by Jules Evans | Aug 23, 2010 | Global system, Influence and networks
News here that David Cameron has approved the establishment of a ‘behavioural insight’ unit, led by policy advisor David Halpern, to find ways to implement the ideas of behavioural psychologist Richard Thaler, who is also apparently working with the unit.
Thaler is, together with Cass Sunstein, the author of Nudge, a study of humans’ poor and often irrational decision-making processes (such as preferring books with easy-to-remember one-word titles) and how governments can manipulate or ‘nudge’ these processes towards more enlightened choices.
Putting a picture of a fly on a urinal, for example, nudges people to pee more in the urinal, and less on the floor. Creating bins that make a funny noise when you drop things into them encourages people to put more rubbish into them. And so on!
There are other, more far-reaching ways you can use behavioural psychology to affect public decision-making. For example, if you present a policy decision to citizens, you could either offer them a box to tick to sign up to it, or a box to tick if they want to opt out of it. Making people tick a box to opt out makes us more likely to opt in.
Why? Because we’re lazy, bored, distracted, inert and irrational creatures. We’re monkeys, so the government needs to present our choices in such a way as to make us pick the right banana.
Thaler and Sunstein call this sort of social manipulation ‘libertarian paternalism’. People are still free to choose how to live. But, knowing that homo dufus often makes bad decisions, governments and companies should structure the choices they prresent so they pick the more enlightened option.
There are two ripostes to this approach. (more…)
by Richard Gowan | Aug 22, 2010 | Conflict and security, Middle East and North Africa, Off topic
Iran has just revealed its first “bomber drone”:
While this is obviously rather annoying, I can’t help noticing the resemblance between this machine and Thunderbird 2 from the famous British sci-fi puppet series:
Even the fake blue-sky-with-clouds background is almost identical.
by Richard Gowan | Aug 21, 2010 | Conflict and security, Middle East and North Africa, Off topic
In the week the U.S. withdrew its last combat troops from Iraq (leaving a mere 50,000 who probably could do bit of fighting if required) here’s a small quiz. Name the years that these Coalition of the Willing members pulled their personnel out of Iraq:
- Honduras
- Mongolia
- Dominican Republic
- Tonga
- Iceland
You can find most of the answers over at Duck of Minerva, although you’ll have to check out this list at Wikipedia if you can’t quite recall when the Mongolians and Tongans shipped out… As for Iceland, well they sent one guy and he left in 2007.
by Richard Gowan | Aug 21, 2010 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Europe and Central Asia, Global system
Look at this little fellow…
…and try telling me that he wouldn’t look better with this logo stuck to his furry flank:
What, you may ask, am I going on about? Here we go: this week, the EU’s Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid – Kristalina Georgieva – was asked “why TV reports had shown aid being distributed in Pakistan in sacks carrying the US flag, but never the EU emblem”. She attributed this to (i) EU modesty and (ii) pesky NGOs:
Europe had chosen to work very much with partner organisations present on the ground, as in Pakistan. But these organisations, such as the Red Cross or Save the Children, have their own brand to promote and are reluctant to use the EU’s to a certain extent.
Sometimes this is because it may seem like their work is being politicised, sometimes it is purely for safety reasons, and sometimes it is because they want to show off their own brand, which is understandable, the commissioner explained.
What is to be done?
“Raising the visibility of Europe and making sure that our flag shines when we are abroad helping people in need is something that I find incredibly important. Especially now, when we are still not through with the economic and financial crises and it is hard for people here, and we also have our own disasters at home,” she said.
Georgieva said she was telling humanitarian organisations that they should do more to help the EU to help them by flying the EU flag.
I have questions about this approach, which I’ll write about soon, but I was also struck by this snippet from the interview with Georgieva, who knows her stuff:
She explained that the main problem was ensuring that aid actually reaches people in need, and that in some places donkeys were a more precious means of transport than helicopters.
Surely this points to the difficulty in “branding” any humanitarian operation: the fact that getting aid through involves a great deal of improvisation. It’s hard to wave the EU flag while bartering for donkeys. Unless, that is, the EU wants to set up a Donkey Corps to airlift highly-trained pack-animals to future crises? When one of them appeared on TV, everyone would know exactly whose ass they were staring at…
Biological note: yes, I know donkeys and asses are not identical. The New Yorker had a great piece on mules and the military, now sadly for subscribers only.
by Jules Evans | Aug 21, 2010 | Economics and development
Here’s a new RSA animation in which Matthew Taylor, former head of the Institute for Public Policy Research and now chief executive of the RSA, sets out what he wants the Royal Society to do. It’s a great animation and lively talk, and he’s clearly very interested in the politics of well-being, and in what moral and political insights we can draw from new research in psychology and neuroscience. But he may be over-hasty in the policy conclusions that he draws. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC7ANGMy0yo[/youtube]
Taylor refers in the talk to “powerful new insights” from neuroscience, anthropology and psychology, particularly the idea, in the work of social and behavioural psychologists like John Bargh and Jonathan Haidt, that we are mainly automatic, irrational creatures, and we need to be aware of the limits of our rationality and free will, in order to become more self-aware and responsible people. (If you read the excellent www.edge.org, you’ll be familiar with a lot of this research.)
Taylor argues that this research provides a scientific ‘evidence base’ that takes us beyond individualism, and towards a more social and communitarian model of politics. In this, he is in the same camp as New Left thinkers like Richard Layard and Oliver James, who have tried to use insights from psychology to criticise neo-liberal individualism and justify a more social-communitarian model of society.
The main problem with this ‘natural communitarianism’ is that Taylor and the RSA are moving too rapidly from an ‘is’ to an ‘ought’, when in fact the same scientific research can be used to justify quite different policy approaches.
(more…)
