Science Friday - Fixing Society's Toughest Problems? ‘It’s On You’

Episode Date: March 6, 2026

Ever heard an alcohol ad that tells you to “please drink responsibly”? Or a gambling ad that warns, "when the fun stops, stop”? Or been urged to reduce your carbon footprint?     The message is basically the same: These products and activities have risks. But mitigating them, well, that’s on you. How did we get this idea that it's our personal responsibility to make a dent in big problems like climate change—and not the job of the government to impose regulations? That’s the focus of the new book It’s on You. Host Flora Lichtman talks with behavioral scientist and It’s on You coauthor Nick Chater, about how he and his colleagues played a role in shaping a narrative of individual responsibility, and how to change it.  Guest: Dr. Nick Chater is a professor of behavioural science at Warwick University and coauthor of It's on You: How Corporations and Behavioral Scientists Have Convinced Us That We’re to Blame for Society's Deepest Problems. Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Hey, it's Flor Lichten, and you're listening to Science Friday. Today in the show. When a beer tastes both refreshing and flavorful, there are some reactions you can't control, and some you can. Please drink responsibly. We have all heard this on alcohol ads. Please drink responsibly.

You might have heard something similar on gambling ads, like when the fun stops, stop. There was even a moment of calorie caution in soda ads. All calories count. And if you eat and drink more calories than you burn off, you'll gain weight. That goes for Coca-Cola and everything else with calories. The message behind these disclaimers are kind of the same.

These products have risks, but mitigating them, well, that's on you. So how did we get to this idea that it's our personal responsibility to make a dent in big problems, not say the job of government to impose regulations. Well, behavioral scientists played a role, according to my next guest. Dr. Nick Chater, Professor of Behavioral Science at Warwick University and co-author of It's On You, How Corporations and Behavioral Scientists have convinced us that we're to blame for society's deepest problems. Nick, thanks for being here. Well, thank you very much for having me. Did I get the big picture right in that intro? Yes, I think you did. Absolutely. I should also put a shout out for my close co-author, George Lewinstein, at Carnegie Mellon University.

So we've worked on this absolutely as a joint project from the beginning. And George is very relevant here because he was in there at the beginning of the time when behavioral science started to get engaged with public policy. And that, I think, was when things went slightly awry in a way that was sort of unpredictable at the time, but led to the kind of the concerns you're pointing out now. So what happened in the sort of early 2000s is that there were a variety of people thinking about the idea of trying to make the world better, improving our diets, dealing with the obesity crisis, thinking about how to get people to save better for the future, given long-term pension problems, thinking about environmental problems, pollution, plastic waste and so on. thinking about these problems from a direct behavioral point of view, attacking the problem, as one might almost think at the root cause, the individual citizen and their behavior.

So the thought was, if we understand how individual behavior works, maybe we can get through all those political logjams, policy tangles and ideological sort of polarization, and just cut the chase and help individual people directly with behavioral interventions to make choices which are better for them and for better for society. And the trouble with that is that it frames these big social problems, which are things that have emerged over decades and differ greatly from one society to another. And it frames them as the problem of the individual. And we have a name for this.

In fact, we call it eye frame thinking. You're thinking about the individual frame of reference. And that deflects attention away from some of the other things you might think about doing, which would be those sort of classical regulatory taxation subsidy government type things that inadvertently we've kind of pushed the focus back onto the individual. And that's been very, very much aligned slightly to our embarrassment in retrospect with exactly the kind of messaging you pointed out at the beginning of the show. Right, right. I want to get into this. So, you know, you're not just a critic. You were actually deeply involved in this world.

You advise the UK government on climate policy. Yeah. Tell us a little bit of that story. Well, I think there are, there's two parts of the story, really. So before the climate engagement for me, I was on the advisory board of the behavioral insights team. And in fact, that was one of the ways in which George and I met. What's the behavioral insights team?

So the behavioral insights team is popularly known as the Nudge units. And it was a unit created inside the UK government to advise the prime minister. This is in 2010 when David Cameron had just taken, taken over. river on these individualistic interventions. There was a very important book, Nudge, by Richard Thaler and Kass Sunstein. So Thaler won a Nobel Prize, not just for this work, but many other brilliant things he's done. And Cass Sunstein is a very celebrated and distinguished legal scholar. And so they wrote this book encapsulating the idea that maybe we can make individual level changes. And their driven nudge is that it's not infringing your liberty, is not controlling

your options. It's simply encouraging you to do the right thing. It's making the right thing the easy thing. So the nudge unit was created out of that. And that's what we're talking about with nudge. It's a nudge in the right direction. Exactly, exactly, which is a very, a very laudable and reasonable thing in itself. And alongside that, of course, comes things which aren't really exactly just nudges, they're just information. So things like calorie labels on food, carbon labels on flights and so on. Right. So that was very exciting. And it's a very big innovation. There are now about 150 and counting nudge units around the world in different bits of governments

and in many different jurisdictions. And many of them do really good work. But became, I think, evident to George and I very early on that we were sort of finding ourselves feeling like we were tinkering with the edges of really big problems. Like the nudges weren't working to solve climate change? Yeah. Well, I mean, climate change. Let's move on to that one because climate change was the one that really shook.

