Is Superfreakonomics your Bible?
A couple of weeks ago I overheard someone say to a friend “I used to believe in [climate change], but now I don’t. Not since reading Superfreakonomics. It’s my bible. Is that worrying?”, to which I silently screamed “yes”.
A lot of people are saying that we’re “losing” the battle of hearts and minds on climate change. Frustratingly silly mistakes from the IPCC that make a mockery of their reportedly rigorous process, the Climategate fracas from the University of East Anglia, the naff result that was Copenhagen and the failure of the government to find a compelling and aspirational story to explain climate change are all factors that spring to my mind. Coupled of course with the effect of the cold weather as a couple (that one’s great) of our representatives demonstrated.
This poll for the BBC, for example, shows a rise of 10% in agreement with the statement “Climate change is not happening” between November 2009 and December 2010. People’s views can rapidly change on issues (especially when polled on global warming during a cold snap), but it looks like the BBC’s poll is consistent with longer term views.
As part of their survey into public attitudes towards climate change, Defra poll people on their response to five questions which reflect different positions on the New Ecological Paradigm scale:
- “Climate change is beyond control – it’s too late to do anything about it”
- “If things continue on their current course, we will soon experience a major environmental disaster”
- “We are close to the limit of the number of people the earth can support”
- “The so-called ‘environmental crisis’ facing humanity has been greatly exaggerated”
- “The Earth has very limited room and resources”
Here’s what people said at the beginning and end of a two year period. The text is a bit small, but you can click for a bigger view. The columns are grouped in five pairs – the first of each pair shows people’s response in 2007 and the second in 2009.
Ecological Worldview
The overall message of this research seems to be that people aren’t throwing a belief in climate change completely out of the window. There was a change of only 3% towards disagreeing with the statement “The so-called ‘environmental crisis’ facing humanity has been greatly exaggerated”.
Rather people are gradually moderating their views on climate change, with the biggest changes being a 9% shift away from the defeatist view “Climate change is beyond control – it’s too late to do anything about it” and 6% move away from the statement “If things continue on their current course, we will soon experience a major environmental disaster”.
So what would be the right response to this change towards more moderate attitudes towards climate change? I guess the obvious one is to resist the temptation to commission more apocalyptic campaigns and commercials that will increasingly become laughed at or complained about and fail to find a foothold in people’s views.
However there is a more fundamental point to be made. There’s a rapidly growing amount of theory in the public sector around social marketing (and behavioural economics etc.) – but (speaking from the outside) all this knowledge doesn’t seem to be breaking into the planning of communications. The UK’s government has been good at creative comms in the past (e.g. Lord Woolton’s knack for PR) but we don’t seem to be doing very well with climate change. It’s superfrustrating.
“Behavioral economists who can code will one day rule the world”
As a rapidly relapsing programmer, I like this encouragement (not that I really want to rule the world) from a tweet from Jonathan Schwartz, the outgoing CEO of Sun. His prediction was in reference to Kwedit, an intriguing new service that allows people that don’t have credit cards to buy digital content over the web. Launched just under a fortnight ago, Kwedit are solving the problem of the 20m US teenagers and 30m households who don’t have credit cards and consequently have no way to pay for (virtual) goods online.
Kwedit allows people to buy goods over the web, then either pay at a convenience store, or by securely mailing cash, or via Kwedit’s “social payment network” which lets you designate someone else (lucky them) to pay on your behalf. In the world of digital music, smart phone apps and online TV episodes – Kwedit sounds like it fills a gap.
What’s really interesting though is that there’s a strong emphasis in their products on the financial literacy implications for teens:
Kwedit Promise provides a safe, virtual environment in which consumers can learn about credit and develop financial literacy – with no real-world implications. [link]
Users are given a Kwedit score according to how frequently they pay on time and the service functions as a place in which teens can simulate financial credit – in the same way that the BSM use driving simulators to give you basic training before heading out into the dangerous real world. It’s the sort of thing you wish the big banks had thought of five years ago.
Kwedit Score
But what does this have to do with behavioural economics? For one thing, the cognitive bias of delayed gratification bias (self control) is well known, and strikingly researched in children by Walter Mischel in his marshmallow experiment. Mischel investigated the self control of children by presenting them with a marshmallow and giving them the choice to eat their marshmallow, or wait for 20 minutes and receive a second marshmallow. Follow-up research indicated that the children able to stave off temptation tended to receive higher ratings for being dependable and higher SAT scores later in life.
I’m still mulling this over, but I’d love to hear what effect Kwedit might have teenagers’ self control a few years down the line – let me know what you think!
