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.
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.
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].
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?
Designing Heroes
A couple of months ago I wrote a post about a fascinating IPPR report on the language used to communicate climate change. The authors reckoned that a new discourse which they called “ordinary heroism” would be more effective at communicating climate change and encouraging people to take action.
If I remember rightly, this discourse would have shades of Dove’s campaign for real beauty together with an emphasis on communicating that the ordinary (but heroical) actions of people really could aggregate to make a significant difference to big problems (like climate change).
I’ve recently been introduced to Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which he writes about the idea of the monomyth. The monomyth is a common pattern that ordinary people follow on the road to heroism that is found in mythology from different cultures. Campbell says that Christ’s, Buddha’s and Moses’ journeys, for example, all follow the monomyth:
- The Departure (which includes The Call to Adventure, Refusal of the Call, Supernatural Aid, The Crossing of the First Threshold, Belly of The Whale)
- Initiation (which includes The Road of Trials, Mother as Goddess, Woman as Temptress, Atonement with the Father, Apotheosis, The Ultimate Boon)
- Return (which includes Refusal of the Return, The Magic Flight, Rescue from Without, The Crossing of the Return, Threshold, Master of Two Worlds, Freedom to Live)
[more detail here]
So an ordinary guy receives a call into an unknown world, and once there faces all sorts of trials. On returning to his home world, he’s able to use the experiences and gifts he earned to do good in his world.
Often my beef with (some) talk around behaviour change policy is that it treats people as mechanical entities, that will respond in the right way if we design the right intervention. Behavioural economics, for example, tends to rely on fallibilities in human cognition to bring about behaviour change “under the radar”. An approach that treats people with more respect is a more engaging one – closer, in fact, to education.
Can we use Joseph Campbell’s monomyth to help us create better processes of behaviour-change that lead to “ordinary heroes” (or citizens of the future, as the RSA would put it)?
Calling Interaction Designers
Yesterday the government released its plans to mandate the replacement of all domestic electricity meters in the UK with smart meters. Smart meters send data that show how much energy homes are using to their electricity supplier, which allows the supplier to match electricity generation with consumption, bill customers more accurately, and helps customers sell any excess electricity they micro-generate back to the grid.
Much more importantly for designers though, the smart meter plans also represent the government’s use of design (or technology at least) to change behaviour – as their current position is that smart meters will also come with a standalone real-time display. Real-time displays show a home’s occupants how their actions relate to the energy consumption in their home. In the spirit of my favourite ‘09 Apprentice (”I feel like a monkey learning how to use tools”), here’s the government learning how to use design as a policy instrument:
Consumer engagement and action to save energy is central to the benefits case for smart metering. Access to the consumption data in real time provided by smart meters will provide consumers with the information they need to take informed action to save energy and carbon. [link]
Encouraging stuff.
The question of how to engage people is absolutely a design question. There still seems very little appreciation in government that the information and interaction design used in these displays is absolutely critical to engaging people, and therefore saving energy by encouraging people to change their behaviour.
A problem with the “evidence-based” approach to the current trials of real-time displays (which show savings of between 5 and 15%) is that the evidence (numbers that strip all context away) doesn’t show the effect of displaying the energy data in different ways. And frankly, most of the trials have taken place with pretty un-engaging displays.
Although there are signs of understanding the importance of interaction design in the recent CERT consultation (which suggested that devices that display individual appliances and other people’s consumption might be more effective than others), there’s a real opportunity here for designers to make an effective contribution to the problem of climate change. The government wants to “use this consultation as a means to open up this debate” about the sort of information that will engage people.
It would be great to get some good interaction designers (especially those clued up on nudges like social norms) involved in this consultation. Do you know any? They can read the documents and respond here.
Bit more background on real-time displays here, by the way.
Nudge & Think
Matthew Taylor published a post on his blog on Friday, which was inspired by this paper [pdf] (definitely worth a read) from the Civic Behaviour project that Manchester and Southampton Universities are collaborating on.
The paper compares two behaviour change strategies of use in public policy; Nudge (ie. behavioural economics), and a more deliberative approach “think” and first takes the view that “The two strategies do not seem to be to be compatible – at first at least”, but concludes “No government should want to get rid of either tool”.
I think the concluding view is right – both techniques are complementary. Nudging can be useful when the harmful behaviour that we’re addressing is habitual (say throwing all your waste into the bin that goes to land-fill), but more deliberative approaches are probably necessary to reduce other harmful behaviours (say physical assaults, to give an extreme example).
One of the difficulties I have with nudging is that it never seems to address the root of a problem. You may be able to make use of clever psychology to direct someone’s behaviour, but that hardly seems to respect people. In other words, nudging may infantilise, which isn’t going to develop the sort of citizens of the future that the RSA is keen to see.
My colleague Matt Grist has also written a post on this subject (I’m just jumping on the bandwagon with this one) and makes a good point about what he calls the naivety of the “think” approach. Matt’s view is that expecting people to think too much is unrealistic – we don’t involve our cognitive processes in some behaviour for good reason – we’d become quickly overloaded. I guess that while this is true, it’s not an argument to write off deliberation, it’s an argument to pick the issues on which we want to encourage deliberation. I dont think it’s terribly important if people don’t recycle, but I do think it’s important that people don’t waste energy.
