic of this argument is that if governments are going to be successful in a more challenging age, they need to use different kinds of instrument, ones that are smart and nimble, that are guided by the way that citizens are, and are driven by the active contribution of citizens (John 2011). The blunt instruments of financial allocation and regulation will fail or be only partly successful. The ways that governments communicate with citizens and involve them will have to be smarter and more effective. But even if there are gains to be yielded from the kinds of policies we Copyright © 2011. Bloomsbury Publishing. All rights reserved. describe here, should government still back off because it should not interfere with individual freedom and choice? After all, it is often argued that the whole idea of representative democracy is that citizens elect governments to get on with the job of government, the media and public opinion keep them in check between elections, and the threat of being up for re-election keeps them on their toes to manage policies effectively. In subsequent elections, citizens can re-elect a government to carry on managing affairs in the same way or elect another government to do things differently. With governments in charge, the job of the bureaucracy, local government and other agencies is to do the best job of administering public services on behalf of the citizen in as efficient and cost-effective a way as possible. Does it not appear inappropriate for government to expect the citizens to contribute their time John, Peter, et al. Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think : Using Experiments to Change Civic Behaviour, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kingston/detail.action?docID=773602. Created from kingston on 2023-09-24 23:30:52.  22 NUDGE, NUDGE, THINK, THINK to shaping services and even to produce some of the outcomes themselves, either directly through co-producing services, or indirectly by altering their behaviour so that they, and other citizens, get a public benefit? Moreover, the public might expect a right to keep their private lives private from the state, to be free from interfering public agencies that wish to change their behaviour. If somebody wants to have an unhealthy lifestyle, they should be allowed to lead it. They are entitled to elect a government and to pay taxes for a health service to pick up the pieces. When is it right for the state to intervene in issues of behaviour? Assessing the morality of seeking to steer people’s choices in certain directions is, of course, not a new dilemma for policy-makers, and issues of whether it is right to intervene apply equally well to the use of standard tools such as law- making, regulation or taxation. What makes the issue more challenging in the case of nudging is that standard forms of intervention are more open and explicit about their intentions. (Although we can ask how much people really understand about the details of regulations and taxation. And we know also that policy tools of all types can be made less visible to reduce public resistance.) The tenor of nudging can be ‘we the government know better what is good for you than you do and we have found a sneaky way of getting you to make the right choice’. This problem becomes more acute when considering some of the techniques that governments can use to change behaviour. With the insights of behavioural economics as a guide, it can appear that public agencies are using the dark arts of manipulation to alter civic behaviour to get to good ends for society. In this sense a think strategy trumps nudge on the grounds of transparency. But even think can invite the same attack. If society accepts that governments should involve citizens in decisions about the delivery of Copyright © 2011. Bloomsbury Publishing. All rights reserved. services, is not this a form of compulsion or an invitation to a self-selected minority to make decisions for the rest of society? Democratic governments, which are supposed to be responsive and to respect individual freedoms, may feel uncomfortable at taking such a direct control over the private lives of many citizens without their active consent. In the rest of the book, naturally we answer this question in the negative, largely because citizens expect governments to get on with the job of making effective policies and only want to blame them when things go seriously wrong. But it is clear that behaviour change is a sensitive area, where extra attention to the democratic principles of transparency and responsiveness should guide policy-makers in the design of these interventions, even more so than other policies. If not, these interventions risk being seen as illegitimate and they will become John, Peter, et al. Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think : Using Experiments to Change Civic Behaviour, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kingston/detail.action?docID=773602. Created from kingston on 2023-09-24 23:30:52.  NUDGING AND THINKING 23 ineffective as a result. Interventions designed to foster behavioural change need to be as public as possible, with as much support from the public as is feasible. One line of defence for nudge strategies promoted by Thaler and Sunstein (Thaler and Sunstein 2008), and appearing under the label of libertarian paternalism, is that at least the choice does remain with the citizen – it is just the architecture of choice that is altered to support what are judged by democratic governments to be beneficial outcomes. Another important point is that our current choice architecture is neither natural nor morally neutral – in fact, in many ways it is pernicious and undermines civic behaviour. Individuals make decisions in the light of social mores and norms influenced by the market, commercial advertising, peer pressure, ignorance and habit. Choice architectures are constantly evolving through strategic action on the part of different actors and the unintentional impact of everyday activities. So policy-makers, by seeking to steer the choice architecture, are just one more framer of choice for the citizen. But unlike other influencers they are at least authorized through the democratic process to promote the common good. And one way to do this is to encourage civic behaviour. If the qualms about intervention can be met, there remains, of course, the issue of competence. Can we trust governments to make the right choices for us? Prabhakar argues: Behavioural economics assumes that government knows best. But often this may not be the case. For good reason, government might find it difficult to unpick the different parts of a policy problem … government might lack proper evidence to guide its decisions. Government might only know the right nudges in a limited number of areas where there is Copyright © 2011. Bloomsbury Publishing. All rights reserved. plenty of evidence. (Prabhakar 2010) Policy-makers after all face the same challenge of bounded rationality as citizens in civil society. In a different way, think strategists have been challenged because of their tendency to assume they know what is best for people (Stoker 2006). People are supposed to choose between options not on the basis of self-interest but rather on the basis of a judgement about which of the options will advance the group’s agenda. And whether they make the right choice or not depends in large part on whether the participants follow the procedures and norms of deliberation (Fung and Wright 2003). There is a danger that in trying to design out difficulties, think strategists are fostering forms of governance that in practice can become rigid and deeply John, Peter, et al. Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think : Using Experiments to Change Civic Behaviour, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kingston/detail.action?docID=773602. Created from kingston on 2023-09-24 23:30:52.  24 NUDGE, NUDGE, THINK, THINK constrained and not all that participatory, because only what are considered acceptable behaviours and reasonable demands are allowed to find their place in its processes and outputs. In their different ways, both think and nudge may be perceived as authoritarian if they are not introduced to the reference points of the citizens with a great deal of sensitivity, so that the individual is ultimately in control of his or her fate, even if governments play a role in structuring the information to the citizen and affecting the institutional context in which action and debate takes place. These arguments are a useful qualification to overenthusiasm about changing civic behaviour but are not convincing enough to suggest governments should abandon the project. When government taxes and regulates citizens how does government know it is doing the best thing? The answer in all cases is surely that the key issue is a judgement for which, in a democratic society, citizens can hold government to account at some point. Moreover our existing choice architecture is a construction of the decisions (or non-decisions) of actors, institutions and practices that (explicitly or implicitly) promote non-civic behaviour. Looked at in this way it would be remiss for policy-makers to neglect the options for changing civic behaviour. Of course, nudge versus think is not the only take on what governments can do to encourage civic-minded behaviour. The traditional tools in the armoury of governments – regulatory and economic instruments – can and are used to shape civic actions. Tax incentives can provide a fiscal incentive to reduce carbon usage, or rewards can be offered for good behaviour on housing estates. The law can be used to compel people to be civic, such as those laws aimed at stopping dog-fouling on footpaths and in parks. But the attraction of nudge and think is that they are not about government commands, but about creating the conditions for better citizen choice. Copyright © 2011. Bloomsbury Publishing. All rights reserved. Conclusion In this chapter, we have reviewed the intellectual origins and implications of our two theoretical positions, summarized as nudge and think. These terms are, of course, simplifications of complex literatures and research programmes that have many manifestations, and range across different kinds of motivations and causes of human behaviour. But we hope we have conveyed an important distinction between ways of thinking about behaviour change, with nudge being more concerned to provide cues to individuals to do better for society; and with think strategies being more interested in presenting individuals with opportunities to debate the key issues so they gain the resources and motivation to act. And, in many ways, John, Peter, et al. Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think : Using Experiments to Change Civic Behaviour, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kingston/detail.action?docID=773602. Created from kingston on 2023-09-24 23:30:52.  NUDGING AND THINKING 25 think may be seen as a more positive alternative to nudge, and one that is more open and respectful of the individual. It is more transparent, too. In practice, these approaches are closer together than they might at first seem. Both acknowledge the limits to individual change and the lack of capacity individuals have in their everyday lives and decision-making for weighing up all the options that are open to them – the constraints of bounded rationality. Both these perspectives offer alternatives to policy-makers that are different from the top-down and commanding tools of the state that have been used so much in recent years; moreover, they are both capable of looking at public policy in a more citizen-centred way, a form of policy-making that is increasingly fashionable across the world. At the same time, because these interventions are new, they have attracted the suspicion of critics who see them as paternalistic and undemocratic – even think because of its reliance on selected groups of citizens. We hope to counter such concerns. As we shall show later in the book, most of these softer interventions in practice are often some combination of nudge and think – for example, democratic innovations can be understood as the active design of structures that nudge citizens towards thinking. In this way, we offer a reconstruction of nudge that uses elements of think to make it more transparent, effective and legitimate. Most of all, these new tools of government need more testing and evaluation. And this is just what we do in the remaining chapters of this book. But before that – in the next chapter – we consider the best way to acquire robust knowledge about what works. Copyright © 2011. Bloomsbury Publishing. All rights reserved. John, Peter, et al. Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think : Using Experiments to Change Civic Behaviour, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kingston/detail.action?docID=773602. Created from kingston on 2023-09-24 23:30:52.  This page intentionally left blank Copyright © 2011. Bloomsbury Publishing. All rights reserved. John, Peter, et al. Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think : Using Experiments to Change Civic Behaviour, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kingston/detail.action?docID=773602. Created from kingston on 2023-09-24 23:30:52.