1 Introduction
Psychological governance and public policy
Jessica Pykett, Rhys Jones and Mark Whitehead
The past two decades have seen concerted shifts in the rationales, techniques and methods of public policy making and governance, which have been well documented in social and political science (Rhodes, 1997; Newman, 2001; Bovaird and Löffler, 2003; Le Grand, 2003). Since at least the late 1990s, there has been an increased policy emphasis on enhancing citizen involvement in government through personalising responsibility, tailoring public services to citizen-consumers and co-producing policy in dialogue with representative communities. These changes have been particularly marked in the UK. Yet conversely, we have also witnessed a move away from the traditional channels of representative parliamentary democracy towards the increasing dominance of expert- and evidence-based policy, focusing on âwhat worksâ â a trend prevalent in both the UK and the USA (Sanderson, 2002). This has included more experimental forms of policy trialling, development and adaptation that are informed by âdesign thinkingâ (Bason, 2014) and ânudgingâ people towards making decisions in their own best interests by shaping the environments in which decisions are made and clearing the psychological ground for more rational behaviours (Thaler and Sunstein, 2008). This move is inspired by a perceived need to innovate, to provide creative, future-proof solutions and to adopt policies shaped around the needs, aptitudes and indeed the technological and behavioural habits of service âusersâ. Such design thinking has been prominent in countries such as Denmark and Singapore and, more recently, in the UK where the Government Office for Science Foresight team, the Cabinet Office Policy Lab and the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) have played key roles.
There is now also a sense within the policy-making process that pragmatic, efficient and cost-effective policy change can and should be delivered through new forms of discursive fora and co-produced through participatory engagement with citizens (Mahony, 2010). This can involve, for instance, getting the best experts in a room together and âworkshoppingâ ideas, rapid prototyping, agile development, experimentation, trials, local pilot projects and rolling out change through government innovation networks, perhaps communicated through stylish infographics and facilitated by market research companies, social marketers and communications agencies. Crucially, these new forms of public policy making represent citizensâ needs, values, attitudes, preferences and behaviours to policy-makers through specifically mediated channels, such as public opinion polling, focus group research or community consultation initiatives. Sometimes those mediators are academic researchers, perhaps giving evidence to parliamentary or presidential committees, conferences or proceedings. They might also be more self-organising groups such as political lobbyists, pressure groups, advocacy organisations or initiators of online petitions. But increasingly, it is a cadre of behavioural experts and consultants operating within the commercial or social enterprise sphere who are called upon to provide policy advice and contribute to policy strategy, design, testing and implementation. In all these cases, considerable work goes into constructing authoritative claims to knowing how and why citizens behave in certain ways and how their behaviour can be changed in the course of addressing specific policy problems.
In this context, the âbehaviour change industryâ has emerged as a body of actors â sometimes governmental, sometimes commercial, sometimes third sector organisations (and often a mixture of these) â who are skilled in identifying, delimiting, measuring, modelling, changing and evaluating the behaviour of individual citizens, communities or particular social groups. In particular, this industry draws on a medical paradigm (e.g. randomised controlled trials â see John, this volume) and the theoretical precepts and experimental methods associated with psychology, behavioural economics and neuroscience as both rationale for and means of achieving specific public policy goals. This behaviour change industry has only recently grown in global significance, playing a crucial role in shaping psychological forms of governance. The notion of an emergent industry denotes the work and effort that has been involved in the construction of contemporary formations of psychological governance.
This book considers the research, policy and practical challenges associated with psychological governance where behavioural change is posed as a means and an end of liberal governance. We define psychological governance as forms of largely state-orchestrated public policy activity (though ânon-stateâ actors are widely involved) that aim to shape the behaviour of individuals, social groups or whole populations through the deployment of the insights of behavioural and psychological sciences. The book considers the varied scope and scale of psychological governance techniques and examines to what extent we can talk of a co-ordinated shift in governance as opposed to a pragmatic set of techniques for improving the efficacy of policy-making in straightened financial times. Contributing authors provide analytical accounts of the wider political significance of psychological governance by investigating what kinds of knowledge claims are made in support of it, its historical and sociological significance, how it operates and its methodological precepts, and its effects in terms of citizen-subject formation and the framing of social and mental problems.
Psychological governance specifically denotes (public, commercial and/or non-governmental) interventions targeted at the interface of conscious and non-conscious thought and action, connecting emotional response and rational deliberation. Chief Executive of the UKâs BIT, David Halpern, has described this interface in the following terms:
Behind the shroud of our consciousness, a myriad processes race to work out what is going on in the world around us, and how we should respond ⊠our brains ceaselessly infer, overlay and interpret new information and memories. Itâs an incredible performance.
(2015: 6)
On the one hand, while these cognitive heuristics are impressive basic human functions to be celebrated, it is clear that contemporary forms of psychological governance are focused on our human tendencies to get things wrong, make bad decisions and deviate from the rational economic actor proposed in classical economic theory. Hence, for Halpern,
[t]he limits of human cognitive capacities, and the naivety and failures of classical economic models, create a powerful case for more regulation and a more active state according to some.
