How an American economist triggered the demise of deliberative thinking
In a free society, it is reasonable to expect that political leaders would strive to promote deliberative thinking amongst the electorate, encouraging them to actively participate in debates about the crucial issues of the day. Alarmingly, in the UK and other Western nations, this is no longer the case. In every sphere of daily life, our thoughts and actions are being manipulated, often covertly, so as to align them with what the state’s technocrats have deemed to be in our best interests; openness and transparent attempts at persuasion are no longer deemed necessary.
We now live in a technocratic and authoritarian country where citizens are construed as nothing more than passive pawns to be manoeuvred by the global elite in their pursuit of often-dubious goals. Our political leaders routinely deploy a range of manipulative strategies – censorship, propaganda, the smearing of those expressing alternative viewpoints – so as to promote the ‘right’ beliefs and behaviours among the populace.
One prominent tool in the state’s armoury is behavioural science, an often covert form of persuasion (frequently weaponising fear, shame and scapegoating) that has become mainstream over recent years, with ‘nudgers’ now embedded in most administrative departments, routinely striving to influence people in all aspects of their day-to-day lives – for instance, there are 24 in the UK Health Security Agency and 54 in the Tax Office. During the covid event, they had a significant presence within the expert advisory groups. They comprise the high-profile Behavioural Insight Team (aka ‘Nudge Unit’), ‘The world’s first government institution dedicated to the application of behavioural science to policy’. And they reside within the Government Communication Service that boasts a ‘Behavioural Science Team’ operating out of the Cabinet Office. The consequence of this ubiquity is stark: whether responding to a health challenge, using public transport, watching a TV drama, or interacting with the tax office, our minds are being psychologically manipulated by government technocrats.
How did the UK, once a beacon of freedom and democracy, descend to such a position?
Although there have been multiple contributors on this journey, a persuasive case can be made that an American economist in the aftermath of the 2nd World War – Herbert Simon – sowed the seed that ultimately legitimised the involvement of behavioural scientists in all human activities.
Herbert Simon – ‘bounded rationality’
In the 1940s, a core assumption underpinning economic models was that human beings were essentially rational, and each person could be relied upon to make decisions that would improve their financial circumstances. This central notion, the basis for the ‘standard economic model’, was first challenged by Simon in his 1945 book, Administrative Behaviour. Simon proposed that the capacity of the human mind to make advantageous economic choices was severely limited, with people typically seeking short-term gratification, relying on arbitrary habits of behaviour, and failing to use all available information – this latter deficit being referred to as ‘bounded rationality’.
This explicit recognition that human decision-making commonly deviated from the path of pure rationality had two important consequences. First, it legitimised the study of cognitive biases by academics, thereby establishing common ground between the disciplines of economics and psychology. Second, it raised the prospect of top-down interventions by social organisations to remedy these thinking errors of sub-optimal citizens; the seed of the Governments-know-what’s-best-for-us mentality was sown.
Simon’s work in the 1940s/50s, although ultimately pivotal, was insufficient to immediately evoke an escalation in state-sponsored behavioural science. Greater knowledge and understanding of specific types of consistent human irrationalities was required. In the subsequent decades, other academics strived to learn more about the range of flaws in human decision making. Prominent among these scholars were Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahnman (Israeli-born psychologists working in American universities) and Robert Cialdini (a psychology professor at Arizona University).
Tversky, Kahnman & Cialdini
As influential members of the ‘new behavioural economics movement’, throughout the 1970s Tversky and Kahnman explicated a range of universal flaws underpinning human judgements, particularly during conditions of time pressure and uncertainty. Extending the work of Simon, they proposed the distinction between ‘fast brain’ (automatic, huge capacity, effortless) and ‘slow brain’ (deliberative, very low capacity, effortful), and described how the former – although mostly efficient and helpful – was responsible for a number of heuristics that consistently led to thinking errors. One example is the ‘availability heuristic’, where the ease of retrieval from memory determines subsequent estimates of the frequency of an item or occurrence; for instance, in the period after driving past a multiple-vehicle accident on a motorway, a person will likely overestimate the future risk of a shunt (typically resulting in speed reduction). By illustrating these common rules of thumb, and providing robust evidence of their negative impacts on judgemeents, Tversky and Kahnman popularised the notion of irrational humans spending most of their time on automatic pilot.
In the following decade, Robert Cialdini wrote a seminal book, ‘Influence: The psychology of persuasion’, in which he provided further insights into the automatic – ‘fast brain’ – workings of the human mind. Informed largely by the time he spent working alongside compliance professionals, Cialdini further elucidated how key features of a person’s social environment can predictably trigger responses that are independent of deliberative thought or reflection.
First published (perhaps appropriately) in 1984, Cialdini listed seven principles used by salespeople to encourage customers to part with their money. As examples, two of these doctrines of persuasion were ‘social proof’ and ‘authority’. The former exploits the inherent human tendency to follow the crowd, to do what we believe most others are doing. The latter relies on a deep-seated sense of duty to obey those perceived to be experts. Thirty-six years later both these strategies were deployed in the Government’s covid communications: statements like ‘almost everybody is following the lockdown rules’ harnessed the intrinsic desire of people to avoid being in a minority; the daily appearances of Professor Chris Whitty (Chief Medical Officer) and Professor Patrick Vallance (Chief Scientist) to dispense their prophesies of doom drew on the state communicators’ expectation that directives issued by messengers with academic prestige would be more likely to be adhered to than those from politicians.
