An Introduction to Nudge Theory
It's all part of a cunning Baldrick type plan to persuade you to live more healthily.
The 1824 Act decreed that beer shall only be sold in multiples of half pints is to be ditched. This is serious! No, not the fact you will be able to ask for a third or two thirds of a pint but that Blair's social engineering project is alive and well.
The Agenda
‘Today we can’t escape the fact that today many of our most severe health problems are caused, in part, by the wrong personal choices. Obesity, binge-drinking, smoking and drug addiction are putting millions of lives at risk and costing our health services billions a year. So getting to grips with them requires an altogether different approach to the one we’ve seen before. We need to promote more responsible behaviour and encourage people to make the right choices about what they eat, drink and do in their leisure time.’ (David Cameron, foreword, A Healthier Nation, Policy Green Paper No.12, Conservative Party.)
Behavioural Insights Abound
This outrage has been designed by Cameron's Behavioural Insight Team
, otherwise known as the Nudge Unit. That is a group of people being paid to think up ways to persuade us "to make better choices for ourselves".
The inspiration behind the Unit, which is central to Dave's Big Society plans, is behavioural economics expert Dr David Halpern. The Unit's focus is on the problems of obesity, diet and alcohol.
Halpern is no stranger to the Cabinet Office, he was one of Blair's glove puppets under the last regime. His most famous contribution at that time towards a Nudge Theory was the paper 'Personal Responsibility and Behaviour Change'. However, more recently, a 2008 book called Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein sets out the full picture. (P.S. Sunstein works for Obama and Thaler works in the Nudge Unit).
The book explores "libertarian paternalism", or how public and private organisations can help people make better choices through market incentives.
In practice this will mean giving poor people food vouchers that can only be used on healthy choices. In New York, Mayor Bloomberg is trying to stop poor people spending their welfare vouchers on soda pop.
It get's worse.....
Halpern says in his blog that his work will build on the Mindspace report commissioned by the previous government. Mindspace looked at ways of changing people's behaviour by influencing not just what they consciously think but also by influencing their "automatic processes" – cues from the subconscious, from the behaviour of people around them, and from emotional associations that affect their decisions.
For year's we have grown used to advertisers' tricks now the Government will be doing it as well. Even the Department of Health have set up a 'Behaviour Change Unit', informed by ad-men.
George Osborne told us in 2008,
"Our work with the world's leading behavioural economists and social psychologists is yet more proof that the Conservative party is now the party of ideas in British politics."
People are, apparently, powerfully influenced by the people around them, this insight is one the driving forces behind Nudge Theory for policy makers. The basic idea for policy makers is simple, tell people what the norms are and people will fall into line with those norms. Evidence from America suggests that a simple metaphorical pat on the back, like a smiley face on your energy bill, where families have managed to reduce their energy consumption below the average, does the trick.
Beware! Behavioual Psychologists at Work.
The Royal Society of Arts’ Social Brain Project, which is spawning many of these ideas, says ‘people are often systematically irrational’. And why would you care what irrational people think, unless you were engaged in a project to make them think rationally, you know, like you do.
When Orwell told us in '1984' that freedom is slavery he must have had Nudge Theory in mind ‘We create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.’ Big Brother wanted citizens to believe that ‘freedom is slavery’, this was 'doublethink at work'. Osborne is talking about creating a politics of behaviour, just another variant of doublethink.
Readers are reminded that in the 2005 election campaign one of the Tory slogans was ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’ If you weren't then, you will be soon.
Nudge theory is Skinnerism designed to reduce our comprehension and responses to a matter of unconsciously responding to stimuli, the focus is on wrong choices, the context in which behaviour can be understood and corrected.
New York is currently the lab in much of Nudge Theory is being tested, where the politicians are ‘changing the entire cultural landscape in order to make bad choices harder and good ones easier’ to ‘an overhaul of human behaviour’ it's ‘a vast population experiment with no control group’.
Dr Thomas A Farley, the main architect in New York's experiment tells us ‘if we really want to change how we behave, we must change the environment in which we live’. Read Skinner's 'Beyond Freedom and Dignity' (1971), he says exactly the same thing? It has taken several decades for Skinner's ideas to find favour, now they have - an alternative title for Skinner's book could easily be 'Lessons in Cultural Design'.