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>> Hey, it's for Lichtman and you're listening to Science Friday.
Today in the show. >> When a beard tastes both refreshing and flavorful, there are some reactions that can't control. [MUSIC] And some you can, please drink responsibly.
>> We have all heard this on alcohol ads. Please drink responsibly. You might have heard something similar on gambling ads like when the fun stops stop. There is even a moment of calorie caution in soda ads.
>> All calories count. And if you eat and drink more calories than you burn off, you'll gain weight.
That goes for Coca-Cola and everything else with calories.
>> Finding a solution. >> The message behind these disclaimers are kind of the same. These products have risks, but mitigating them. Well, that's on you. So how did we get to this idea that it's our personal responsibility
to make a dent in big problems? Not say the job of government to impose regulations. Well, behavioral scientists play to role according to my next guest. Dr. Nick Chater, Professor of Behavioral Science at Warwick University and co-author of It's On You, How Corporations and Behavioral Scientists
have convinced us that word to blame for society's deepest problems. Nick, thanks for being here. >> Well, thank you very much for having me.
>> Did I get the big picture right in that intro?
>> Yes, I think you did, absolutely. I should also put a shout-out for my close co-author George Lewinstein at Carnegie Mellon University. So we've worked on this absolutely as a joint project from the beginning. And George is very relevant here because he was in there at the beginning
of the time when behavioral science started to get engaged with public policy.
“And that I think was when things went slightly awry in a way”
that was a little unpredictable at the time. But led to the kind of the concerns you're pointing at now. So what happened in the early 2000s is that there were a variety of people thinking about the idea of trying to make the world better, improving our diets, dealing with obesity crisis, thinking about how to get people to save better
for the future, given long-term pension problems, thinking about environmental problems, pollution, plastic waste and so on. Thinking about these problems from a direct behavioral point of view, attacking the problem as one might almost think at the root cause of the individual, citizen and their behavior.
So the thought was, if we understand how individual behavior works, maybe we can get through all those political, long-term policy tangles and ideological sort of polarization and just cut the chase and help individual people directly with behavioral interventions to make choices which are better for them and for better, better for society.
And the trouble with that is that it frames these big social problems, which are things that have emerged over decades and are different from one society to another. And it frames them as the problem of the individual. And we have a phenomenon for this, in fact, we call it eye-frame thinking.
You're thinking about the individual frame of reference. And that deflects attention away from some of the other things you might think about doing, which would be those sort of classical regulatory taxation, subsidy, government type things that's inadvertently. We've kind of pushed the focus back onto the individual.
And that's been very, very much aligned slightly to our embarrassment and retrospect with exactly the kind of messaging you pointed out at the beginning of the show. Right. Right. I want to get into this. So you're not just a critic. You were actually deeply involved in this world.
You advised the UK government on climate policy. Yeah. Tell us a little bit of that story.
“Well, I think there's two parts of the story, really.”
So before the climate engagement for me, I was on the advisory board of the behavioral insights team. And in fact, that was one of the ways in which George and I met. What's the behavioral insights team? So the behavioral insights team is popularly known as the Nudge units.
And it was a unit created inside the UK government to advise the prime minister. This is in 2010. My David Cameron had just taken over on these individualistic interventions. There was a very important book, Nudge, by Richard Thader and Cassonsdee. So Taylor, one on Nobel Prize, not just for this work, but for many other brilliant things.
He's done and Cassonsdee is a very celebrated and distinguished legal scholar. And so they wrote this book in calculating the idea that maybe we can make individual level changes. And they're driven nudges that it's not infringing your liberty is not controlling your options. It's simply encouraging you to do the right thing. It's making the right thing the easy thing.
And that's the Nudge unit was created out of that.
“And that's what we're talking about with Nudge.”
It's a Nudge in the right direction.
Exactly, exactly.
Which is a very, a very lordable and reasonable thing in itself.
And alongside that, of course, comes things we can't really, exactly just nudges, they're just information, so things like calorie labels on food, carbon labels on flights and so on. Right. So that was very exciting. And it's a very big innovation there are now about 150
and counts in Nudge units around the world in bits of governments and in many different jurisdictions. And many of them do really good work.
“But, um, they came, I think, evident to George and I very early on,”
that we were sort of finding ourselves feeling like we were tinkering with the edges of really big problems. Like the Nudge is weren't working to solve climate change. Yeah. Well, I mean, climate change, let's move on to that one, because like climate change was the one that really shocked me, I think. Because I went on to the UK's Climate Change Committee, which sets and monitors the targets for carbon reduction.