me, I think, because I went onto the UK's climate change committee, which sets and monitors the targets for carbon reduction. And so it's a pretty significant committee in terms of its influence. And they wanted to have a behavioural person. And that itself is remarkable. And I was that person, it turned out. So I took this role with great enthusiasm thinking, I'll have all these brilliant ideas about how to change individual behaviour in a helpful way. And after six years of finding it incredibly useful and I hope contributing in some valuable ways. I really don't think I came up with a single brainwave which really made any difference to individual behaviour. Just individual behaviour wasn't where the action was. So it was a sort of demoralising thing. When you think about

the problem of climate reduction, the things that were really mattering in the UK anyway were things like decarbonising the grid. So just closing the long clock coal-fired power stations and reducing the amount of gas in the system and just pushing wind and solar and so on. And this is just power. There's obviously very, very big things you have to do to food production and transportation and so on. So these sort of massive scale changes are things that really make a difference. And the kind of things that I would have been able to suggest if I had the gumption to actually even raise them, and I would have felt foolish to do so really, would be sort

of small nudges which would help people reduce their heating costs by one or two percent. Well, I think this is the thing that's so fascinating about this, because I remember this time very well. And I was actually in media at the time, and I did a whole project about climate guilt because, you know, I feel like we were taught to believe that this is our problem to solve on an individual level. Yes, I think that's absolutely right. And if you're in the fossil fuel industry, it's a really, really useful thing for the public at large to own the problem themselves. Yes. And that is the perfect segue, because I want to talk about. this in particular. Listen to this clip.

We all have a carbon footprint which contributes to climate change. To discover yours and how to reduce it, visit direct.gov. The carbon footprint, right? Where did this idea come from? Well, it came primarily from a big publicity campaign

by British Petroleum, so one of the world's largest oil companies. The points of the carbon footprint and the PR behind it, which was a very big and successful, indeed award-winning campaign. was to frame the problem of climate change, not as a problem for the very existence and business model of fossil fuel companies,

but to frame it instead as a problem for each of us. So we need to be blaming ourselves and also blaming each other. That's also a very, very effective strategy that we can start to see hypocrisy everywhere and start to point fingers at each other, and then we're at a kind of doom loop of despair and sort of disarray,

rather than thinking, well, clearly we need to make major, structural changes the way energy is provided. Now, BP had posters saying things like, perhaps it's time to go on a low-carbon diet. So we're so much on your side. We're really trying to solve this problem. But at the same time, of course, they were working hard, and the fossil fuel industry in general has been working hard to slow down any progress towards national and international agreements on switching away from fossil fuels. That's amazing. I mean, that's an amazing insight. that carbon footprint was invented by BP.

It is astonishing, isn't it? Yes. It's an alarming sort of shock to discover that. I mean, I, you know, I think there's a temptation in conversations like this to say, oh, well, yes, of course, corporations are evil. But it can't be that simple, right? No. No.

And I think it's sort of wrong in a way to think, and we do naturally have this tendency to think either the corporations are evil or the particular people inside the corporations of evil or the people who invented the advertising campaign of evil and that's, I think, completely the wrong perspective. So what George and I are arguing for in the book is that instead of thinking from the eye frame perspective, thinking about individuals,

whether those individuals are chief executives or everyday folks, we should be thinking about systems. So this is the S frame. This is thinking, how is the game, the general economic and social, a political game working? And when things are going wrong,

we should be thinking, well, clearly there's something wrong with this game. We've got the rules wrong somehow. And so that's the thing we need to be worrying about. So it's sort of not surprising that fossil fuel companies are trying to find strategies to reduce regulatory pressure on them. And then most of the time doing things which are allowed within the rules of the game. But if that's the case, we need to think about how we make the rules work differently. Right. I mean, but this gets back to the original reason that we got to the eye frame or the individual responsibility.

in the first place, which is that systems are hard to think about, and they're not tidy narratives, right? Which I wonder if psychology has something to tell us about that. Like, can we train our brains to think about these problems in a systemic way? Yeah, I think we can to a degree, but you're completely right that there is an inherent tendency to think at the individualistic level. We have a strong psychological bias to see the patterns in individual behavior are stemming from the characteristics of specific individual people. And I think this has very deep roots. So human beings are not evolved to deal with a world of extremely complicated societies

with large corporations in governments and systems of laws and so on. We're evolved to work in small groups, where we're dealing with small numbers of people. And then in those groups, the action is all about individuals and which individuals have which characteristics and which ones are trustworthy, which ones are trustworthy. So our everyday navigation of the social world is something that encourages us to see problems as problems of individual praise and blame and character, essentially, characteristics. But I don't think it's hopeless. After the break, that's what I want to talk about.