Crowdsourcing Comments
I’m putting together some ideas for a short pamphlet on behaviour change policy and designers (mostly service and product designers I suppose). Here’s a precis:
Civil servants, politicians and their advisors have been fascinated to hear how knowledge from psychology can give insights that may lead to more effective ways to encourage people to change their behaviour. How to use such knowledge to generate policy options is a different question, and developing behaviour change interventions could be risky. These risks may be mitigated by adopting working practices more usually found in the creative industries than Whitehall and Westminster.
What I’m trying to say is that politicians, political advisors and civil servants interested in the effect of social proof and other nudges lack a process that allows them to move from this theoretical knowledge to putting such insights into practice in a way that is fun, transparent and effective.
From my perspective, I think that design could contribute a lot to this discourse – especially designers’ ability to come up with creative ideas, their reliance on social research and their experience in co-design and social prototyping.
I’d love to know what you think – do drop me a comment.
Decode at the V&A
I visited the V&A’s Decode exhibition over the weekend which showcases digital interactive art. Decode did a good job of showing how code was becoming a tool in its own right for artists and designers, how technology allowed people to interact more fully (read: full of very excited children) with exhibits, and how dynamic visualisations could be generated from vast networks. The video for Radiohead’s House of Cards was displayed on an interactive screen but others I hadn’t seen before, like Troika’s digital zoetrope which whizzed round displaying an incoherent babble of words, then suddenly clicked into focus showing snippets of a story: “stockbroker / 200k / belgravia / she left me” before changing speed again so that the words fell back into the babble. Putting the puritan hat of Edward Tufte on, I guess I’d say that a lot of the visualisations didn’t always have bringing clarity to data as their first concern: when walking around lots of things made me think “that looks complicated”, rather than “that helps me understand”.
In his 2003 book Persuasive Technology, BJ Fogg lists some reasons why using technology to influence behaviour is different from persuading people using other forms of media like traditional advertising. For example the anonymity of interacting with a machine can encourage people to be more open in their responses to questions which could allow a computer to present more tailored responses. Computers can also sift through enormous volumes of data to present people with an overpowering case - or find the one fact in millions that they find most persuasive. Another reason Fogg gives that I find convincing is that computers can present people with a rich variety of text, video, audio and the ability to interact and simulate, allowing people to select the media that they find most engaging.
Decode wasn’t an exhibition about changing behaviour of course, but it was interesting to read an interview with one of the artists, Golan Levin, who when asked “what do digital technologies allow you to do or investigate that other tools do not?” replied “I can create ‘behaviour’”.
Missing Links
My Wii age is the same as my real age. This means that the makers of Wii Sports consider that, based on my age, height and sense of balance - I am fit. Nice to be given the approval from a games console. If on the other hand it calculates that you are overweight or obese it rather nastily swells the tummy of your mii (your avatar in the game) in proportion. It’s a cheeky response from a lump of electronics and plastic.
It’s difficult not to get uppity when people imply (at least when you haven’t asked them) that you should correct the way you live. We tend to think our lifestyles only have an effect on ourselves and our close family and friends. In many ways it’s just not true though. Stats last year showed that NHS trusts saw spending rise seven-fold in three years on obesity-related costs; a trend that will come under scrutiny when public sector spending as a whole faces cuts.
There’s been an explosion of research in public policy over the last few years into more effective ways to encourage “behaviour change” – renewed interest in social marketing, behavioural economics, neuroscience, social and cognitive psychology… Through a heavy pile of papers and reports, we seem to know more than ever about what affects the decisions we make. In theory allowing us to design intelligent policies and measures that give us freedom while protecting others from the fall-out of our actions.
One of my frustration is that we need to put more of this research into action – behaviour-change theory is fascinating, but it’s only half the challenge. We need good ideas for how we can convert knowledge into practice.
One way in which the RSA is trying to jump this theory/practice gap is through a short project with the police. Working with the National Police Improvement Agency, we carried out some short qualitative research with officers and the public to identify a few key behaviours. We chose behaviours we thought likely to affect levels of public confidence in the police – the police force’s main target – and chose an approach of using design and technology (everything from handcuffs to websites) to form behaviour change interventions.
Working with a few designers, we used the Design with Intent toolkit to brainstorm new ideas which could encourage more desirable behaviours. These ranged from using heart rate monitors to help officers monitor their levels of stress, to using Waitrose-like plastic tokens to allow people to vote for the police force’s neighbourhood priorities. We’ll publish a more comprehensive list in a few weeks here.
We ran through the same process a couple of weeks later with a larger group of people more familiar with the police. One of the strengths of the DwI toolkit seemed to me to give those who aren’t professional designers the confidence to come up with new ideas. By looking at how others have used design to influence behaviour it is easier to transpose those ideas to the behaviours that you are trying to change.
