Instant Genius - Nudge theory

Episode Date: April 4, 2018

How much difference can a small change make? When it comes to changing habits, convincing someone to do something or affecting the behaviour of people without them even knowing about it, quite a lot, as we have seen with the recent Facebook scandal, where data firm Cambridge Analytica used personal data influence the way people vote.    In this week's Science Focus Podcast, BBC Focus commissioning editor Jason Goodyer speaks to David Halpern, Chief Executive of the Behavioural Insights team, about nudge theory – a psychological tool used in behavioural science to subtly influence peoples’ decisions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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People are being nudged all the time in lots of areas, you know. So gambling, if you go to Vegas, gambling in some ways is a masterpiece of behavioural science and how it's been configured, a casino, to maximise how much people will spend. Really Cambridge Analytica take it to another level because it feels like it's even more below the radar. It's being personalised. It's in the political domain. It feels deeply uncomfortable. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team. We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world.

Find out more at ScienceFocus.com or look at. out for us in your app store. Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Alice Lipscomb Southwell, the production editor of BBC Focus magazine. In this episode, Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor of BBC Focus magazine, speaks to David Helpham. David is the chief executive of the behavioural insights team, and he talks about Nudge Theory, a psychological tool used in behavioural science to subtly influence people's decisions.

You've recently been working on a project to help students. who are resitting their GCSEs using text messages as encouragement. Could you just tell me a little bit about how that works, please? We've actually done a couple of different versions. We've done versions which both send text messages to the young people themselves. You know, he's saying kind of motivational text as well as just kind of simple information. The one that maybe has attracted particular attention is we've also done a version where we asked the young person,

would you like to nominate two so-called study supporters? It could be someone, it could be a parent, it could be a friend, whoever, and that they then receive information. The college will then send them information. So, you know, next week we'll be reading about so-and-so. We might want to read a couple of chapters about, you know, hunger games or whatever it will be. So we found great results for this, basically. We're finding that these kinds of interventions are both increasing.

attendance in courses, but maybe most importantly is they're increasing the pass rates, quite markedly actually. So the kind of effect sizes we're seeing are a sort of six percentage point uplift or an everyday speak about a 25% in some versions, even as much as a 50% increase in the pass rate. So really big effect sizes. Yeah, so you kind of touched on it there, but more specifically, what sort of content is in the messages, you know, what do they say? So it can be quite practical. I mean, obviously a lot of thought goes into and work into what are their effective messages. Some of them are just literally talking about the content of the course. So don't forget next week, we've got a math test on so-and-so or Charlie's got a math test next week. How's it going on that? Don't forget to bring your calculator. It can be quite practical things. It draws on something that's called implementation and tension. If you encourage someone to think ahead about how they're going to do something. they've become much more likely to do it. Sometimes it can be motivational in other ways.

So it can be, you know, you might find it a bit tough at the moment or Charlie might be finding tough at the moment, but a lot of people do. But you should find it'll all kind of click into place in the next couple of weeks. Or it can be a key moment. So quite a lot of young people drop out over half term on a lot of courses. So towards the end of half term, you might send them a text or an email saying, hey, we're really looking forward to seeing you on Monday. day, don't forget to plan your way in, you know, to college. So it's a whole range of those things essentially. Yeah, so it seems like not only the content of the message is important, but also the timing of it. That's right. Exactly so. So we try and look at when people might need that

extra support and then how to tune and improve it. The other detail, which is sort of lies almost behind your question and behind this approach is that, yes, there's both the kind of content that's a kind of neat intervention, but it's also an empirical approach. So, for example, you just take something simple like timing or when is the best time. Is it more effective to send the text in the morning or the afternoon or when, you know? And it doesn't end. So we've given you the headline results, but partly the whole point of this type of approach is that you keep tuning and seeking to improve it to make it work better and better to help these young people. and that in some ways is the most radical element of all is to try and turn education.

In fact, public policy more generally into an empirical project where we test, learn and adapt all the time, as opposed to someone has a great idea. They put it in the manifesto. We do it everywhere. Who knows whether it worked or not. Sure. So, I mean, that leads quite nicely under the next question, is that you're part of a group called the behavioral insights team. So I was wondering if you could just give me a bit of background.

around about what you work is in general and the kind of psychological behavior phenomena that you tap into? Yes, so I am actually the chief executive of the behavioral insights team. It's an unusual body. It's certainly true. It was a part of British government. It was set up in 2010 inside Downing Street. It is now a social purpose company.

