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Behavioural Change | Notes
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Behavioural ChangeLecture 2 (9-9-2020) – Nudging in Policy Making:
Behavioural Science and Public Policy: Enhance welfare by shaping behaviour
Traditional approaches rely on a limited set of tools: taxes, subsidies, mandates,
bans, information campaigns
- Based on assumptions from neo-classical economics: decision makers are rational,
profit-maximizing, consistent over time, consider all relevant information, mainly
motivated by monetary incentives
Alternative approach: nudging (influencing peoples choices unconsciously, giving
people a little push, without forcing)
- Social and behavioural sciences: more complete (and different) portrait of human
decision-making
Nudging: any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behaviour in a
predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their
economic incentives
- Prominent form of public policy interventions, informed by behavioural sciences
(behavioural economics, psychology)
- Beneficial or optimized decision for decision maker (internalities; emphasis on
changing behaviour to benefit those who are nudged, not to reduce the harms that
these behaviours may impose on others)
- No (changes to material) incentives (or at least just smaller incentives); not simply
about changing the incentive structure, the aim is to motivate people to change their
(self- and society harming) behaviour without imposing further regulations, penalties,
or bans.
- No limitations/restriction of freedom of choice: libertarian (belief in protection of
individual rights and freedom) paternalism (infringement on the personal freedom of
an individual with a beneficent or protective intent) “free will preserving
infringement with a beneficent intent”
- Based on dual cognitive process theories (rely on system 1; unconscious, automatic,
parallel, rapid, large capacity, modular cognition, contextualized, evolutionarily old,
nonverbal (heuristics (rule of thumb in complex situation under time pressure) &
biases) can be used to influence behaviour: social norms, gains/losses, likeability,
reciprocity, anchoring, status quo bias, defaults, emotions, disjunction effect
(immediate decisions prevented by an uncertain, but irrelevant, future event, that will
cause you to delay decisions you could/should make immediately)
Choice architecture: reshape choice environment, so that automatic choices align
with optimal/preferred behaviour (relies on automatic decision making processes, is
liberty-preserving, does not use large financial incentives, is informed by behavioural
economics, targets internalities)
Complications:
- Long term effect: one-off behaviours, resilient shifts (created a behavioural pattern),
environmental changes, repeated exposure effects (habituation or reinforcement)
- problems with proxy measures: immediate and (considered reliable) proxy measures
don’t always have a causal relationship with each other
, - spill-overs and unintended consequences: interventions could have possible
unintended and unmeasured effects elsewhere (licensing effects)
- true universals and cultural variation: most research is done on western, educated,
industrialised, rich and developed people, which isn’t generalizable to all people
- reverse impact: government actions are altered and then the results are published in
peer-reviewed journals (impact comes first)
- replication crisis: if the replicated interventions (from lab studies & field experiments)
aren’t reliable, this could lead to wasted resources & damage trust in policy-makers
Lecture 3 (11-9-2020) – Nudging; Acceptance & Ethics:
BIT (Behavioural Insights Team): helping the government with policy making
Government strategies:
- Law/enforcement: fines/penalties
- Incentives/rewards: financial, social
- Information Campaigns: normative information & empirical information
- Nudging: default (opt out), framing (making a piece of information salient/attractive)
Scaling interventions: a specific opportunity for taking a behavioural approach to
government itself
- Behavioural science has often adopted a basic approach of ‘experiment and then
scale’: a trial is conducted on a sample (which nonetheless might be relatively large)
and the best-performing variant is adopted more widely
Social diffusion: use of social networks for behavioural change
- A public sector actor attempts to influence an individual, organisation or group
- Influence that exists between individuals, organisations or groups (associative
matching > random assignment)
Nudging organisations: instead of only individuals
- Many policy-relevant decisions are made by organisations
What is a good choice?
- Science: based on empirical evidence
- Society: reduce harm to others
- Environment: respect for nature and resources
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