Inside the nudge unit

Serendipity

I didn’t plan to read this book at all, never heard, never read the review of it before. It just that it showed up after the search for “nudge” so might as well kind of thing. I was pleasantly surprised by the book. It was fun to read.

It is very rare to see academic concepts born in ivory tower being applied to real-world problems. This is a unique book written by an academic who’s directly involved in turning behavioural science concepts to real government policies. It’s a part memoir, part political how to, and part academic textbook. It is, essentially, real-world implementations and experimentations of behavioural science as outlined in the book “Nudge”. The attempts were made for all experiments to be randomised-controlled trial, which is a gold standard design. The author understood and appreciated how powerful this experimental design is in getting the answer.

It’s a fascinating documentation of scientific applications to real-world problems. They range from increasing tax collections, organ donation rates, retirement plan enrolments, and charitable donation. All of these were on the conditions of small tweaks of the processes previously implemented and small to no additional investment. Even though results may be considered modest, the return is enormous because there was small to no additional investment. There was no law, mandate, sanction or outright ban of any kind to get the outcome; it’s just ‘nudge’. This book is truly a government or political party policy gold mine. It consists of myriad of policy initiatives, failed and successful examples of implementations/experimentations. There’s even an example of how to work on interdepartmental politics.

The book touched upon history of evidence-based medicine, Archie Cochrane and his seminal book, which was the basis of my PhD research. It was delightful to learn that Cochrane’s influence continues to resonate and diffuse into areas outside healthcare. It would be an understatement to say that the author lead the movement of evidence-based governance, where government policy requires evidence to back up that it would actually work. And if there’s no evidence, the government would experiment, learn and adapt. This is scientific process on steroids.

The followings are part that I like.

On speed

On road screens that show speed of drivers going too fast in red, while showing the speed of drivers obeying the limit in a soothing yellow, have been found to be highly effective – and often more so than speed cameras and fines.

Limitations of laws

While laws and punishments have often proved reasonably effective at getting people to stop doing something, they are often much less effective at getting people to start doing something, and certainly to persist with it.

A different approach 

A ‘nudge’ is essentially a means of encouraging or guiding behaviour, but without mandating or instructing, and ideally without the need for heavy financial incentives or sanction.

I can’t help but thinking about current pandemic management. If it all depends on populace follow government instructions, changing human behaviours, the government seemed to be barking up the wrong tree as they keep hammering on laws, fines, ban. I don’t clearly see applications of behavioural science on pandemic management at all.

Smoking ban

The smoking ban, in the UK at least, has been subject to almost no enforcement. In essence, smoking bans have been self-policed, built around a new social norm – or tacit public support – for smoke-free environments

Probability of an event

Rather than statistics most people use a mental shortcut along the lines of how easily they can recall examples of planes versus cars crashing – what Tversky and Kahneman called an ‘availability’ heuristic. 

How to ‘nudge’

EAST Easy Attractive Social and Timely

If you want to encourage something, make it easy. Subjects are more likely to believe a statement as true when it is written in bold rather than standard text. It’s easy to read.

A simple message and image that attracts attention, connects on an emotional level, and has a clear call to action. These make people likely follow the message. A personalised email and the tub of sweets led a stunning 17% increase to give to charity. Because they created a sense of personal connection and reciprocity.

Exam

In a series of lab studies, it was found that people were less likely to cheat if they signed a declaration of honesty before rather than after the opportunity to cheat.

Make the market works

Energy companies were required to print on bills a QR code that summarised the customers’ details, patterns of use and their current tariff. In technical terms, this made the customers’ data machine-readable. In everyday terms, it meant that all customers need to do to save some money is to scan the QR code with their mobile phone, and a switching site app can search the market for the best tariff for them. Instead of switching being a task that would take a few hours, it can be done in a few seconds. You don’t have to be a top economist to see why this seemingly small change could be a game-changer. Before the change, utility providers could make much of their profits by quietly ensuring that switching providers was complicated and time-consuming. 

Nudge advocates RECAP: Record, Evaluate, and Compare Alternative Prices.  The basic idea was that companies should be required to give the prices and attributes of products in comparable, machine-readable form, so that consumers could make easier and more effective comparisons.

Dogma

There’s behavioural literature on expert judgements, and it’s not pretty reading. Philip Tetlock has documented how, very often, political and policy experts aren’t very good at getting it right. In particular, experts who have strong views of the world, with clear-cut but rigid theories, tend to make predictions that turn out to be wrong. In contrast, experts who make more accurate predictions tend to have much messier views of the world. They change their minds when new evidence comes along. They’re often full of doubt, so they don’t make great pundits on TV. But they’re more likely to get it right, because the world is, after all, a complicated place.

“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts” Feynman-physicist. His point was not that scientists were ‘ignorant’ in the usual sense, but that science was about embracing ‘doubt’ – being open to the possibility, even likelihood, that your theory was wrong

On subjective well-being

Drivers of well being are individual constitutional or personality differences; material factors; and social factors, including personal relationships

The well-being literature also brings some new twists, suggesting that factors such as control and access to the natural world play an important role over and above income per se. People prefer products and designs that they have had a hand in creating, (have a sense of control) even if experts rate them as less effective, and prefer websites that show them what they are doing, such as when searching for flights, holidays or partners, to ones that don’t, even if they take longer.

Cracking cancer is important, but from a well-being point of view don’t loneliness and mental health look strangely under-resourced, too? We want our kids to leave school able to read and write, and to get well-paid jobs, but don’t we want them to have acquired the psychological resilience and skills to enjoy satisfying and meaningful lives, too? Perhaps the biggest shift the subjective well-being concept/measurement brings is to highlight the profound importance of social relationships, and emphasises the importance not just of ‘hard’ outcomes but the extent to which citizens have control over processes along the way.

On long commute

Epley, researcher at the University of Chicago, found that talking to fellow commuters increased subjective well-being markedly. It turns out that changing a long, boring commute into a more social experience makes it much more pleasant, and eliminates most of the negative effects documented elsewhere. Cost-benefit analysis of high speed train should take note.

Trains and buses often now have ‘quiet carriage where people are politely asked not to use their phones and to respect those who want to read or work. But why not also have ‘talkative carriages’, for those who’d like to chat.

On deliberative forums

This involves bringing together a statistically representative sample of the public for a day or more, briefing them in detail about the issue. During this process, hundreds of members of the public were shown the facts and figures on pensions, and the early evidence on how changing from an opt-in to an opt-out scheme might change savings rates. They heard the argument for and against the change, they could ask questions and finally they were asked to decide what they would do to boost retirement saving rates. Then the government took the forum decisions on board or rejected it, either way the government must defend its position publicly. Sounds like a democracy at its best.