Book review: Inside the Nudge Unit by David Halpern

My 27th read of 2017 was Inside the Nudge Unit: How small changes can make a big difference, by David Halpern.
After reading Think Small by Owain Service earlier in the year, Inside the Nudge Unit was another exploration of the inner workings of the government’s Behavioural Insights Team (or Nudge Unit).
Written by Dr David Halpern, behavioural scientist and head of Number 10’s Behavioural Insights Team, the book shares some of the stories and experiences from this team, which saved millions of pounds for the taxpayer by influencing small, simple changes in our behaviour.
It’s a more detailed read than Think Small, covering some similar ground but with a range of new anecdotes too.
Here are some of the passages I highlighted on my Kindle.
The white line is a wonderful everyday example of a ‘nudge’, as are many of the prompts that guide our driving every day.
An everyday assumption is that attitudes shape behaviours. Yet psychological studies have shown that very often it works the other way around: behaviours shape attitudes.
A ‘nudge’ is essentially a means of encouraging or guiding behaviour, but without mandating or instructing, and ideally without the need for heavy financial incentives or sanctions.
A century of research has shown how our senses are tuned to detect changes, contrasts and personal relevance.
For example, in the aftermath of 9/11, people’s estimate of the dangers of flying increased dramatically in the USA. As a result, more people decided to drive instead of flying in the year following, leading to a substantial increase in road deaths. This increase is estimated to have been greater than the original death toll from 9/11 itself.
By early 2015, this simple change in the default had led to more than five million extra UK workers saving for their pensions.
If you want someone to do something — pay their taxes, recycle, or take on an extra employee — a pretty good start is to ‘make it easy’.
In short, the requirement to wear a helmet introduced ‘friction’ to the act of stealing a motorbike, with dramatic consequences.
The next step up from simplifying messages and communications is to simplify processes.
In some situations, the role of the ‘nudger’ may be simply to put a bump in the road to jolt the person’s ‘system 2’, or active reflection, back on.
Humour, fun and curiosity are neglected forces of social change and nudging.
To attract attention, something has to stand out: in the language of psychology, it has to be salient. Salience can be increased through personalisation, relevance or contrast — standing out as different from the background.
Similarly, many teachers and leaders soon learn that they had better follow a ‘tight-loose’ rule: enforce the good behaviour you want to see early on and you will generally find that later you can be much more relaxed.
Dan Ariely, Max Bazerman and colleagues tested this idea in the USA in a series of lab studies and found that people were indeed less likely to cheat if they signed a declaration of honesty before rather than after the opportunity to cheat.
Behavioural economists link this to ‘hyperbolic discounting’: the further into the future a cost or benefit, the disproportionately smaller it becomes relative to immediate costs and benefits.
With a plausible, and seemingly safer substitute in place, the public health community might want to ponder whether e-cigs, however ambivalent they feel about them, might enable societies to get rid of smoking for good.
A growing body of work suggests that if you prompt people to think ahead about how, when and where they will do something they are much more likely actually to do it.
The most common reason for an idea to fail was a blurry mixture of practicalities and departmental resistance.
It’s for individual businesses to decide whether to invest or hunker down; for banks to decide whether to lend or not; and for consumers to decide whether to spend or save: but nudges can affect some of these decisions.
People disproportionately remembered the words at the beginning of the list (primacy effects); the ones at the end (recency effects — just as you can remember the last few words of what was said to you); and words that stood out as especially salient or graphic.
In broad terms, there are three types of factor that appear to influence differences in levels of well-being, almost regardless of how it is measured. These are: individual constitutional or personality differences; material factors; and social factors, including personal relationships.
Volunteering has a similar effect, and also appears to create positive well-being spillovers to the wider community: even if you personally don’t volunteer, if you live in a community with high levels of volunteering your well-being will tend to be raised.
One of the characteristics of modern life, particularly in Anglo-Saxon countries, is that we have often used our wealth to avoid other people.
The de-shrouding of the drivers of well-being — all those quirky books, increasingly based on hard science of what really makes us happy — will reshape and direct markets. Forget GDP: better-informed consumers will reshape markets and economies for themselves. It is the ultimate double nudge.
‘Radical incrementalism’ is the idea that dramatic improvements can be achieved, and are more likely to be achieved, by systematically testing small variations in everything we do, rather than through dramatic leaps in the dark.
For Sunstein and Thaler, the originators of the term ‘nudging’, their first response has always been that nudges should be both ‘choice-enhancing’ — or at least not choice-restricting — and transparent.
I do worry that certain approaches will get overused, or even inappropriately and insensitively used as familiarity with them spreads, and that their positive effects may wash out.
If you want to encourage a behaviour — in yourself or in others — make it easy, attractive, harness social influence, and choose a time when most receptive.
I would definitely recommend this book for anyone with an interest in behavioural science and its application within society.
Next up, I’m reading Million Dollar Habits by Stellan Moreira.