It's still owned, importantly to know, actually, it's still co-owned by British taxpayers. So the cabin office and a chunk. It's also basically a third of cabin office, a third, the innovation charity, Nesta, and the third there's an employee benefit trust. So it's a social purpose company, a govco basically. So that is what BIT is. And we continue, I mean, the vast majority of our work is public sector, government focused. But we also do stuff not only for Britain, but public sector in other countries too.

Sorry, that may be more too much detail, but I think there's sometimes confusion about what BIT is and what it isn't. Sure. On the surface, this kind of method of encouragement seems kind of self-evident, but there's obviously a lot of subtle effects going on underneath. And you've had success using this method in other areas, I believe. Yes, that's right. So across a very wide range of areas.

In fact, BIT has initiated more than 500 trials in the last eight years, so really quite extensive. Some of the famous ones, and they do touch many people's lives now. So BIT, of course, is very involved, not only BIT, but the changes to auto enrollment in pensions. So it's now estimated around 9 million people more are saving for pensions than previously as a result of auto enrollment. Just make it easier. It's not that people don't like the idea of saving. They just can't be bothered to fill in a form because they've got bought. better things to do. We always think we'll do it tomorrow. So, auto enrollment is a great example and

is extraordinarily effective compared to a financial incentive. Other ones, getting people back to work faster. We've done a lot of work, certainly in the early years we're doing a huge amount in job centres and elsewhere by, again, making what seem like small changes, but can be very consequential. So an example in that area would be for 40-odd years, pretty much. If you went into a job center, we would ask you to prove that you're looking for work, which boiled down to show us which three jobs did you look for or apply for last week. And we had the strong hypothesis that it will be more effective to get people to ask, ask them about next week, not last week.

So instead we would say, so what kind of jobs are you looking for and when will be a good time or in the morning, you know, after breakfast, blah, blah, blah, first two hours. and how will you go about it? So you prompt people to think about what, when, how. And sure enough, when we change the system to this, we test it again as a controlled trial, we found that people were significantly faster

getting back into work by asking about next week rather than last. Or another thing which may affect some people is, obviously, governments also have to collect tax and revenue to pay for all the good things that we will want to have happen. And we were able to show that what seemed again like quite small changes to tax letters for people who are late paying in the system more generally could increase payment rates quite dramatically. So, for example, an early result was for people who are late paying their tax, if you added

one line into the letter, which was just to say something which is true, most people pay their tax on time, you're one of the few yet to do so, increase the payment rate by a five percentage point or a 15% uplift in payment rate without any further action. So it's very powerful, very effective across most areas of policy. And if you think about most policy concerns human behavior, right? You want people to, you know, you want kids to study more at class. It's hard to pass a law and say, hey, you at the back, will you pay attention? You know, it requires something a bit more human than that through to saving the planet, to reducing crime, to increasing productivity, I mean, almost every policy area when you think about it,

you know, lifestyle, obesity, etc., concerns human behavior. So in that sense, I think, we'll probably look back and just think, what the hell are we doing before? How weird is that, that people used to do government using these very unrealistic, often models built in traditional economics, and even we didn't used to test things, just used to do them. And no one actually tested whether. are effective. So the IT has helped to change that. Are we able to kind of drill down a little bit more

into the psychology? So it seems like you mentioned the forward planning aspect seems effective. There also seems to be a context where you're placing the person amongst other people and comparing their behaviour to the behaviour of other people. Am I right in saying that? Yeah. So look, the wonder of human beings, we're complicated and interesting ways and in particular what psychologists talk about is that the way we make most decisions many of which by the way are done in a kind of automatic way we don't you know our brain so-called fast brain what dana kahnem calls fast brain processes um but we use what called mental shortcuts or heuristics to make decisions and focus i'm sure we'll have talked about this in other

areas um so that's true for lots of judgment so when you come into work you know you don't have to think hard about your roots your brain kind of on autopyance that makes lots of decisions going along the way and they work really, really well. But they are sometimes subject to errors. So we will intend to do more virtuous things, but we generally intend to do them tomorrow. It would be a simple example, right? So we think, you know what, I'm going to get fit. I really am going to do that.

But, oh, today, it's a bit of an effort. You know what, I'll do it tomorrow. And I'll save more tomorrow or I'll do all these things. So that will be a really good example. And of course, what happens is tomorrow never arrives. And one of the things underneath it, psychologists and behavioral economists, for example, talk about hyperbolic discounting. So when we think about the future, the pain and the effort looms less large. So it is literally in our brains more attractive to go to the gym tomorrow because the effort is then discounted in the future and so on.