If it's not nudges and disclaimers, you know, how do we solve these big problems? Stick around. You know, right now especially, definitely in America, we often hear that problems people face their personal failings, you know, like people with strong willpower or good values will make the right choices if given, you know, the right information or all the information. What does the research say about that? I think the research says that's sort of comprehensively about as wrong as it could be, although you're entirely right. It's a message that we get a lot. So I think there are a couple

of very broad-brush things to say. I mean, one is that most of the social problems we face are not eternal problems. So if we look at something like the rising problem of obesity in many Western nations, that's a relatively recent problem. It's sort of grown up over the last 40 or 50 years and become a pretty severe problem. But it cannot be that the sort of willpower or sort of moral fibre or somehow has been terribly eroded across the whole of the sort of Western developed world. And the obvious explanation is that what foods are primarily being pushed at us and which are cheap are radically changing. So the cheap, easy things to eat are just getting less and unfortunately getting having less and getting less and less healthy. So the food environment has become very, very different.

But it's a sort of, it's a case of having a tide sort of rapidly moving out. And you can point to a few swimmers and say, well, they're actually swimming so fast to get the tide. They're actually doing fine. But on balance, if the tie is going one direction, that's where we're all going to be heading. And I think you can say the same for a whole range of issues. I mean, I think a very interesting example of this, a very relevant one at the moment, is big tech. So, you know, if you think about issues like, for example, privacy or questions of screen time, yeah, harm. Social media. Social media use could cause you.

it's clearly very, very helpful if you're big tech, rather like the oil companies, say, well, really, it's over to you the consumers. But it's a pretty weak argument in general, because you've got what appears to be a fairly gigantic social problem emerging, which is clearly new. The exhortation to solve the problem one by one is inevitably not going to work. And, of course, that's one reason it's so attractive to people who are opposing change, because they know really that if you simply exhort people to try a bit harder and sort of take responsibility, that's going to be no change at all.

Okay. Well, I mean, you know, behavioral science helped get us into this mess. I'm not trying to, you know, point the finger too much. But is there a role for behavioral science in helping us reframe, in helping us solve this problem? I think there is. So, I mean, like you, I don't want to point the finger too much. I need to be pointing the finger at myself primarily in terms of the source of the problem. But I think we really haven't helped much.

I think I certainly from a personal point of view, feel like I've been at best just distracting myself and other people in my orbit from thinking about systemic solutions that will actually be helpful. So I think behavioral science can help us. And I think there are two key things, I think. So one is that if we're thinking about policies that are going to really make a difference, the big systemic policies,

and we kind of know what to do. But the crucial question for psychologists, behavior economists and so on, is how do we frame and explain those policies in a way that makes them attractive to people? So if you take something like carbon taxes, I mean, the very idea of a carbon tax seems like a doomed idea because people don't like taxes. They're trying to sell anyone to the tax. So this has got the great tax and it has all these wonderful consequences. It's sort of off on the wrong foot. It's tricky. Yeah. So thinking about how you can pitch this as a matter of redistribution.

So we're going to just shift money around. I'm going to take it away from people who are doing lots of carbon burning, but give it to other people. We're not just throwing it into the government coffers. The way in which we change in diets is another one. So in fact, in the UK, there's been some substantial, actually, quite successful legislation, reducing the amount of sugar that's in certain kinds of drinks and ready prepared foods, and also salt.

Now there, actually, I think behavioral science can be quite helpful too, because we know that it's actually very hard for us to detect absolutely how much sugar or salt we're ingesting except what we're used to. So if you gradually reformulate things so that the sugar and salt levels go down, we don't even really notice. So it turns out that we could be tapered off of our addiction to salt and sugar. Yeah. You give the industry the time to do it, they'll be able to reformulate and no one's really

only the worst off. And it's not even bad for business. So I think, I suppose they're really still. these two sort of elements. One is what policies will actually work from a behavioral point of view without causing any consumer detriment? And there's also just this sort of sales bits question. How do we, how do we formulate messages that really lag with people? Yeah. Well, Nick, thank you for being here. Appreciate it. Well, it's been a real pleasure. Thank you so much. Dr. Nick Chater, Professor of Behavioral Science at Warwick University and co-author of It's on You,

How corporations and behavioral scientists, have convinced us that we are to blame for society's deepest problems. Shoshana Bucksbaum produced this episode. There are no warning labels on this podcast, but it is on you to give us a good review on any platform wherever you listen. I'm Flora Lichten. We'll catch you next time.