Nudge, nudge, think, think

Experimenting with ways to change citizen behaviour, second edition

Peter John, Sarah Cotterill, Alice Moseley, Liz Richardson, Graham Smith, Gerry Stoker

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781526140555
• eBook ISBN: 9781526140562
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Affairs & Administration
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How can governments persuade their citizens to act in socially beneficial ways? This ground-breaking book builds on the idea of 'light touch interventions' or 'nudges' proposed in Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein's highly influential Nudge (2008). While recognising the power of this approach, it argues that an alternative also needs to be considered: a 'think' strategy that calls on citizens to decide their own priorities as part of a process of civic and democratic renewal. As well as setting out these divergent approaches in theory, the book provides evidence from a number of experiments to show how using 'nudge' or 'think' techniques works in practice. This second edition includes a substantial prologue by Cass Sunstein and an epilogue by Peter John, reflecting on recent developments in nudge theory and practice and introducing his radical new version of nudge, 'nudge plus'.

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 citizen 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 reflecting on big problems of the day, as well as when deciding to carry out a routine civic action. This does not mean that they are necessarily making wrong choices for themselves and others, but that policies based on assuming rational action will be limited in their desired impacts.

We then ask whether policy-makers should be trying to stimulate citizen 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. Most forms of policy intervention are desirable, provided there are checks and balances on what can be done.

How to change citizen 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 citizen 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. 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. As discussed in the previous chapter, 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 (e.g. Sunstein 2016a, 2017b), 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 from the work of behavioural economics (Thaler 2015), a line of work going back mainly to the 1960s but with earlier roots (Oliver 2017), and which draws extensively on assumptions from psychology about heuristics, and is not necessarily about nudge (see Hargreaves-Heap 2013). But in practice, behavioural economics 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 influenced policy-makers to redesign these policies and implementation procedures with these insights in mind.

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 called MINDSPACE (Dolan et al 2010, 2012), which seeks to encourage policy-makers to think beyond the tools of regulation, law, and financial incentives. The report contends:

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 et al 2010: 7)

The MINDSPACE report, and our thinking in designing our nudge experiments, also draws on disciplines beyond behavioural economics, including health psychology, social psychology, and politics, all of which have made a big contribution to understanding how behavioural insights can enable more effective public policy aimed at changing citizen behaviour (see Spotswood 2016). As a result of this broad engagement across the social sciences, nudging has emerged as an important strategy for public authorities to adopt for changing citizen behaviour (John 2018). The good news, according to Thaler and Sunstein, is that policy-makers may be successful in nudging citizens into civic behaviour if they take account of the cognitive architecture of choice that citizens face, and if they work with, rather than against, the grain of biases, hunches, and heuristics. While 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 which recognize that citizens are boundedly rational decision-makers. The recommendation is that governments consider default options when they offer citizens choices.

An alternative strategy for transforming citizen behaviour – labelled as think – emerges from the deliberative turn that has dominated democratic theory over the last three 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 citizen 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 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).

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 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. In recent years, such innovations have been increasingly institutionalized in public decision-making (Smith 2018).

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 or always make a 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.

The starting point for our understanding in this area is the pioneering work of the Nobel Prize winner 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.

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 maximizing 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 has been 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 such strategies succeeding. Operating with an awareness of the implications of bounded rationality would appear to be advantageous.

Nudge tries to go with the grain of human behaviour: understand the shortcuts and heuristics that people use to make decisions and then seek to bend or influence their environment – choice architecture – 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 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 othe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• The authors
• Foreword by Greg Clark, MP
• Prologue by Cass R. Sunstein
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Nudging and thinking
• 2 Testing
• 3 Recycling
• 4 Volunteering
• 5 Voting
• 6 Petitioning
• 7 Giving
• 8 Donating
• 9 Debating
• 10 Including
• 11 Linking
• 12 Summary of key findings
• 13 Epilogue: the future of nudge and think
• Note on results from the experiments
• Glossary
• References
• Index