The difference between the approaches Nudge and “think” also makes me think of this post from Dan Lockton on different approaches to design for behaviour change. Perhaps design that motivates behaviour is closer to Nudge, and design that enables behaviours (e.g. by providing certain information) is closer to “think”?
On Liberty and Behaviour
I’ve been thinking over the last few days about behaviour change policy, particularly around the division of responsibility between the government, business, the third sector, and communities.
John Stuart Mill wrote On Liberty in 1859 and argued for the need for the individual, rather than the state, to have sovereignty over himself. His exception to this rule, when people hurt others through their actions, provides the foundation of the harm principle.
148 years later in a speech at the RSA, David Cameron, quoting multiple recent examples of physical assaults, said “My belief in social responsibility is not a laissez-faire manifesto. I believe that government has a vital role to play in changing social behaviour”.
It’s not just assault that he’s talking about though. Back to Mill, who also writes:
“No person is an entirely isolated being; it is impossible for a person to do anything seriously or permanently hurtful to himself, without mischief reaching at least to his near connections, and often far beyond them.”
Some behaviours, like assault, directly harm others. But many others harm people indirectly. Wasting energy in your home contributes to anthropogenic climate change. Your unhealthy diet and lack of exercise puts the National Health Service under more stress. Government interest in encouraging behaviour change is more than political rhetoric. There’s a great deal of interest in how behaviour can be effectively influenced.
The (excellent) recent pamphlet by Demos on the politics of behaviour change remarks that:
There is certainly something deeply unusual about a democratic culture in which government becomes preoccupied with altering the behaviour of citizens, rather than vice versa.
These issues are making us re-examine the respective role of government and people. Given that we need to change our behaviour to help tackle large and complicated problems, what’s the right division between government, business, third sector and people?
Against Evidence-Based Policy
While scanning the recently published POSTnotes in the course of writing this rather negative post, I came across one called “Lessons from History” [pdf], which opens with:
In the past decade, the government has repeatedly emphasised the importance of taking an “evidence based” approach to policy-making … However, despite increasing use of evidence from the natural and social sciences, evidence from humanities disciplines such as history is not widely used. This POSTnote considers how history could help to inform decisions on key scientific and technological policy issues.
That’s great to hear from a department primarily concerned with new developments in science and technology. They note (among other things) that history provides new (or old) perspectives on current problems and provides key examples of past successes and failures. Also noted is that although historians are often keen to engage with policy makers, there is currently little use of their research and little opportunity for them to get involved in policy development (with some exceptions).
Another paragraph says too great an emphasis on evidence-based policy making can bring problems (evidence can be patchy, knowledge changes over time, experts interpret evidence in different ways etc…).
This has some similarities with a paper I’m reading at the moment by Jake Chapman (not the artist), and published by Demos on Systems Thinking (be warned, the wiki article looks pretty opaque, but the Demos report is very readable) and its application to policy making.
The basic idea is that policy making is too mechanistic (”machinery of government”, “policy levers” etc. — although I think that’s a bit rich from someone who advocates a “Systems Thinking” approach) and reductionist. An example of this tendency in public services is to hear talk of delivering healthcare, when in fact all public services require the “customer” to be an actively engaged citizen (maybe including changing our behaviour).
Chapman also criticises the evidence-based policy approach for its lack of contextual understanding:
- Evidence from one particular study is used to justify decisions in completely different circumstances
- Its use assumes linear cause and effect relationships
- The quantitative evidence on which decisions are based only measures outputs, concealing other variables
One of the basic points of this approach (I’m only on page 35 of 94) is that reductionist thinking will break a problem down into simple enough chunks to be analysed, and then when each chunk is understood, the entire system is reconstructed and an understanding of the whole is based on an understanding of each component.
Systems Thinking says that in some cases this causes problems, as it’s the interconnections between the components that are critical to understand. The System Thinking alternative is to abstract “up a level” which still simplifies your understanding of the problem because the detail is lost, but retains the important interconnections.
Early days, but if Systems Thinking proves helpful to the Design & Behaviour project, I’ll cover this again on the blog.
It would be great to hear of any experience any of you might have in putting this sort of approach to work.
News in the POST
POST’s (the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology – who provide parliament with policy analysis on science and technology issues) most recent POSTnote is called “Delaying Gratification” and is clearly aimed at policy makers and civil servants interested in all things Nudge. The main thrust of its message is that people have a bias towards short-term rewards over longer-term benefits, and opens with a paragraph that says:
Economic theories assume that people behave rationally and that their preferences will be consistent in time. Research however, suggests that people sacrifice positive long-term outcomes for immediate rewards. While most people would rather receive £100 in 18 months than £50 in 1 year, many opt for £50 today over £100 in 6 months.1 Time-inconsistent preferences are evident in everyday decisions regarding health and finances.
I’ll cheerfully admit to not being an economist, but I thought that our in-built preference for rewards in the here and now is pretty standard economics, and the reason that economists generally model goods in the future at a reduced value. As Peter Singer said at the RSA last night, that’s one of the reasons that Stern’s refusal to do this in his report on the economics of climate change, went against the status quo.
Carry on reading the POSTnote if you like — it goes on to provide implications for policy of this bias in behaviours related to smoking, drug use, pro-environmental behaviour and saving for retirement — but for me it just reinforced my impression that most Nudge-y things simply re-package old knowledge (in this example from standard economics rather than the social sciences) for a new audience.
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