Juliet Michaelson is a researcher at nef‘s centre for well-being.
‘ “Want to grab some lunch?” ask a couple of colleagues as they walk past your desk’. This is the unconventional opening of the excellent MINDSPACE report on influencing behaviour through public policy, here taking its own advice in making information seem relevant to the people at whom it is aimed (in this case, civil servants designing policy).
Commissioned by the Cabinet Office and published earlier this year by the Institute for Government, MINDSPACE is a mnemonic for nine key influences on behaviour which should be given attention in the policy-making process. Drawn from the extensive literature on what influences our behaviour, MINDSPACE sets out that: we are heavily affected by the Messenger delivering information; respond to Incentives through shortcuts such as strongly avoiding losses; we are influenced by the Norms of what others do; go with the flow of Defaults; we are drawn to Salient information and Primed by sub-conscious cues; are strongly influenced by Affect, that is, our emotional experiences; seek to be consistent to the public Commitments we make and act in ways which make us feel better about ourselves and thus protect our Ego.
The report contains lots of illuminating examples showing how these influences can be and have been used in designing policy. It also makes two very important observations about policy making as a whole. First, that
whether we like it or not, the actions of policymakers, public service professionals, markets and our fellow citizens around us have big, and often unintended, impacts on our behaviour. ‘Doing nothing’ is never a neutral option
This is of key relevance to those of us advocating a well-being led approach to policy-making. While we are often accused of wanting policy to overly interfere in people’s lives, in fact, given that all policy affects behaviour, it is also very likely to affect how people experience their lives. So policy-makers should see themselves as having to ensure that the effects they create through their policy decisions are postive rather than negative to well-being overall.
The second key observation is that
Government needs to understand the ways it may be changing the behaviour of citizens unintentionally…some priming effects work in surprising ways.
For me, this is an excellent summary of the reasons why nef advocates using well-being measures as ultimate indicators of society’s progress. When government focuses its energies on the growth of the country’s GDP, we are thereby primed to behave as though economic factors are the most important influence on our personal well-being, although the evidence, and much of our ‘folk knowledge’, suggests otherwise. By concentrating instead on the well-being outcomes of its policies, government could help us all to improve our own well-being by prioritising what really matters.
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19 June, 2010 at 12:03 pm
Phil Henshaw
I do think having lots of new ways to measure “well being” is important, but just having better measures won’t make nature follow our instructions any better if that’s what we’re hoping.
One of the fascinating things about our “clever thinking” is that we often forget to check how our personal and cultural world views check out with the real world. For example, a great many sustainability efforts more or less assume nature operates by consensus, and if enough people agree with something, then it’ll happen. It has not been working is the clear problem, like the hope that being efficient will reduce our impacts, and (actually for 150 years) seeing exactly the opposite regular net effect!
Of course, you do need group consensus to cause large scale change when someone actually does see what would affect our environment. The rub is that nature is a ‘cellular’ organism that works by different systems all over which are changing by accumulative development. Our cultural realities, as constructed in our minds is an environment like that too! They are just made of **different cells and relationships** connecting them! <:-o
This is where our basic "dual reality", the mind/body problem, becomes a critical issue for our surviving on earth. Our culture even has as it's principal economic idea the expectation that you can and should have ever more control over other things on earth (i.e. money) for ever less effort…. Oops! Will that work?
Something tells me we need to rethink.
19 June, 2010 at 8:32 pm
David Chester
Most people have stopped thinking and feel and emote instead. That includes intiution.
In order to think in the true sense it is necessary to recognise and then use scientific procedures which are as follows.
1. Hypothosise–suggest a possible explanation for the subject in question.
2. Review it, from a viewpoint of seing how it works. Either reject it or
3. Subject the hypothesis (now called a theory) to a critical test. Does it meet this crirterion and if not where does it fail?
4. Improve on the hypothesis and repeat steps 1 to 3 until the theory answers the experiment.
5. Formalise your conclusions about the subject and spread the word around.
The most famous saying which fails this test is “I think therefore I Exist” (Decarte). Better to claim that because I exist I can think.
20 June, 2010 at 2:59 am
Phil Henshaw
But the phrase attributed to Decarte seems to omit whether the speaker is referring to the physical processes of thought which the word “think” is referring to, or the logic. They certainly exist in rather different senses at least, since the physical process doesn’t work by logic and the logic can’t work anything unless the person uses the physical processes at their mind’s disposal.
I think that distinction solves the “mind/body problem”. Mind can only be pointed to with explanations and body can’t be explained except by being pointed to physically. Try doing otherwise!
Drinking a glass of water or extending a handshake, for example, are quite easy to do but impossible to explain. Conversely, theories are generally based on some logic that seems easy to explain, but there’s not theory that anyone can possibly “do”. All we can actually do to imitate theory is act it out by engaging in physical processes the theory can’t explain… right?
I think we need both. Or at least I guess that’s my theory. 😉
20 June, 2010 at 1:15 pm
Phil Henshaw
Oops… I just noticed your summation “Better to claim that because I exist I can think” is just a simpler way to say what I added.
That “what we think of things isn’t what they are” is an important step, though, toward learning the habit of referring to things as being themselves rather than as being our explanations.
20 June, 2010 at 2:01 pm
Reading Nature’s Signals » Mind body problem revisited…
[…] on a discussion of “economics as if people and the earth mattered” in a NEF blog post Clever thinking about how we think, Dave Chester offered a concise statement on the scinetific method of reasoning, concluding: The […]