And so it's a pretty significant committee in terms of its influence. And they wanted to have a behavioral person. And that itself is remarkable. And I was that person, it turned out so I took this role with great enthusiasm, thinking, and I'll have all these brilliant ideas about how to change individual behavior and help for way.
And after six years, I've finally, incredibly useful in,
and I hope, contributing some valuable ways. I really don't think I came up with a single brain wave, which really made any difference to individual behavior. Just individual behaviors wasn't where the action was. So, so it's a sort of demoralizing thing when you think about the problem of climate reduction.
The things were really maturing in the UK anyway. Yeah. Well, things like decarbonising the grid. So just closing them like how cold firepower stations are reducing amounts of gas in the system, and pushing wind and solar and so on.
And this is just power.
“There's obviously very, very big things you have to do to food production and transportation and so on.”
And so these sort of massive scale changes, that things that really make a difference. And the kind of things that I would have been able to suggest if I had the gumption to actually even raise them, I would have felt foolish to do so, really. Would be sort of small nudges which would help people reduce their heating, heating costs by either one or two percent.
Why, I think this is the thing that's so fascinating about this. Because, you know, I remember this time very well, and I was actually in media at the time, and we did, I did a whole project about climate guilt because, you know, I feel like we were taught to believe that this is our problem to solve on an individual level. Yes, I think that's absolutely right, and if you're in the fossil fuel industry,
it's a really, really useful thing for the public at large to own the problem themselves. Yes, and that is the perfect segue, because I want to talk about this in particular, listen to this clip. Well, it came primarily from a big publicity campaign by British petroleum, so one of the world's largest oil companies.
The points of the carbon footprint and the PR behind it, which was a very big and successful indeed award-winning campaign, was to frame the problem of climate change. Not as a problem for the very existence and business model of fossil fuel companies, but to frame it instead as a problem for each of us. So we need to be blowing ourselves and also blowing each other, that's also very
very effective strategy that we can start to see hypocrisy everywhere and start to point fingers at each other, and then we're really kind of doom-loop of despair and disarray. Rather than thinking, well, clearly we need to make the major structural changes where energy is provided. Now, BP had posters saying things like, perhaps it's time to go on a low carbon diet. So we're so much on your side, but we're really trying to solve this problem.
But at the same time, of course, they were working hard and the fossil fuel industry in general has been working hard to slow down any progress towards national and international agreements on switching away from fossil fuels.
That's amazing. I mean, that's an amazing insight that carbon footprint was invented by BP.
It is astonishing, isn't it? Yes, it's an alarming sort of shock to discover that.
“I think there's a temptation in conversations like this to say, oh, well, yes, of course, corporations are evil,”
but it can't be that simple, right? No. No, and I think it's sort of wrong in a way to think, and we do naturally have this tendency to think either the corporations are evil or the particular people inside the corporations are evil or the people who may bend to the advertising campaign revolver. And that's, I think, completely the wrong perspective. So what George and I are arguing for in the book is that it's sort of thinking from the eye frame perspective, thinking about the individuals,
whether those individuals are, that's chief executives or everyday, everyday folks.
We should be thinking about systems.
the general, the economic and social of political game working? And when things are going wrong, we should be thinking, well, clearly there's something wrong with this game. We've got rules wrong somehow. And so that's the thing we need to be worried about. So it's sort of not surprising that the fossil fuel companies are trying to find strategies to reduce regulatory pressure on them. And then it most of the time do things which are allowed within the rules of the game.
But if that's the case, we need to think about how we make rules work differently. Right. I mean, but this gets back to the original reason that we got to the eye frame,
or the individual responsibility in the first place, which is that systems are hard to think about.
And they're not tidy narratives, right? Right? Which I wonder if psychology has something to tell us
“about that, like, can we train our brains to think about these problems in a systemic way?”