One consequence of Cialdini’s work (and that of Tversky and Kahnman) was to encourage a more frequent employment of these often-covert techniques of persuasion in both the private and public sectors. Nonetheless, the efforts of two other American scholars were required to accelerate the process of embedding behavioural science into the political realm, the communication infrastructure of the UK Government.
Thaler and Sunstein
Richard Thaler (an economics professor) and Cass Sunstein (a law professor) – both based at the University of Chicago – played a pivotal role in mainstreaming behavioural science strategies into the national political arena. Their 2008 book, ‘Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness’, translated the ideas of Tversky, Kahnman and Cialdini into a form that was more amenable to state actors. Thaler and Sunstein argued that the tools of behavioural science could re-construct the ‘choice architecture’ so as to increase the likelihood that citizens act in ways that enhance their long-term interests, without the government having to resort to the cruder methods of coercion and the removal of options. The implicit assumption of this approach was that the government and their technocrats always know what is in the best interests of the people they are paid to serve.
Thaler and Sunstein’s masterstroke was to label this form of often-covert persuasion as ‘libertarian paternalism’ so as to render it palatable to actors across the political spectrum, this oxymoronic name making state-funded nudging acceptable to those on the right (who were drawn to the ‘libertarian’ banner) as well as those on the left (who were comfortable with the ‘paternalism’ theme).
Collectively, the efforts of Thaler, Sunstein and the other American academics succeeded in attracting the attention of UK politicians, particularly those who were comfortable with the prospect of more top-down, technocratic state control.
The rise of New Labour
As detailed in the book, Changing Behaviours: On the Rise of the Psychological State (Jones et al., 2013), the Labour Party – in the aftermath of their surprise election defeat of 1992 – was taking an active interest in the potential value of behavioural science as a means of sharpening government communications. In 1993, Geoff Mulgan (a communications academic, journalist and former BBC reporter) became the director of Demos, the newly formed Labour thinktank and, subsequently, the leader of Labour’s ‘Cabinet Office Strategy Unit’ (COSU). Within these working groups, psychologically inspired behaviour change agendas were often discussed. One early output from these forums was the Missionary Report (1995), a document (co-authored by Mulgan) that proposed that existing public policy failed to take account of the complexities of human motivation. After absorbing these behavioural science ideas, in 2011 Mulgan became the chief executive of Nesta, a social enterprise charity that now fully owns the UK’s ‘Nudge Unit’.
Intriguingly, the Chief Analyst at COSU in the period 2001 – 2007 was Professor David Halpern, a close colleague of Mulgan and another pivotal figure in the subsequent emergence of the Behavioural Insight Team/Nudge Unit. (Halpern is currently their president and founding director). Working during the tenure of Prime Minister Tony Blair, Halpern provided a crucial link between the behaviour change agenda in the UK and the new behavioural economists in the USA. Furthermore, in 2004 Halpern was lead author on a publication titled, Personal Responsibility & Changing Behaviour, which provided a detailed review of the work of Tversky, Kahneman, Thaler, and Sunstein, and explored how knowledge of human heuristics and cognitive biases could be incorporated into the design of government policy.
It was, however, the Conservative Party who presided over the final steps towards embedding behaviour science as a core element of government policy. In 2008, Richard Thaler met with David Cameron (the then Tory leader) to promote the potential role of nudges in the political realm. The American economics professor clearly made an impact; in the same year, Cameron included Thaler and Sunstein’s book as required reading for his political team during their summer vacation. When Cameron became Prime Minister in 2010, two pivotal moments in the evolution of UK behavioural science occurred. First, the MINDSPACE document (co-authored by Halpern) was published, providing an explicit practical framework of how these methods of persuasion could be applied to public policy. Second, the Behavioural Insight Team was spawned, a collective of nudgers (led by Halpern) who, to this day, routinely provide advice to the heart of government.
Concluding comments
Over seventy years ago, Herbert Simon challenged the fundamental assumption that people are rational in their day-to-day decision making. This radical challenge to the status quo stimulated extended periods of psychological research that explicated the range of biases and cognitive distortions that characterise the human mind. Together, these initiatives raised the spectre of social organisations (including nation states) intervening to correct these thinking errors for the ‘greater good’ of its members. Such ideas appealed to political groups, particularly those ideologically wedded to technocracy and top-down control of the populace, and have had profound consequences for British society.
Alongside other non-consensual methods of persuasion and propaganda, the tools of behavioural science are now embedded within the UK Government’s communication infrastructure collectively constituting a potent armoury for manipulating the beliefs and actions of ordinary people. Under the banner of any ‘global crisis’, our political elite are happy to covertly shape citizens’ behaviour to align it with their (often dubious) goals, routinely deploying methods that rely on fear inflation, shaming, and scapegoating.
HART believes that it is important for ordinary people to reflect on the appropriateness and acceptability of this form of government persuasion. Do imperfections in individual decision-making legitimise state intervention into all aspects of our lives? How can technocrats validly determine what is in our best interests? Are the vagaries of the human form something that should be eliminated or embraced? Is it ethically sound for our political elite to strategically inflict emotional discomfort on the populace as a means of encouraging compliance with their diktats? Should the government put far more emphasis on information provision and reasoned argument rather than exploiting our automatic, fast-brain biases?
After contemplating these, and similar questions, readers may wish to show visible dissent to this form of authoritarian control and strive to reclaim their basic human right of deliberative decision-making. We can but hope.