(2015: 6)
This means the state should orchestrate regulatory activity around a more complex and messier vision of the cognitive capacities of individuals, involving the redesign of government business around citizens who, in Thaler and Sunsteinâs (2008) terms, are emotional humans, not rational econs. The notion of âstate orchestrationâ does not suggest that a monolithic and authoritarian state is imposing such forms of intervention on an unsuspecting public, but refers to the explicit state support and development of psychological governance by nation states, which we outline in the following section. The âbehaviour change industryâ thus refers to a confluence of state and non-state actors and existing initiatives/policies/programmes as well as a more fluid set of political ideas, agendas and discursive practices that have risen in prominence globally since the turn of the twenty-first century.
Applying behavioural insights to public policy: a global agenda
There are several purposes for which national governments are currently mobilising psychological insights in the cultivation of specific behavioural responses amongst individual citizens and national populations. Evidence of behaviourally informed policy initiatives can be found in Australia, Denmark, Singapore, the UK, the USA and the Netherlands, with rumours afoot of moves to establish state-run behavioural insight teams in Germany, Italy and Canada. The UKâs BIT established in 2010 has pioneered several public policy initiatives informed by behavioural science and aimed at changing citizen behaviours for the public good (for detailed histories of the BIT, see Halpern, 2015 and Jones et al., 2013). These initiatives are extremely wide-ranging and include: encouraging tax compliance; reducing missed hospital appointments; designing web-based public health campaigns; reducing dropouts from adult literacy and numeracy skills programmes; reducing mobile phone theft; increasing the likelihood of Army reservists completing the application process; increasing diversity in the police force; encouraging illegal migrants at Home Office reporting centres to voluntarily return home; changing job centre processes to harness job seekersâ commitments to find work; and a number of policy experiments in the fields of consumer protection, charitable giving and international development (Behavioural Insights Team, 2015). This by no means exhaustive list could be supplemented by the interventions, governing cultures and practices that have been more indirectly shaped by the enthusiasm of national governments to support behaviour change as a paradigm for public policy reform.
The use of psychological knowledge in shaping conduct is thus by no means the preserve of national governments. Supranational organisations such as the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the European Union have also reported on the potential of behavioural economic and neuroscientific research to inform a wide range of policy areas, whilst international aid and development organisations have arguably long engaged in behaviour change interventions and communications projects in the areas of public health and poverty alleviation. Nor are these behavioural interventions the preserve of state authorities. Advertisers, marketers, political campaigners, NGOs and charities have long drawn on psychological forms of expertise in their efforts to communicate with, capture the attention of and shape the choices of their audiences. More recently, the focus of such forms of expertise and techniques has been notably shifting towards the inner workings of the mind, with âneuromarketingâ consultancies promising services that can generate data on the embodied and psychophysiological responses of consumers to specific brands and products (see Schneider and Woolgar, 2012 for a critical review). Advertisements themselves have, for instance, been designed to respond to viewersâ attention using eye tracking techniques â a common method in psychological research. Global behaviour change consultancies and social enterprises have emerged as important players within this industry, whilst many existing global consultancies have incorporated behavioural economics into their portfolio of services and knowledge bases (e.g. Deloitte, Gallup, KPMG, McKinsey, PricewaterhouseCoopers and RAND Corporation). There is often a close relationship between such organisations, university research centres and government-commissioned work. Some examples include Behaviour Change, Collaborative Change, National Social Marketing Centre, Nudgeathon (Warwick Business School), UCL Centre for Behaviour Change (all in the UK); iNudgeyou (Denmark); GreeNudge (Norway); Irrational Labs, The Greatest Good group (both in the USA); BEWorks (Canada); and The Behavioural Architects, Ogilvy Change (global).
Aside from advertisers, the everyday citizen-shaping domains of schooling, work and urban/building design have been shaped also by psychological and neuroscientific research (Pykett, 2015). This is further indication of the expansive and diffuse nature of psychological governance beyond the direct confines of âthe stateâ. Schools have long been replete with educational practices based on developmental psychology, and more recently this has been complemented by programmes based on positive psychology (Seligman, 2011), theories of âgrowth mindsetsâ (Dweck, 2006) and character strengths (Arthur, 2005), mindfulness and âneuroeducationâ (Huppert and Johnson, 2010; Howard-Jones, 2010; see Sanchez-Allred and Choudhury, this volume). In workplaces, human resource management and employee training processes have been heavily shaped by organisational psychology, positive psychology again, psychometric testing and âorganisational neuroscienceâ (Becker et al., 2011). And in the fields of urban design and architecture, concerted efforts have been made to establish âneuroarchitectureâ as a distinct field of research and practice to build on the foundations of work from environmental psychology and studies of spatial cognition to better design buildings and cities which respond to and potentially help to shape the psychological dimensions of human nature (Eberhard, 2009). These developments point both to the institutionalisation and formalisation of particularly psychological and biophysical accounts of human behaviour and to the way in which such knowledge is shaping governing practices within institutions (schools, workplaces, planning/architecture) beyond those of the state.
