There is a lot of lively academic debate about how the seminal 18th-century economist, Adam Smith, was actually well aware of the irrationalities of human decision-making and incorporated it into his theories – what he called the ‘passions’ versus the ‘impartial spectator’ in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. But whether he was truly the first behavioural economist is outside the scope of this book.
6 The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, Ariely D, Harper Collins (2012).
7 In this case, this possibly creates a negative social norm, explained on page 10.
8 www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/dec/12/london-homicides-now-highest-in-a-year-for-a-decade
9 Explained on page 14.
10 Such is the influence of online review sites that restaurants, hotels etc. have become somewhat obsessed, and the system has been gamed by some unscrupulous practitioners. This was hilariously demonstrated in 2017 by Vice journalist Oobah Butler, who created a fake restaurant called The Shed at Dulwich, based at his garden shed in south-east London. Using his experiences writing fake reviews for £10 for real restaurants, he got his friends to write fake TripAdvisor reviews in sufficient volumes to become rated in the top 2,000 restaurants in London. As part of the hoax, he shot fake Instagram pictures of the food (including a ham hock that was actually a close up of his ankle) and created made-up dishes such as vegan clams. He leveraged scarcity bias (explained on page 29) by creating a phone number and website for appointment-only bookings (which was never answered). Despite not actually existing, it became the top-rated restaurant in London in 2017. Butler staged an opening night for the restaurant, serving thinly-disguised £1 ready meals to ten customers. Despite having been blindfolded and then led down the alley past his house to the end of the garden and the shed, some said they wanted to come back and would recommend it. (www.theshedatdulwich.com)
11 citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.470.522&rep=rep1&type=pdf
12 Thinking Fast and Slow, Kahneman D, Penguin (2011).
13 Undoubtedly his long-time friend and colleague Amos Tversky would have jointly been awarded this prize also, but he sadly died in 1996.
14 I am a board member for the Association for Business Psychology in the UK, and the majority of our members are business psychologists whose role at least partly involves assessing performance of people and teams in work.
15 The Undoing Project, Lewis, M, Penguin (2018).
16 This is where an event is assumed to be more likely because it shares characteristics of its category – even though this has no effect on likelihood. In this case, criticism led to a better performance, so the assumption was this was the cause and effect.
17 An example of confirmation bias, explained on page 143.
18 The Undoing Project.
Chapter 2: Nudging For Good – How Governments Use Behavioural Science
How to change an irrational behaviour: smoking
To demonstrate how governments have been leading the way in applying behavioural science, let’s look at an example of a behaviour successfully addressed using these principles: smoking.
Smoking is the single largest driver of health inequalities in the UK, killing nearly 78,000 people every year in England alone.19 I spent a large part of my public service career addressing this challenge. In 2006, I first joined the public sector as a campaigns manager at the Department of Health, and my role was delivering public information campaigns designed to encourage people to quit.
Smoking is in many ways the quintessential, irrational behaviour. Spock would never touch a cigarette. The legacy of consistent government campaigning for over 40 years means virtually all smokers know it is bad for them. Most want to quit. But lack of willpower, plus the chemically addictive and habit-forming nature of smoking, means they find it hard to do so. Focusing on rational drivers of behaviour – simply providing the logical reasons for quitting – was not going to achieve our campaign objective to reduce overall adult smoking rates to 21% or less by 2010.
All of our work was couched in terms of behaviour. Everything we did was assessed on the basis of whether it was likely to influence people to quit smoking, and stay that way. The metrics for policy and campaigns were mostly in terms of smoking-related behaviour – overall smoking rates, people attending NHS Stop Smoking Services, and calling our helpline or visiting our website.
Much of the evidence of efficacy was based on flawed data – on what smokers were telling us, which was not necessarily an accurate reflection of what was driving their behaviour, as we will see in part five. The principles we were applying were from social marketing, or how to use established marketing techniques to change behaviour for good. Much of the theory that informed this was based on psychology, and understanding the irrationalities of human behaviour.
To build a new departmental tobacco marketing strategy, our team worked with an external strategist, the leading ad planner Kate Waters, now director of client strategy and planning at the UK broadcaster, ITV.
As Waters put it when I interviewed her in early 2019 at Now, the advertising agency she co-founded: “I did a psychology degree and I never imagined that it would be particularly relevant or useful – in fact I think I managed to forget most of it – until about ten years later when I was working on a brief from the British Heart Foundation, where I had a hunch that psychology might be useful. It was an amazing brief which was essentially ‘the government wants to get more people to stop smoking, and think we should scare people into doing so, but they are concerned that the NHS as a brand is too nice and caring and sharing to do that.’ So they asked the British Heart Foundation to think about what we could do to add another voice to the debate around tobacco control.
“The ad that resulted is what became known as the fatty cigarette campaign, which I think was probably the most disgusting ad – and I mean that quite literally, as in to elicit disgust – that TV had seen for some time. Possibly ever.
“Smokers have a very deep relationship with the act of smoking, but interestingly they have a slightly more ambivalent relationship with the cigarette itself, and we wanted to turn the venom on the cigarette. We wanted to get to the point where smokers had a ‘Pavlovian’ response so whenever they saw a cigarette they couldn’t help but think of the gunk collecting in their arteries.”
Several
