
Nudge, nudge. Think, think. Say no more …
I hear the Nudge unit is in the news again …
I am waiting for the government to establish a Dig in the Ribs unit. Maybe even a Slap and Tickle unit, who knows?
Don’t be silly. Remind me what Nudge is again?
It started as a concept, “libertarian paternalism”, advanced by two American academics, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. The idea was that the government could help people to help themselves without violating their liberty – for instance, by assuming they would like to make pension contributions unless otherwise stated. Then it became a book and the concept got a bit broader and a bit vaguer and more generally about the use of psychology and behavioural economics in policymaking. Then “Nudge” became a fashionable label to be slapped on any policy in search of a headline. Finally, David Cameron set up the Behavioural Insight Team – aka the Nudge unit – to do more research on the subject. The Cabinet Office published some of their findings this week.
This sounds an unpromising pedigree …
Well, the idea of using a popular economics book as a branding exercise certainly smacks of superficiality. But the idea of doing actual experiments to improve policy is a good one and, perhaps surprisingly, that’s what the Behavioural Insight team has been doing.
Why are you surprised?
I am surprised – pleasantly surprised – because these experiments risk failure and take time, neither of which are qualities calculated to endear them to politicians. The Nudge unit has managed to get around this by conducting some experiments on a large scale and examining short-term questions, such as whether people will respond to a letter about tax. This makes it possible to produce results very quickly.
For example?
Let’s say somebody has been fined in court but has not paid. You could send in the bailiffs. Or you could send a text message explaining that if the fine isn’t paid quickly, the bailiffs will be on their way. The Behavioural Insight team and the courts service ran a randomised trial, sending no text message to some people and a variety of text messages to others to see which approach works best. It turns out that text messages are highly effective and even more effective is a text message that mentions the miscreant’s name. The difference between no message and a personalised message is that instead of one in 20 people immediately paying up, one in three people do. That adds up to 150,000 occasions on which the bailiffs need not be called in.
This doesn’t sound like rocket science …
No, and it’s not brain surgery either. But it does appear to work. Sometimes these effects are mind-numbingly obvious. For instance, a letter sent by HM Revenue and Customs to chase up tax from doctors was vastly more effective after being written in a straightforward way with the key messages and request for action at the top of the letter. It was just as effective as an alternative that shoehorned in many fancy behavioural insights.
Why do we need these experiments at all, then?
There are a couple of reasons. The first is that human psychology is full of surprises. The report from the Cabinet Office contains no jaw-dropping discoveries but it does show that some sensible-sounding interventions have no effect, while others have very large effects. The second reason is that credible experiments tell a powerful story. I am told that the phone is ringing off the hook at the Behavioural Insight team office – government departments are queueing up to get some of that Nudgey goodness.
Nice for them, but I thought Nudge was all about persuading us to go to the gym
That has been its reputation, but so far the focus has been persuading people to pay taxes and fines and get a driving licence. A lot of the details are, frankly, pedestrian. But if core functions of government can be conducted more effectively the stakes are far from trivial. These experiments suggest that they can.
Do the experiments really stack up?
Most of them are work in progress. But while the Cabinet Office has obviously rushed to publish early results, they don’t look like a botched job. In an ideal world we’d get peer review, a registry of experiments and eventually systematic reviews. For now, I think we should be grateful that somebody is bothering to ask what works.
Also published at ft.com.
8 Comments
Timandra Harkness says:
A Slap and Tickle Unit might not be a bad idea. there’s convincing evidence that being single/lonely is as bad for your health as smoking (health advice I make sure to pass on to all the attractive men I meet).
11th of February, 2012Robin Tucker says:
It is really encouraging to hear government actions driven by evidence rather than dogma. Let’s hope it continues and expands.
The masters of this are credit card and similar businesses. They now have automated test marketing of every variation you can think of and probably some you couldn’t, like the colour of the envelope and the text on it. Maybe the government could make good use of the financial services expertise it has recently acquired.
11th of February, 2012Hoover says:
It’s good that the government is trying to help people to help themselves.
But wait… let’s look at the bailiff example and try to untangle who is helping who.
If the person who hasn’t paid a £100 fine is cleverly nudged into paying, the behavioural insighter would presumably argue that they’ve been helped.
I’m a bit stupid and I have odd views. I think that when a person is £100 worse off, they haven’t been helped.
I think letting them off the fine would help them, and my reasoning is that they would have kept £100.
Bizarre, I know.
I suspect that most of the helping going on is actually helping the government. In this instance, the government is helped by being £100 better off.
This is ungrateful of me, because when I look at success stories in the BIU annual report, it gets a bit hazy. If the government nudges me into drinking less alcohol, I might become healthier but it’s also true that the NHS saves money and the police won’t use resources arresting me for drunken affray.
When they nudge me into insulating my home, the government gets closer to achieving its dreamy emissions targets.
So I would ask this: What incentive does the BIU have to help me disinterestedly? Would one of the whizz-kids working there lend me his car to get to a job interview, for example? Or take a few hours out of his leisure time to teach me literacy?
12th of February, 2012Ivan Jordan says:
I instinctively like nudge theory. It’s the lighter touch that humanises government/person interaction. However, the novelty will wear off, and if every department gets in on the act it may turn from nudge nudge to nag nag. Then we will be longing for the old language of bureaucracy that we can file as “pending”…
12th of February, 2012James says:
Good piece and agreed there are some important ideas to test. The problem is, for health behaviours at least, these are just individual level interventions. To really affect something such as a problematic drinking culture, population level action to address determinants like price, availability and marketing. Of course these are politically risky, but as the lords committe report found, nudge alone is not enough.
12th of February, 2012Paul Fairburn says:
I loved the Nudge book, and love that Government is trying this.
What should be more shocking is that our dear leaders don’t test and research more policies before imposing them wholesale.
Evidence-based-policy – now there’s a novel idea.
12th of February, 2012Rinu says:
This may fail in the long run as has been proved in the case of parenting all over the world !!!
12th of February, 2012MattCG says:
Has the Nudge team investigated the impact of using adapted Monty Python dialogue to encourage clickthroughs?
13th of February, 2012