Can politicians shape our behaviour?
By
Martin Rosenbaum
Producer, BBC Radio 4's Persuading Us
to be Good
Are you a good citizen?
The kind
who doesn't drink too much but always puts the empties in
the recycling box? The kind who ignores tempting store
credit card offers but does give blood, who saves prudently
for your pension while avoiding unprotected sex?
In
short, the kind who does what the nanny state might want you
to do?
And if you're not yet perfect, how can the
state persuade you to become better?
That's the
question a growing number of politicians, local government
officials, health professionals and think-tank members are
grappling with, as they puzzle over how best to change
public behaviour to achieve their policy goals..
Personal choices
And they are now turning to
the increasingly influential ideas of social psychology and
behavioural economics in their search for answers.
"In many areas now there are limits to the cures
that can be achieved by government alone," says the climate
change minister, Joan Ruddock.
" Some leaflets are
more likely to encourage anti-social behaviour than
discourage "
Martin Rosenbaum Freedom of information
blogger
"Behaviour change is a very important
priority because we know that things like health and the
environment are affected by the choices people make."
And the Conservatives are also interested, according
to the shadow chancellor George Osborne.
He argues:
"Social psychologists are helping governments around the
world design policy solutions that are more effective than
big state solutions. If you go with the grain of people's
instincts you are more likely to achieve the public policy
outcomes you want, rather than sitting in a government
department dreaming up some rational scheme that doesn't
work in practice."
Barnet Council in north west
London is one of those local authorities trying to improve
its population.
" We've got to stop nagging. If
nagging worked we'd all be skinny, we'd all be recycling and
we'd all be walking to work "
Mike Freer, Barnet Council
leader
In one pilot scheme in Finchley, the
residents have been asked to reduce their carbon footprint
by turning down their heating, reducing their car use, and
so on..
A traditional persuasive strategy would be
based on stressing how this could benefit the environment.
But the council is going further in testing out techniques
of influence.
The residents are asked to make
pledges in a face-to-face conversation with one of the
canvassers who have been going door-to-door in this area.
They are only asked to make some limited pledges -
to choose three out of nine options on the pledge card they
are shown.
And posters on lampposts proclaim the
number of households in that street who have agreed to
participate.
Peer pressure
In other words,
this project is based on enticing people into making a small
but face-to-face commitment and then using the force of peer
pressure to encourage others.
"If you go to
someone's door and say 'can you do a great deal for the
environment?', they're probably going to back off," says
Daniel Delange, of the charity Groundwork, which the council
has employed to implement the project.
"But if you
say 'a little bit for the environment', they feel they can
do a little bit and feel good about themselves for doing
it."
"We put these posters up, so we hope the
neighbours see," he adds. "We hope the neighbours will feel
'if they're all doing it, maybe I should be doing it as
well'."
But there is still some way to go.
When we asked one resident if she was impressed by
the posters about the number of neighbours taking part, she
replied: "Not knowing who the neighbours were, I don't
know."
For the council leader, Mike Freer, this
approach is an idea whose time has come.
He says:
"The role of the council has shifted away from being a
provider of services to being responsible for helping local
citizens improve their lives. Nudging people along is a
terrific idea, we've got to stop nagging. If nagging worked
we'd all be skinny, we'd all be recycling and we'd all be
walking to work."
The Barnet pilot scheme is being
funded by the Department of Communities and Local
Government, which wants to examine how well the academic
theories involved can be implemented in practice.
Similar ideas are also being employed at the
national level.
If you fill out the "carbon
calculator" on the government's Action CO2 campaign site,
you will see that at the end it compares your carbon
consumption to that of other households like yours.
Some of this is based on the work of the leading
American social psychologist, Professor Robert Cialdini.
He argues that the key role of peer pressure or
"social proof" is illustrated by a Californian experiment
about trying to reduce household energy consumption.
The participants were given information about how
cutting consumption could benefit the environment, and also
about what other households were doing to save energy.
The outcome?
"The messages we sent to them
about what their neighbours were doing were the only ones
that made a difference," he says.
New jargon
But this also suggests that politicians who complain
about how widespread an undesirable behaviour is can
inadvertently be encouraging it, because it can help that
behaviour become a social norm.
" I'm starting to
hear local authorities...now talk about 'person-shaping' "
Matthew Taylor
This applies to everything from
young people carrying knives to patients who don't turn up
for their medical appointments.
Thus Professor
Cialdini believes that talk of an "obesity epidemic" simply
encourages more obesity.
"Instead of normalising the
undesirable behaviour, you want to marginalise it," he adds.
All this may mean that we have to learn a new item
of political terminology.
"I'm starting to hear
local authorities that were quite recently using the phrase
'place-shaping' as the jargon for what they did now talk
about 'person-shaping'," says Matthew Taylor, a former
Downing Street policy aide to Tony Blair.
The term
"person-shaping" probably won't appeal to politicians, but
it could increasingly describe what they are trying to do.
Persuading Us to be Good will be broadcast on BBC
Radio 4 at 20.00 on Tuesday, 15 September, and again at
17.00 on Sunday, 20 September 2009.
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