So we sometimes use a very simple framework. Obviously, there are lots of different heuristics and a huge amount of work on this, which is east, a simple pneumonic. If you're trying to, be you're a prime minister or you're a teacher or whatever it will be, you're trying to affect human behavior, you might think about these four most basic elements. So East is easy, make it easy, attractive, which we can talk about a second, social and timely. So easy. Essentially, a lot of economic models are neglectful of what sometimes is known as frictional factors, effort, etc. It hugely affects human behavior.

Again, that might just seem like it's common sense, but people underestimate how big the effects are. We try and be very open about our work in the book Inside the Nuggen. I use the illustration of from suicide rates. So in Britain, you may know that suicide rates dropped quite dramatically, particularly in the late 1950s. In fact, they dropped year on year for seven years in a row by about 25% for both men and women. And there was a great deal of interest at the time. Like, what is happening? You know, is it free love, etc.?

Actually, it turns out it was the discovery of North Sea oil. So North Sea oil, how does that lower our suicide rate? Because the primary route that people would kill themselves, so they put their head in the oven. They turn on the gas, put the head in the oven. And the reason it would kill you is because of carbon monoxide. So when North Sea oil is discovered, on stream comes natural gas. It doesn't have much carbon monoxide.

So it's no longer effective to kill yourself in the oven, put your head in the oven. So the most important decision you might make in your life, whether to carry on or not, it turns out, is affected by friction or factors. So you see a collapse, particularly in men, in the number of suicides from carbon monoxide poisoning and almost no change in any other channel. So that would be a simple example of friction. Make it easy. In this case, make it more difficult.

You know, if you want to reduce suicide, you put up barriers on bridges. You sell pills, as we now do in pop-out packages so that it's more effortful to, you know, get 40 of them out of one go. So that will be a simple example of changing frictional factors. And indeed, for change in enrollment on pensions is an example of that. It's not that Anglo-Saxons hate saving. It's just a bit of a hassle to fill in a form. And when you remove that hassle, but still leave the choice because you can still opt out,

91% of people stay with the default. Incredibly effective. So make it easy. It might seem, again, it's kind of common sense, but the effect is, are really enormous. And I could give you 20 examples. I give you one more, one of my favorite actually is a number of countries. When people introduced, has happened in lots of places in the world now, are required

for when you're on a motorbike, you have to wear a helmet. Generally speaking, when that regulation is introduced, you get typically 30 to 40% reduction in the number of motorbike thefts that occur. And why is that? It's because if you are a motorbike, if you're going to go out and steal a motorbike, if you're going to go out and steal a motorbike, you know, I have to remember to bring a helmet. So even adding a tiny bit of friction has, anyway, so it's really, really powerful force. And classical economics tends to ignore it, just like in physics.

Imagine you inject this kind of force, but basic Newtonian into this object, then what will happen, ignoring friction, right? It'll normally have a thing ignoring friction. It's like, you know what, friction's really important in the world. Try and push an object. It generally doesn't move very far across the table. because of friction. So the same is true. Classical economic generally ignores frictional costs, and so does a lot of policy. Attractive is similar kind of story, if you think about the

psychology, which is it's not just whether you pay someone or not. What makes it appealing? Can you break through someone's consciousness? So, you know, personalization will be the most basic example. If you're going to ask someone to do something and writing them a letter, use their name, they're much, much more likely to respond to use someone's actual name. or design of an incentive. And again, the key thing is that because of mental heuristics, it's not just linear. So a simple everyday example would be adding 5P charge to plastic bags, as we now know, and he had predicted, leads to 85% odd reduction in their use for 5P.

Like, what's that about? Of course, if you went from 5P to 10p, you wouldn't see the same scale of effect. It's because for humans, the difference between zero, three, and 5p is an enormous amount psychologically, even though economically it's not. So making something appealing, attractive can have a huge impact. Getting people back to work, we found some working job centers that quite often job centers will book people in for a job interview. And you'll get a text saying, hey, we booked you into this interview for a job fair

at the weekend, and only like one in ten people would turn up. On the other hand, if you just slightly adjust and personalize that text, so it now says, Jason, I've booked you a place, blah, blah, blah, this is the detail, good luck, David. Almost three times more people will then turn up than if it just gave you the facts, right? It's basically a very rudimentary form of attractive. So there's lots of ekewarm examples. How do you make something more appealing, both capture attention and so on and so on. And I can give you a hundred examples of that to you. Social, that's the one story you asked about before.