The challenges of psychological governance
It could be argued that these developments do not indicate anything particularly new about psychological governance or shaping citizenly conduct. Indeed the social and political uses (in Europe and North America) of psychological knowledge since the late nineteenth century have been well documented (Hearnshaw, 1964; Rose, 1985; Bunn et al., 2001). Areas of psychiatry, education, social and family policy, criminality, military recruitment and training as well as post-conflict therapy, industrial management, Victorian self-improvement and population-based eugenic thinking have been notable in their focus on the setting of psychological norms and the training, correction and governing of minds. Some of these phenomena are directly explored by the contributors to this book. Many scholars have outlined the close interconnection between the development of academic psychology, prevailing perceptions of societal problems and the status of clinical psychology as an applied profession. Meanwhile the historiography of psychology has itself come under much criticism for its naĂŻve search for psychologyâs founding fathers and its own role in sustaining a psychological discourse (Jones and Elcock, 2001; Blackman, 1994). In a radical rethinking of the history of psychology, Nikolas Rose argued that the development of psychology should not be understood as a progressive journey towards scientific truth and its subsequent application in practice, but rather that:
[t]he conditions which made possible the formation of the modern psychological enterprise in England were established in all those fields where psychological expertise could be deployed in relation to problems of the abnormal functioning of individuals.
(1985: 3)
It turns out that it has long been ârealâ social problems which have shaped the development of psychological science rather than a clear sense of scientific development as somehow separate from the ordinary concerns of society. The promise of an evidence-based policy driven by novel scientific insight is therefore rendered problematic.
This historical account throws into question the particular idea that âbehavioural insightsâ are simply applied to social and governmental problems as if they were straightforward manifestations of scientific evidence. Significant and historically contingent effort has been put into the assembling of the behavioural and decision-making sciences as sciences, through the establishment of accepted methodologies, international journals, research centres and funding. It is therefore essential that we consider the ways in which activities of psychological governance are studied in their broader social, cultural, political and economic contexts; for instance, by tracing the intimate trajectories shared by neoliberal economic theories and developments in the brain and behavioural sciences (Jones et al., 2013; Pykett, 2013; Davies, 2015). Contemporary manifestations of psychological governance are connected with a particularly economised vision of psychology, drawing most heavily from the discipline of behavioural economics. Like any such account, this offers only a partial view of the complexity of human behaviour, emotion, perception, cognition, intention and action. It thus arguably provides little by way of cultural, social and political-economic explanation for how and why people behave in certain ways. Indeed, as has been argued elsewhere (Tarde, 2007 [1902] in Greco and Stenner, 2013: 60), integrationist disciplines such as political economy and economic psychology (and by extension, behavioural economics and happiness economics) tend towards a split notion of disciplinary perspectives â where one discipline is said to compensate for the partiality of another. In Tardeâs critical account of economic psychology, then, the work involved in constituting economics as a science serves to reformulate the âsubjectivity of desiresâ, and the semiotics of money (as a cultural product) as abstract, measurable, objective and quantifiable. This observation is developed by Davies (this volume), who considers the inherent suspicion of discourse and language posed by contemporary happiness economics in particular.
Elsewhere (Jones et al., 2013), we have outlined what we term âthe rise of the psychological stateâ in light of evidence of the influence of the idea of ânudgeâ and behavioural science literatures on UK policy strategy and policy-making in several sectors including personal finance, environment and health. By approaching the psychological state as an anthropological phenomenon, we traced the specific enthusiasm for behavioural science explanations in policy strategy documents, white papers, think tank publications, in political discourse, by specific civil service personnel, political figures, research centres and highly publicised academics, and actually existing state practices around these three sectors. We described the appeal of ânudgeâ-inspired thinking and behavioural economic thought in particular to both the modernisation of New Labourâs proclaimed âmissionary styleâ of government, in the ascendance during the late 1990s, and the 2010 Conservative-led coalition governmentâs emphasis on reducing bureaucracy and state expenditure. Since 2013, further evidence of the influence of the behavioural sciences on global national and supranational government strategy and policy abounds, from both critical commentators and early advocates, as already described above (see, for example, the European Commissionâs latest review of behavioural insights applied to policies across European nation states [Sousa Lourenço et al., 2016]).
In adopting the moniker of the âpsychological stateâ, however, there is a risk of suggesting a rather caricatured critique of government intervention as if there is something untoward about using the latest scientific evidence as a basis for designing more cost-effective policies that take into account the real complexities of the human mind and behaviour. Some critics have indeed dismissed psychological governance as being either too trivial to matter or, conversely, a radical threat to democracy achieved through malign manipulation and psychological control. However, our position has been to narrate the emergence of the psychological state as a form of political reasoning â as a set of justifications and rationales given for taking particular courses of governmental action, targeting specific individuals and social groups, and for promoting certain kinds of intervention or indeed non-intervention in specific contexts. All of these forms of reasoning are highly contentious, and it is therefore important to attempt to understand the stated rationales behind new behavioural policy-making and delivery mechanisms, the foundat...