It’s methods like DwI that are one of the components missing from much of the behaviour change discourse. We need that idea-generating process to help policy makers work with designers, behaviour experts and people to make the leap into practice. Maybe then we’d find some better ways of reducing obesity and its rapidly rising social costs.
From Data to Behaviour
Matthew Taylor’s thesis that a more engaged citizen (as opposed to a consumer) is required to reform government, one that will understand the need to make trade-offs and one that takes personal responsibility for their actions, is perfectly exemplified by many of today’s activist geeks. Individuals like Tom Steinberg and MySociety, a voluntary organisation of technical experts donate their time to the challenge of scraping data from public sector websites (like Hansard records) and re-published it in websites that are far more engaging, allowing others in turn to become more engaged.
Today, principally because of their example, and reports like the Power of Information review, both the present government and the opposition fully recognise the value of making such data available online, where communities of people linked by the internet can ‘get excited and make things‘. This appears to be causing the enormous pent-up enthusiasm to be released; indicated by the membership of the new http://data.gov.uk/ site’s discussion group reaching 1,464 (at time of writing) with some extremely active discussions.
Stephen Timms recently spoke at the RSA, highlighting the success of the government’s effort to open up more data, and the efforts made are likely to remain, with the Conservative party also showing enthusiasm for the idea. When it comes to opening up government data, the most ambitious example I’ve seen so far is http://www.recovery.gov/, the website for the US Government’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act – Obama’s stimulus package.
I often write about ”persuasive technology” on this blog, which has, as a pretty foundational tenet, that allowing people to see the effect of their actions, or “self-monitoring” can enable and encourage them to change their behaviour (a la real-time energy displays). Freeing public sector data is simply this on a much more ambitious scale.
AGM!
Tomorrow (Wednesday 6th) is a special day at the RSA as it marks the 255th Annual General Meeting of the Society. To celebrate, we are hosting a day of seminars for the Fellows of the RSA about the project team’s work, followed by the AGM itself and the Chairman’s speech in the evening.
The project team’s seminars include:
Connected Communities
10.30am – 12.00pm
Steve Broome and William Shaw will discuss their programme of action research projects that work together to understand how social networks operate and can be better used in creating the kind of sustainable communities we want to live in.
Peterborough Project
1.30pm – 2.20pm
Sam McLean will be on hand to talk about The Peterborough Project; an exciting, long-term partnership between the RSA, Peterborough City Council, Opportunity Peterborough and Arts Council East with the core aim of reshaping the identity of Peterborough around active, sustainable citizenship.
Design and Education
2.30pm – 3.20pm
Emily Campbell from our Design & Society project and Louise Thomas from our Education project will explore the ways in which design principles might be applied in education to support rigorous innovation, as well as increase the agency, independence and capacity of educational practitioners.
Social Brain
3.30pm – 4.20 pm
Matt Grist will discuss new ways of thinking about brains and behaviour that offer insight into how to create a more self-reliant and ‘pro-social’ society; in line with the RSA’s vision of social progress.
If you’re able to visit the RSA tomorrow you will also see a fantastic exhibition that details the society’s varied and surprising history – from chimney brushes to the RSA academy with everything else between. Not simply a retrospective, the exhibition will develop over time as more people, projects and ideas are added. You can see a virtual version on the RSA’s website, but I’d recommend popping in if you can.
Other ways that Fellows who aren’t able to get to John Adam Street can listen and talk on the day include watching the speech online from 6:30, or by tweeting your thoughts to #rsaagm.
Looking forward to it!
Potato Propaganda
“There is nothing new under the sun”, said a depressed Solomon. That’s certainly true of government using psychology to influence their people, notwithstanding the excitement among policy makers around behavioural economics. An example is the good story about Frederick the Great’s attempts to introduce the potato into Prussia in the 18th century, or the shift in public health during the 50s and 60s from “a culture of secrecy to a culture of communication”.
The other example that not too many people mention is propaganda. I’m not yet quite sure where government interest in behaviour change policy stops and propaganda begins. This is a question that arises in an article by Conrad Bird for the Foreign Office, when applying lessons from domestic policy to public diplomacy. He says:
Strategic communication has a key role to play in securing behaviour change. Although the examples used above are from the UK domestic policy context, the principles that underlie strategic communication can be applied universally. Where there are people, there is insight to be generated – all the more so if we are working with peoples of differing cultures, ethnicities and religions. And we will always need to work out how to segment our audiences so that we can craft and tailor compelling propositions.
