Governments the world over seek to influence citizen choices by, for example, encouraging them to recycle, stop smoking or read to their children. Traditional policy levers such as taxing or prohibiting "bad" choices or 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 known to support the idea and in 2010 the UK government launched a behavioural insights team to look at using alternative levers of influence such as more targeted language in tax demands, hard-hitting adverts about the risks of speeding, and food labelling. These levers play on human emotions such as guilt, the desire to conform and the need for better information to influence choices.
These methods 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 its THINK! anti-speeding campaign saved the taxpayer £9.36.
But implementing behavioural levers can be daunting. The key is to break it down into steps. First, policymakers must identify the groups who make choices that need to be influenced, and their desired outcomes. This seems simple but frequently is not. People are rarely predictable, and dislike the idea of being manipulated by governments.
Second, 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 get the message across. In an era of tight budgets this often means digital marketing, PR rather than advertising, and social media.
Policymakers and public managers face two key questions: how can they can spot when behavioural approaches might work, and how can they implement them in practice?
For this approach to work effectively, we believe managers need to have positive answers to the following questions:
1. Is the outcome driven by personal choices that citizens do not consider harmful to others, such as healthy eating or early detection of health issues? Traditional levers here are hard to apply and can be counterproductive.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Do you want to influence a large or diverse number of people? Behavioural levers are much easier to refine and target than traditional ones.
5. 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.
We believe that if they are backed up by constant re-evaluation, these levers will become valuable tools in the armoury of tomorrow's policymakers.
Joel Bellman is director in public sector consulting at Deloitte, whose report, Influencing citizen behaviours to achieve policy outcomes, was published this month
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