(Politico) – For the
past year, the Obama administration has been running an experiment: Is it
possible to make policy more effective by using psychology on citizens?
The nickname is
“nudging”—the idea that policymakers can change people’s behavior just by
presenting choices or information differently. The classic example is requiring
people to opt out of being an organ donor, instead of opting in, when they sign
up for a driver’s license. Without any change in rules, the small tweak has
boosted the number of registered organ donors in many states.
Nudging has gained a
lot of high-profile advocates, including behavioral-law guru Cass Sunstein and
former budget czar Peter Orszag. Not everyone likes the idea—“the behaviorists
are saying that you, consumer, are stupid,” said Bill Shughart, a professor of
public choice at Utah State University—but President Obama was intrigued enough
that he actually hired Sunstein, a law professor at Harvard who co-wrote the
best-known book about the topic, “Nudge.”
The president
officially adopted the idea last year when he launched the White House’s Social
and Behavioral Science Team (SBST), a cross-agency effort to bring behavioral
science research into the policymaking process. Now the team has published
its first annual report on this experiment.
How did it go? Mostly,
the efforts appear to have worked, though it’s hard to know how much impact
they’ll have. In part this is because the SBST’s efforts are small—just 15
proof-of-concept projects in its first year—and limited by agencies and laws in
how bold they could be. Nevertheless,
the findings produce a few key insights:
1. Young people clearly respond to texts
One problem the team
tried to address is an education issue called “summer melt”—the fact that each
year, 20 to 30 percent of high school graduates who’ve been accepted to college
just don’t matriculate for their freshman year. Most of them are poor, the kind
of students who would really benefit from a college degree. The Department of
Education and the SBST partnered with a nonprofit organization to send text
messages to selected students,
reminding them to complete certain required tasks before showing up on campus,
like filling out forms. The results: about 9 percent more poor students
matriculated.
2. You can make federal vendors more honest with a simple reminder
On certain
transactions, federal vendors are required to pay a fee on quarterly sales, which
they self-report through an online form. To improve honest reporting, the
General Services Administration—the
agency that manages the function of different agencies—added a small prompt to the top of the form asking vendors to promise they were
submitting accurate information. Lying on the prompt has no legal
repercussions, but it still led
to a $1.59 million increase in fees in one quarter, suggesting that the
respondents were more fully reporting their sales.
3. Doctors? Not that nudge-able
Peer pressure works on
a lot of people; studies have shown that people who see sentences like “9 out
of 10 people pay their taxes on time” are more likely to make their own
payments on time. The nudge team tried this out on doctors, sending letters to
physicians who prescribed far more medications than their peers informing them of their abnormally high
prescription rates. Did it work? Not this time: The letters had no measurable
effect on prescription rates.
OK, but is this really nudging?
The team’s projects were
definitely a form of prodding—giving people little pokes to improve their
behavior in some way. But the more muscular form of “nudge” involves what
experts call changing the “choice architecture” automatically enrolling
employees in an optional 401(k), for instance, or making organ donors opt out.
That’s largely not
what the government was trying here.
“A lot of the stuff I
see on here is just straightforward psychology, just thinking about ways in
which people react to forms and how they will be able to make it easier to fill
out forms,” said Michael Thomas, an assistant professor of economics at
Creighton University who has been skeptical about the uses of behavioral
science.
“I’d like to see more
economic ideas get involved,” said Richard Thaler, an economist at the
University of Chicago who co-wrote “Nudge” with Sunstein, “but so far that
hasn’t happened.” (Thaler was still pleased with the SBST’s results in its
first year.)
Even modest prods can
still make a difference, of
course; government has long been behind corporate America in following up to
make sure its policies actually work.
Economist Justin
Wolfers recently wrote positively about this aspect of the program:
that A/B testing each policy idea helps ensure that government is functioning
effectively.
Why hasn’t the SBST
used more economics in its projects? Maya Shankar, a neuroscientist who created
and now leads the SBST, says that the
team works with other agencies to design the projects and must navigate certain
program constraints. “We rely on their expertise to help to determine what is
possible and what is not possible in every given context,” Shankar said.
Whatever the reason,
the result is that these projects, while valuable, are less informative than
they could be. The SBST team’s report showed that 13 of its projects worked;
one didn’t; and one was hard to tell. That’s a good result for a small and
inexpensive office. But when it comes to whether behavioral economics could
offer a new tool to push Americans toward different choices in big-ticket areas
like healthcare—or whether Americans would actually want that—the evidence is
still out.
http://www.teaparty.org/obama-used-mass-psychology-experiment-american-people-nudge-behavior-124906/
Comments
I wonder
how the government will like it when we start to nudge them and their allies.
As consumers we are not satisfied with government policies. We will ignore some
and raise hell about the rest. We are
also amassing a list of corporations we don’t like and can buy from their
competitors. We already have a history of not buying products when prices rise
too much. We are certainly not happy with government.
Norb
Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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