Nudges, the Enlightenment and Resourcefulness
One of the criticisms of using insights from behavioural economics to influence behaviour is that it might lead in the long term to an infantilised society. People might get so used to being ‘nudged’ by the government into behaving in the right way, that they forget to think at all. If true, this would be completely at odds with the RSA’s central theme of developing self-reliant “citizens of the future”.
The RSA, as the website says, has been a cradle of enlightenment thinking since 1754, and the beginning of Kant’s What is Enlightenment essay is appropriate to the question of infantilisation:
“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another.” [link]
The RSA’s design work is centred around the question of how design and designers can make people more resourceful. Instead of design as problem-solving for example, can design show you how the problem is to be solved without doing it for you?
So how can we use design to influence people’s behaviour while encouraging resourcefulness at the same time? Does this mean, for example, that we should concentrate more on enabling behaviour rather than motivating or constraining behaviour (to use Dan Lockton’s helpful terms)?
What do you think?
Comments
6 Comments on Nudges, the Enlightenment and Resourcefulness
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Richard Gooch on
Sat, 18th Jul 2009 7:59 pm
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Rowland on
Thu, 30th Jul 2009 9:36 pm
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Jamie Young on
Wed, 5th Aug 2009 4:59 pm
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Jamie Young on
Wed, 5th Aug 2009 5:00 pm
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ted on
Tue, 25th Aug 2009 10:14 pm
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Josh W on
Sat, 24th Oct 2009 2:14 am
There’s no denying the cotton wool culture (fear of legal liability). “Caution, bench may be wet if it has rained”.
As a society, we’ve started to get used to factual information being presented to us, but eliminating the unnecessary – I’ll use Sat Nav as an analogy. By being shown the ‘right way’ to go for your route, you learn that route. However, that’s all you learn. In terms of functionality, surely that is serving its purpose. To give ‘clues’ such as – go north east – causes frustration and confusion.
Design can be about functional communication. If you need to explain the communication’s meaning – the piece has failed. Design for the sake of beauty, elegance or inspiration is open to interpretation and can certainly be intended to make the viewer think.
I certainly wouldn’t apply that thinking to designing a powertool.
Hey Jamie
Seems to me that nudging and the Enlightenment are pretty compatible because they are both ultimately sadistic.
Be interested to hear your thoughts:
http://www.rowlandmanthorpe.com/blog/2009/07/the-sadism-of-nudge/
Hi Richard – thanks for your comment. I agree about the sat nav example, and also agree that giving encouraging people to learn rather than follow them blindly by giving “clues” would be annoying…
Hi Rowland – sorry to be so late getting back to you. I’ll have a look at your blog post now…
I’m pretty new to the whole behavioral economics debate but the best example this brings to mind for me is the case of Radiohead’s ‘pay as much as you like’ album.
In giving consumers the opportunity of choice to pay what they like for the download they moved the responsibility for valuing the product to the individual, in turn making them question their own values and beliefs. So in a way the experience design of this download model influenced peoples behavior (by making them choose a legal download over illegal) while empowering them to be resourceful and define their own value beliefs rather than have them dictated.
Here’s a couple more thoughts on this…
http://letsbehumanbeings.typepad.com/letsbehumanbeings/2009/08/no-surprises.html
http://letsbehumanbeings.typepad.com/letsbehumanbeings/2009/06/what-you-like.html
The enlightenment included a number of texts, a number of patterns for thinking, but these were framed as something your own mind would naturally agree with, as opposed to something you must accept even if you can’t recreate it from your own experience.
Certain kinds of design fit the first quite well, in that you can see the moving parts and test it out, and learn from seeing it in operation. Finished industrial products quite frequently fit the latter, in that the design is opaque and observing the product gives little sign of how it could be recreated. In other words the enlightenment thinking expects you to reverse engineer it, try to improve on it, and find you can’t.
A “nudge” system based on the same principles would be an explicit manipulative/enabling scheme, which people could critique and offer feedback on. Now this provides an interesting divergence; if the users of the system, (ie the ones it is being used on) are to be presented with the “source code” to something they otherwise only experience subconsciously, it is an encouragement to consider themselves in an external manner, similar to how awareness of your own blindspot allows you to consider yourself as a “functioning being”. This gets everyone thinking in terms of governing people, even if one of those people is themselves, perhaps an incentive towards something like Rawl’s original position.
Of course consistently considering yourself as someone of imperfect rationality (who needs these cues) is in itself a divergence from enlightenment thinking, so we haven’t closed the loop yet; we need a view of human thinking that enables us to consider the imperfections and mechanical underpinnings of our subjective view without invalidating it’s self-purposing, which is what makes enabling meaningful!
And I think the RSA is making some good effort towards that actually, making sure there’s a good picture of the human experience behind our attempts to improve it.
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