Yeah, I think we can to a degree, but you're completely right, that there is an inherent tendency to think at the individualistic level. We have a strong psychological bias to see the patterns in individual behavior, stemming from the characteristics of specific individual people. And I think this had very deep roots. So human beings are not evolved to deal with a world of extremely complicated societies with the logical operations and governments and systems of laws. And so we're evolved
to work in small groups, we're dealing with small numbers of people. And then in those groups,
the reaction is all about individuals. And which individuals have which characteristics and which ones are trustworthy, which ones are trustworthy. And now in everyday navigation of the social world is something that encourages us to see problems as problems of individual praise and blame and and character essentially, characteristics. But I don't think it's hopeless. After the break,
“that's what I want to talk about. If it's not nudges and disclaimers, you know, how do we”
solve these big problems? Stick around. You know, right now, especially, definitely in America, we often hear that problems people face, their personal feelings. You know, like people with strong willpower or good values will make the right choices if given, you know, the right information or all the information. What does the research say about that? I think the research says that sort of comprehensively about as
wrong as it could be, as they are entirely right, it's amazing that we get a lot. And so I think
I mean, we're a couple of very broad brush things to say. I mean, one is that most of the social problems we face are not eternal problems. So if we look at something like the rising problem of obesity in many Western nations, that's relatively recent problem. It's sort of growing up over the last 40 or 50 years and become a pretty severe problem. But it cannot be that sort of willpower or sort of moral fibre, or somehow has been terribly eroded across the whole of the
sort of Western developed world. And the obvious explanation is that what foods are primarily being pushed at us and which are cheap. I'm radically changing. So the cheap, easy things to eat are just getting less and unfortunately getting happy getting less and less healthy. So there's a food environment has become very very different. But it's a sort of, it's a case of having a tie sort of rapidly moving out and you can point to a few streamers and say, well, they're actually
swimming so fast, get to tie, they're actually made, they're doing fine. But on balance, the doctor,
“if the tie is going one direction, that's where we're all going to be heading. And I know, I think”
you can say the same for, for a whole range of issues. I mean, I think a very interesting example of this very relevant moment is big tech. So you know, the thing about issues like, for example, privacy or questions of screen time, social media, social media use could cause you, it's clearly very, very helpful if you're big tech rather than the oil company. So well, it's really, it's over to you, the consumers. But it's a pretty weak argument in general because
you've got what appears to be a fairly gigantic social problem emerging, which is clearly new. The exhortation to solve the problem at one by one is inevitably not going to work. And of course, that's one reason it's so attractive to people who are opposing change because they know really that if you simply exalt people to try a bit harder and sort of take responsibility, that's going to be no change at all. Okay. Well, I mean, you know, behavioral science helped
get us into this. Yes. I'm not trying to, you know, point the finger too much. But is there a role for behavioral science in helping us reframe in helping us solve this problem?
I think there is.
it'd be pointing the finger at myself primarily to, in terms of the, the source of the problem.
But I think, I think we really haven't helped much. I think I certainly, for a personal point if you feel like I've been, um, at best, just distracting myself and other people in my orbit from thinking about systemic solutions that will actually be helpful. So I think the
“aim for science can help us. And I think there are two key things, I think. So one is that”
if we're thinking about policies that are going to really make a difference of systemic policies
and we kind of know what to do. But the crucial question for psychologists, behavioral economists,
and so on, is how do we frame and explain those policies in a way that makes them attractive to people? So if you take something like carbon taxes, I mean, the very idea of a carbon tax seems like a doomed idea because people don't like taxes. So you try to sell it, you want
“to the taxes. So it's, it's got the great tax and it has always wonderful consequences. It's sort of”
awful. It's tricky. It's very good. So thinking about how you can pitch this more as a matter of
redistribution. So we're going to just shift money around. I'm going to take it away from people who are doing lots of carbon burning, we're going to give it to other people. We're not just throwing it into the government coffers, the way in which we change in diets is another, another one. So if that's in the UK, there's been some substantial, actually, quite successful legislation reducing the amount of sugar that's in certain kinds of drinks and ready-prepared foods. And also salt.
“Oh, they're actually, I think behavioral science could be quite helpful too because we know”
that it actually very hard for us to detect absolutely how much sugar usalt we're ingesting, except what we used to, so if you gradually reformulate things so that the sugar and salt levels go down, we don't even really notice. So it turns out that we could be taking off of our addiction to salt. Yeah, yeah. If we give the industry, it's time to do it. They'll be able to reformulate and no one's really any of the words of, and it's not even bad for business. So I think,
I suppose there really is two sort of elements. There's one is what policies will actually work from a behavioral point of view without causing any consumer detriment. And there's also just this sort of sales bit, it's questionable. How do we, how do we formulate messages that really like with people? Yeah, well Nick, thank you for being here. Appreciate it. What has been a real pleasure, thank you so much. Dr. Nick Chater Professor of Behavioral Science at Warwick University
and co-author of It's On You, How Corporations and Behavioral Scientists have convinced us that we are to blame for society's deepest problems. Shashana bucks bound produced this episode, there are no warning labels on this podcast, but it is on you to give us a good review on any platform wherever you listen. I'm Floral Lichtman. We'll catch you next time.
