Do we need shoves or just better nudges?

Can big changes in our behaviour come from seemingly small changes to our environment? This is the general premise of the book Nudge - an exploration of the applied aspects of the emerging field that is behavioural economics. Nudge has drawn its praises (from political figures eager for a quick fix to society) and criticisms (from political figures who don't think a quick fix is feasible), in the three years since its publication and we can look forward to a whole new back-and-forth in light of other more recent popular science publications. To save everyone time, the Financial Times has wrapped up a collection of book reviews of human behaviour into a neat overview of the state of play of behavioural economics.

The FT article argues that each of the books reviewed makes for compelling evidence that we are not rational mechanical agents, making trade-offs of risk and reward. Alongside this, it also picks out each book's specific criticisms of the 'Nudge' approach, largely along the lines that it is too small an influence. Sometimes those impulsive acts or drives will overcome any influence on our surroundings that a Nudge may have had. Questions arise then, how much do you have to nudge someone before their behaviour changes to a non-trivial degree, and how much of a nudge can give without it turning into the full shove of regulation (something that this government would happily oppose*)?

The second question is a broadly drawn policy matter, which is far beyond my scope and all I would be confident in saying is that regulations are not an a-priori bad that the government paints them to be. My dentist apologised to me, in my last visit, that recent regulations required me to wear plastic glasses so that if the dentist did drop her tools, the tools wouldn't fall and stab me in the eye. I don't look back on the more adventurous times, in which dentists were freer to have a go at some impromptu eye surgery, with any particular fondness. But I am distracting myself.

The first question is the important one. Just what do you have to do to get people to change their behaviours? In the past, I've looked at papers describing our limited capacity for self-control, which is ultimately what the FT article regards as needing to be overcome - picking salads over meatballs and saving for later instead of spending now. There are means of improving self-control capacity, though so far have all been through the exercising of our self-control. This creates a bootstraps problem, in which our capability to improve our self-control relies on existing self-control. It's a similar situation to companies requiring work experience in candidate employees who are applying in order to get work experience.

A paper out this year offers a new insight into improvements in self-control, without the longer term requirements of training and exercising our restraint. Alberts Martijn and Vries (2011) indicate that increasing our own self-awareness can overcome the effect of ego-depletion. Through an implicit priming of our attention to themselves, depleted participants were shown to perform in a second self-control task just as well as those who had not undergone depletion. A neutral prime showed no effects, and the implicit prime of self-awareness did not boost a non-depleted person's performance. The authors postulate that these effects occur because of the priming's implicit nature and that explicit calls to attend to ourselves do not show similar influences. In a similar position to a previous paper, they argue for self-regulation failures to be considered along the motivation intensity theory that if we perceive a goal to be too difficult (say through feeling fatigued) we will ignore it unless the goal is rewarding enough. It's an interesting prospect and one to be taken a closer look at in due course.

It seems that there may be criticisms of nudges still to come, particularly that they are the wrong sort of nudges. Putting clear caloric and health information on food packaging may only go so far, if people aren't considering the food's effects on themselves. I seriously doubt that there is going to be any variant of the quick fix that has a lasting sizable influence on people's behaviour but it's possible that redesigning nudges that appear to have us in mind rather than 'the average adult' could be more effective. Would we reconsider that bag of crisps if it described its contents as 184 of my calories for the day rather than 184 calories - 9% of an adults GDA?

*This is the last week that you can submit your ideas to the Department for Transport for which rail regulations that you want removing. I may know nothing about trains but I do know a lot about how to make this world a less safe place.
Alberts Martijn and Vries (2011) Fighting self-control failure: Overcoming ego depletion by increasing self-awareness. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 47 (2011) 58 – 62
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