So humans are incredibly social creatures. We are incredibly influenced by what other people are doing. It's what psychologists call the declarative social norm as opposed to the injunctive. So the injunctive is the rules say you must not drop litter. You know, do not drop litter. On the other hand, what's everybody doing? That's called the declarative social norm. If there's lots of litter on the ground, hey, presto, you're much more likely to drop litter.

So if you come back to your card, there's a real experiment. and someone's put this kind of flyer in the windshield, if there's not a bin right there, you are eight times more likely to drop it on the ground if there are several such flyers already on the ground. Incredibly influenced by what other people are doing. So the example of the tax one, telling people, hey, most people pay their tax on time

or nine out of ten Britons pay their tax on time increases your payment rate because you go with the flow of what other people are doing. That's why, you know, if you go into a bookstore, people want to write on the front of it, hey, you know, BBC focus, read by, you know, quarter of a million people a week, it makes it more appealing because other people are doing that. Very influenced by other behaviours.

Timely is the last one, which is that human behaviour tends to be particularly amenable to change at certain things, in particular at certain times, particularly when it's being disrupted. So a classic example, a notorious example is retailers want to know whether you're going to have a baby, Target was a famous one in the US, they look at your consumption patterns. And why do they want to know that? It's because having a baby disrupts your habits and you can, that's the best time to persuade someone to change products, retailers, et cetera, et cetera. A simple example would be transport. So, you know, we want to encourage people to cycle more and walk to work and take public transport. Generally, campaigns that encourage people to do that don't work. They're very ineffective.

The exception is if you contact someone about it when they've just moved house. If they've moved house in the previous three months, those kind of campaigns can be very highly effective. So you look for these moments when someone's behaviour has already been disrupted. That's the right time to make a suggestion. So timely, hence east. So there you go. You don't need a PhDD now. That's your 101 guides to behavioural science in one word.

That's fascinating. I mean, is there any way of that we? can harness these same effects ourselves or does it have to come from an outside entity? Yes, so that's a great question, actually. In fact, the words of the coalition agreement, which was sort of used in government to set out what BIT would be, it said support people to make better choices for themselves. So often what you're trying to do is you're trying to produce a sort of scaffolding. And we can do this for ourselves. If actually one of my colleagues, I mean, you can read about BIT and inside the Nudge unit.

but a couple of my colleagues also wrote a book called Think Small, which basically is using these techniques for yourself. So if you want to achieve something, how do you break it down into different goals, to the implementation, attention to plan ahead and think about when will I do this? And essentially, I won't go through the whole thing, but the short answer is yes, you can use it for yourself. I'll give you a really trivial example. A lot of people who are retro enough still to wear watches set their watches fast.

I don't know if you do this, if you wear a watch. No, I have known people who do that, yeah. So it's very common. And you think, well, that's a bit weird, isn't it? Well, what's that about, right? Like, if you ask people, you know you're what you're set fast, right? And typically people say, yeah, three minutes, four minutes. Why does it work?

It's like it's a self-nudge because if you're in a real hurry, you don't make the mental adjustment. Oh, God, I've got to go, right? It's two o'clock, whatever. Pretty quick. If you're not in a hurry, you can make the mental adjustment. but if you are in a hurry, you don't make their mental adjustment. So even though people are aware of it, that would be a really simple example of people self-nudging

by just setting their watch a few minutes fast. And in fact, if you think about it, it does work because of, you know, thinking fast and thinking slow. So there are lots of ways of doing it. I mean, there are things called commitment devices. You think, on reflection, I would like to do the following thing. I would like to not spend so much money on my credit card. So you think, I think that now, but. when am I going to make the mistake?

You sort of think ahead. So there are literally examples of people who, one of my favorite ones is someone who keeps their credit card in a block of ice. Right? So that would be a strong form of a commitment of ice. Because you know you anticipate that you'll be weak. So you just think, well, now if I need my credit card, it's still there, but I have to break this damn thing.

So yes, of course people can, in everyday life, people do use some of these same things. in order to affect their well-being, right? Or their behaviour in lots of ways. It's kind of cool, actually. Yeah, that's really fascinating. And like obviously a big sort of, well, in all kinds of news, but with the psychological angle at the moment is the Cambridge Analytica story

and their alleged methods of targeting specific people with certain beliefs and attempting to influence them by sending them messages. I was just wondering what your thoughts on, you know, How powerful and effective can this type of campaigning be? Well, who knows how effective they were? But the short answer is yes, it can make a difference for sure. I mean, to be clear, VIT does not do any political campaigning or work. Well, I mean, it's important to be clear about.

