Recognising the limits of ‘nudge’ interventions to drive positive behavioural change at scale prompts challenging questions about how research can effectively drive action within the structures of government decision making. Participatory methods offer an alternative vision of ‘evidence’ that can complement behavioural science to help spur action.
From individuals to systems
Last year, Nick Chater and George Lowenstein published a paper challenging behavioural science’s focus on individual levels interventions, arguing that:
- Behavioural policy making has been focused on interventions aimed at ‘nudging’ individual behaviour
- An evaluation of the evidence demonstrates “disappointingly modest” results for individual level interventions across a wide range of policy areas
- This focus has crowded out a proper consideration of more systemic reform, via traditional policy levers, such as regulation or taxation
- Whilst this has been carried out in good faith, it has also unwittingly played into the hands of corporate lobbyists wishing to block systemic reform
- The discipline should therefore refocus on informing more systemic interventions, via the application of behavioural insight and research to regulatory and tax regimes
The paper prompted a range of responses – some more receptive and others more critical (and all worth reading!). For me, as someone coming into the field from a background in anthropology and qualitative research, it was a welcome public airing of conversations that otherwise seemed to be happening largely in private. Given the scope of work taking place under the behavioural banner, this felt like an overdue corrective to the gap between the discipline’s public image and the actual concerns of practitioners.
And at its core lies a fundamental point around which everyone seems to agree: the accumulated evidence from years of behavioural work points towards a need for greater system-level intervention to effectively drive behaviour change at scale across a range of important issues.
Structural and political challenges
The implications of this shift in focus to system-level interventions are profound – and are made more searching in the context of the systems and structures that helped embed behavioural science so firmly into policy making.
This fascinating piece of qualitative work carried out amongst Government Social Research colleagues helps to illustrate how the discipline’s appeal within government has been driven in part precisely by its promise of enacting change without recourse to systemic reform. Policymakers are typically operating within constrained budgets and timescale, with limited scope for influence, and pressure to provide evidence of their impact. In this context, interventions focused on nudging individual behaviour that can be tested using experimental methods and rolled-out incrementally have a natural appeal.
By contrast, systemic reform is hard! It requires long-term commitment and carries with it substantial risk. It may rely on coordination across multiple individuals, teams or departments. And it is generally not amenable to the kind of generalisable and replicable quantitative evidence of ‘what works’ favoured within government. Even more fundamentally, the idea of shifting focus from individual to systemic level intervention is itself deeply political, given that it requires by necessity an appetite for greater state intervention. This adds to the challenge of carrying out reform – and takes researchers and practitioners into tricky territory when making recommendations.
In their paper, Chater and Lowenstein propose a series of ways in which behavioural science can be brought to bear on the design of regulation, including a better consideration of ergonomics in service design, the application of psychological principles to improve group interactions amongst policymakers and a more nuanced consideration of how citizens may respond to incentives. However, beyond calls to aim to maximise voter turnout, they do little to propose how research might help to overcome the structural and political factors that could otherwise be a block to passing this legislation in the first place, instead claiming that this will need to be shaped by ‘normal democratic processes’.
For a discipline whose impact to date has been in part due to the way that it has been able to neatly sidestep questions of politics and work with the grain of the constrained policymaking process, this shift into more political territory therefore presents something of an existential challenge.
Participation and collaboration
There are no easy answers to this impasse. Systemic reform will continue to need political will, which will in large part – and quite properly – depend on the actions of political parties as voted for by the public. However, if we look beyond the traditional toolbox of behavioural science, then there are also ways in which research may be able to help.
In their paper, Chater and Lowenstein talk about a shift from the ‘libertarian paternalism’ associated with behavioural approaches. This term reflects two founding tenets of the discipline:
- It is best to avoid legislation where possible so as not to curtail individual freedoms (the ‘libertarian’ bit)
- Individuals are prone to making predictable errors of judgement and therefore do not always act in their own best interests (the ‘paternalism’ bit)
In place of this, the authors suggest the need to shift to a more ‘heavy-handed paternalism’, in support of a shift away from libertarianism in light of evidence about the limited effectiveness of attempts to change behaviour in the absence of systemic reform. However, perhaps because of the paternalistic assumptions that continue to be built into the DNA of behavioural policy, they don’t seem to consider alternatives to this part of the model.
Participatory research methods are one such alternative, in which research and policy making is less about ‘doing to’ and more about ‘doing with’. And they have the potential to effectively bring in all of the parties involved in and affected by policy reform:
- Public Participation: Voting will be vital to achieving democratic consensus around systemic reform, but it is a blunt instrument in relation to specific proposals. Deliberative research methods offer the means to meaningfully involve the public in decision-making in a more targeted way. Deliberative events are designed to offer those who will be affected by policy the time and space to consider issues from an informed perspective, prompting them to draw on multiple evidence sources and input from diverse experts. Whilst important political differences in view can remain following such events, they typically generate considerable consensus over the broad direction that policy should take. The kind of evidence this approach generates can complement evidence of ‘what works’ to demonstrate the democratic case for taking action.
- Stakeholder Participation: Chater and Lowenstein’s paper draws attention to the ways in which business have contested systemic reforms via lobbying. Whilst the power of corporate lobbying is undoubtedly an ongoing concern, in my experience there are also many within businesses looking to the government to produce regulation that will drive their industry in directions that they do not feel they are able to take alone due to commercial and competitive pressures. Facilitated and evidence-based discussions between business leaders and policymakers offer a transparent and constructive way to navigate the design intelligent regulation that raises standards across the board.
- Policymaker Participation: The involvement of policymakers in this kind of participatory work brings them into direct contact with those for or around whom they are shaping policy. It can also connect them to colleagues in different departments who may be working in related policy areas, forging relationships and creating space for collective action. From this perspective, the research process is itself an intervention, with the potential to break policymakers out of the usual organisational constraints that shape their actions.
Driving through systemic reform will remain challenging. However, given the challenges faced by behavioural policy making as it shifts its focus to systemic reform, there is likely to be benefit in scaling up approaches that more directly involve the participation of all parties. Making this happen will require an acknowledgement of the limits of a purely behavioural approach and an appetite for greater collaboration between those doing ‘behavioural science’ and those experienced in participatory methods.