Our environmental and social problems are pressing and, in many countries, money is short and politics deadlocked. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there turned out to be a new way of making real progress cheaply and without getting enmeshed in party politics?
About two decades ago, along with many of our colleagues in the behavioural sciences, we thought there might be. The idea was elegant: social problems often arise from people making the “wrong” choices, either for themselves (eating unhealthily, smoking, gambling – the list goes on!) or for others (by, for example, damaging the environment by dropping litter). The old-fashioned approach to bad choices is to tax them or ban them. But the new strategy aimed for a gentler, more psychologically subtle approach: to redesign the way options are presented so the “right” choice becomes easy, natural and appealing. The bad choices are still available, but the clever policy ensures they are picked less often.
Such “nudges” seemed to offer the hope of addressing big social problems through small changes to reshape individual behaviour. Worried about rising obesity? Try smaller portion and plate sizes, and move the salad bar to the front of the cafeteria. Concerned about climate change? Put homeowners on “green energy” by default.
For a while, it appeared that a nudge revolution might be on the cards. An army of researchers (including us) searched for small tweaks to “choice architecture” that could drive changes in individual behaviour and make a big difference for society. Now was our chance to use psychological insights for a better world.
If only. Nearly 20 years on, the results have been few and disappointing: even where nudges work, their effects are small, fade quickly and typically don’t scale up. And it turns out that by reinforcing the idea that social problems should be seen through the lens of individual behaviour, researchers have inadvertently provided ammunition for powerful business interests that oppose the old-fashioned (but effective) policy tools of tax and legislation that fundamentally change the system of rules and incentives that shape society – and could threaten their bottom line.
With hindsight, none of this should have surprised us (though it did). The social problems we face have arisen not from changes at the individual level, given human psychology is surely largely constant over history. Instead, they have resulted from seismic systemic changes, such as mechanisation and electrification powered by coal, oil and gas over two centuries, or the rise of ultra-processed foods over the past 40 years. These shifts aren’t the responsibility of individuals – and individuals, however well they may be nudged, can’t alone fix the problems of carbon emissions or unhealthy diets. Indeed, there is a real danger that the individual focus is a distraction, misleading policy-makers and citizens alike into thinking there is a viable alternative to those laws and taxes.
If we are right, we might expect corporations fighting regulation to be particularly active in inventing ineffective but plausible-sounding individual-level solutions. But wait – this has already happened. Consider the personal “carbon footprint” to help us track our individual damage to the planet. Where did this idea come from? The UN? Greenpeace? No, it came from a huge ad campaign in the early 2000s from one of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies, BP.
Whatever the social or environmental problem, opponents of systemic change want to push that problem back to the individual. As behavioural scientists, we have fallen into the trap. No longer.
Behavioural scientists Nick Chater and George Loewenstein’s new book is It’s On You (WH Allen), out on 27 January
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