Governments the world over seek to influence citizen choices and encourage us to recycle, to stop smoking, to read to our children. Traditional policy levers employed to achieve desired outcomes – taxing or prohibiting "bad" choices, subsidising or requiring "good" ones - can work, but they are hard to target and costly to enforce.
The idea of 'nudging' citizens into making better decisions has been in vogue in the past few years. The Obama administration is a known fan and the UK Government launched a Behavioural Insights Team to look at using these alternative levers of influence. For example, using more targeted language in HMRC tax demands, hard-hitting adverts about the risks of speeding, and providing better information about food content. These push human buttons such as guilt, wanting to conform and having better information to influence choices.
These behavioural levers are cheaper and easier to target, advantageous in the current financial climate, and they can work. The Department for Transport estimated that every £1 spent on their THINK! anti-speeding campaign saved the taxpayer £9.36.
Policymakers and public service managers face two key questions: how they can spot when behavioural approaches might work, and how they implement them in practice?
To spot when personal choices can be influenced by behavioural levers, the answer to any of the questions below must be "yes":
- Is the outcome driven by personal choices that citizens do not consider harmful to others – think healthy eating or early detection of health issues? Traditional levers here are hard to apply, and can be counter-productive.
- Do the choices you wish to influence occur frequently? Regular choices such as what to eat, how much to save and whether to exercise mean that behavioural levers can influence many decisions at relatively low cost.
- Do the choices occur regularly over a long period of time? A strength of behavioural levers is that they are more agile and much easier to adjust to changing attitudes than levers enshrined in legislation and backed up by agencies of the state.
- Do you want to influence a large or diverse number of people? Behavioural levers are much easier to refine and target than traditional ones.
- Is the outcome sought in the distant future, but driven by choices that occur now? As climate change campaigners are well aware, people naturally discount future consequences compared to today's costs. Behavioural levers help people make real-time decisions with better information.
- Is there already a groundswell of positive sentiment towards the behaviour you are trying to encourage? These people can become the advocates and foot soldiers you need to influence and embed wider behavioural change.
Implementing behavioural levers can appear daunting. The key is to break it down into steps. Firstly, policymakers must identify the groups who make choices which need to be influenced, and their desired outcomes. This seems simple but frequently is not. People are rarely predictable, and have a distaste for feeling like they are being manipulated by Governments.
Secondly, the causal link between choices and outcomes needs exploring, ideally through trials and collecting evidence. This kind of policymaking cannot be done in an ivory tower in Whitehall.
Once the evidence and understanding is there, public bodies need to invest in levers of influence. In an era of tight budgets this often means digital marketing, PR rather than advertising, and social media.
These levers, backed up by constant re-evaluation, will become valuable tools in the armoury of tomorrow's policymakers.
The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.