And we don't do it and we're constrained not to do it appropriately. But of course we know that these techniques are used in that way. I mean, the big background story to it is, Behavioral science is like any form of knowledge. You can use it for good or bad in the same way that you could use biochemistry to make nerve agents or to make fantastic new medicines. So it's not just Cambridge Analytica. People are being nudged all the time in lots of areas. So gambling, if you go to Vegas, gambling in some ways is a masterpiece of behavioral science and how it's been configured at a casino to maximize how much people,

will spend. Really Cambridge Analytica take it to another level because it feels like it's even more you know, it's below the radar. It's being personalized. It's in the political domain. It feels deeply uncomfortable. And one reason, by the way, why governments are looking at this stuff is because they're trying to work out also what should you stop happening. Like what are the limits? What's acceptable on what's not? I mean, I can give you an example. I said, I can't comment and I don't know about Cambridge Analytica, but in the Obama campaign, even though a lot of it didn't come up public domain, but there was quite a lot of work done and some of which has surfaced in the public domain about examples of this. I'll give you a simple one to illustrate the effect size.

So I mentioned earlier this thing called implementation and tension in the psychological literature, which is if you prompt people to think about doing something to plan it, they're much more likely to do it. So a simple example would be you want people to get an immunization. If when you send in the letter about the immunisation, you say, don't forget to write here, you know, when you'll go to the doctor to do it, right? You just prompt people to write and think about the date. Or as I explained, getting people back to work faster, to encourage them to think about next week, what will you do, what when and where. It has been also used in the political domain. So if you say to someone, there have been lots of experiments around trying to encourage people to

get out and vote. And, you know, you might say, it's your civic. Do you? and things like that, you know, don't forget to vote. Often don't do very much. But an implementation intention message is significantly more effective. So if you say to someone, how will you get to, you know, the voting station, whatever, right? Don't forget to make a plan, you know, plan ahead or whatever. So you encourage people not in a highfaluting way to say why you should vote. You just encourage them to think about making a plan to how they will go about voting.

And this has been shown to increase turnout by, you know, typically four or five percent. And in particular, in single person households, it increases the turnout by about 10 percent by sending a message which just tells you, basically, don't forget to plan how you will get to the voting booth, right? So that would be a very simple example, but it just gives you an illustration of why these things can matter. and if you can take a segment of the population in this case people who live alone and you can work out which ones are going to vote for which party and you send them a message like that and you get 10% more of them to turn out

well that's a pretty big effect so clearly it can be used and it can be pretty effective and we should be thinking pretty hard as a society about what the parameters are about what is and is not acceptable so that's why of course we are we make a point of really being quite open we publish our results and go along we let people know what we're doing. And really importantly, ultimately, it's ministers and others who decide as to whether is this okay or is not, right? They are setting the agenda for us and they are saying yes or no to particular kinds of interventions. And that's entirely appropriate. I mean, just as a sort of final thought, is there any way that people listening

could get involved with your texting encouragement project? Yes, actually. That's a great example. So, BIT, we've produced a lot of this stuff and sometimes they're really cool results, but, look, fine, if it's been done in 10 colleges, that's great. But, you know, FE colleges, there's more than 300 further education colleges in Britain alone, let alone there are 24,000 schools. So absolutely, they can get involved in lots of ways. A, they can read our content and just go and do it themselves. But otherwise, for example, on the texting, we built a texting platform called Promptible,

which colleges can get basically and use if they want to. or if they want to, if they want to be a bit more adventurous, they can get in part in the actual trials and test new variations. So we're working a lot with a body called the Educational Endowment Foundation, a fantastic body, actually, which essentially encourages and does research in schools

to figure out more effective teaching practices. It's just past a million kids in Britain have taken part in EEF-sponsored trials now. Amazing, actually. So yes, if there's a college or a school out there who'd like to take part, then get in touch. Or if you're just a parent or whatever, you want to read about it,

you can just look at our website and who knows, maybe you'll find something useful to. Do you have an address for that website? Yeah, sorry, it'll just be, if you just Google Behavioral Insights Team, you'll be able to find us and read about it. Or in relation to the texting thing, it's called Promptible. That was David Halpin,

chief executive of the Behavioural Insights team, talking about Nudge Theory. In the April issue of BBC Focus magazine, which is on sale now, we search for exoplanets by taking a look at Project Blue. This audacious plan has a single goal in mind to photograph an exoplanet in the habitable zones of the nearest sun-like stars in the hope of finding a potentially habitable planet. Plus, you can find out more about real-life robocops,

how freezing patients could save their lives, and how geoengineering could cause a climate war. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team. We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at ScienceFocus.com or look out for us in your app store. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name audio believes you can have digital precision,

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