One review of Bird’s article picks up on the theme that the public diplomacy that Bird speaks of is really propaganda (apparently an old argument to diplomatic types) under a new name and is skeptical about how appropriate a strategy it is:
“If all this [behaviour change / strategic communication] is public diplomacy or is, at least, on the minds of some of those practicing it, then I would not like to be one of their targets”
The FCO response to the review is worth a look – and among the points it makes is that one distinction between behaviour change (or public diplomacy in this case) and propaganda is that the latter is one way and doesn’t seek a dialogue with its target. But I’m not yet convinced that this distinction is upper-most in the minds of policy makers keen to experiment with the new knowledge of behavioural economics.
Where do you think “behaviour change” stops and propaganda begins?
On a related note, one piece of public health advice that looks uncannily like propaganda tried to put a face on AIDS – and ended up using an image of a mass-murderer. The campaign has attracted a lot of criticism, and the linked image is quite strong [link].
UK Personal Debt: From Misery to Happiness
Mr Micawber delivers some valedictory remarks - courtesy of http://charlesdickenspage.com/
A week ago, the Bank of England reported that personal debt fell during July for the first time since records began (1993): people paid back more than they borrowed. Without picking sides in the debate running through the comments on Stephanie Flanders’ blog post on the subject, being able to live with less debt generally seems like a Good Thing to an economic muggins like me. As Mr Micawber said…
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”
…et cetera, et cetra. Spending and money management is a behaviour I haven’t thought too deeply about, but there are a few interesting instances of design that encourage particular money-related behaviours that immediately spring to mind.
A while ago when working on a university project on Personal Carbon Trading (a parallel currency of carbon credits often described as another card that people would carry in their wallets) I wondered whether incorporating a display that indicated how many credits remained on the card would be a good idea. Something like e-paper could work well; it’s flat and consumes little power. Leaving aside the privacy issues and risks associated with displaying account balances on cards for everyone to see, a display on the card would give people some feedback (or self-monitoring) on their balance and could help them manage their account more effectively. Perhaps it could even take the idea of being in the red or the black literally and change colour according to the balance of your account.
Adding feedback to cards isn’t a new idea. You probably remember BT’s earlier phonecards, which had a strip which was marked each time the card was used. Here’s one (it just happens to be prisons issue phonecard) that looks from the marks like it’s been half-used:
Phonecard by Flickr user everydaylifemodern
Another interesting example of design for behaviour change to help money management is given by Dan Lockton in his Design with Intent toolkit. Yahoo’s loan simulator provides people with the ability to project their loan repayments into the future (it doesn’t seem to work on Internet Explorer 6 by the way):
Yahoo's loan simulator
It’s a helpful utility I think, but does it give the simulation in the right place? Maybe a loan simulator on a mobile phone be a better influence when you’re out spending money? Would it be better if you could plot other big expenses you’re expecting in the next few years?
Do you know of any other good examples of design, behaviour, and money management out there?
Gauging public attitudes to the BBC’s “Perfect Storm 2030: Public attitudes”
Mark Easton wrote a good summary yesterday of the government’s work in trying to encourage people to adopt more “pro-environmental” behaviour. He references Defra’s work, which takes a social marketing approach, segmenting the UK population by their attitude towards the environment and choosing specific behaviours (like “install insulation” or “adopt lower impact diet”) that will suit them.
I’m glad he wrote his post, as I think Defra’s approach is novel. But what I’m particularly interested in is how people respond to knowing that central government are approaching behaviour change in this way; which might seem more redolent of an advertising company than a government department.
I’d love someone to release content analysis service for blog comments, but without having that at my disposal, I read the 31 comments that were posted by 9:31 this morning and divided them into the following groups:
- Issues about whether man-made climate change is real and the science certain
- Issues about the relationship between the state and individual
- Issues about individual human behaviour; our incentives and agency
The first section is not really of much interest, and simply reworks old ground.
The third section maps to about 10% of all comments which suggested, among other things, that adopting more pro-environmental behaviur was just not in human nature.
The middle section was the largest; at least a third of the comments fell into it. Comments argued that the government should set an example (Heathrow’s 3rd runway, the Department for Energy & Climate Changes’ apallingly energy-inefficient building etc.) before telling people what to do, and should treat people intelligently when it did so. Various comments also highlighted people’s willingness to change but poor existing infrastructure or policies that trapped them into environmentally damaging ways of life. This section was also the most strongly worded, with comments suggesting that the approach from government was Orwellian and could feed conspiracy theories about climate change.
What is the right way of developing effective behaviour change interventions and policies? Writing from a design perspective I immediately think of public service innovation companies like thinkpublic or Participle. Could a co-design approach to behaviour change interventions help improve the fractured relationship between the individual and the state?
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