Nudging the way to better public policy

2022/10/11 Leave a comment

More on nudging but too much on process and number of units rather than concrete examples, both successes and failures:

In 2013, Rotman School of Management professor Dilip Soman argued governments should use a behavioural approach to design public policy. Building on the concept of “nudging” introduced by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Soman suggested this approach could lead to real policy change. Nine years later, we can see how this approach appears to be working in the design and implementation of public policies across Canada. This is why policymakers should consider using it more frequently.

The idea behind nudging is simple. By creating a “choice architecture” – simple, beneficial options that people can opt in or out of – policymakers can improve access to public services and help people achieve their goals in life. Nudging makes it easier for people to get what they need from government without taxing their time and energy.

Key to this approach is finding small tweaks with big impact, backed by scientific methods like randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Nudging helps policymakers learn what works and what doesn’t.

It’s an easy idea to get behind. Too often, citizens find that interacting with government challenges their patience and sucks up their time. Renewing a driver’s licence should take a few clicks on a website ­– not hours in line at an administrative office staring at walls painted “greige.”

Many Canadians might wonder if service delivery could be improved. It can – and nudging is a mechanism that can lead to improvement. In recent years, governments have shown their ability to improve the service experience, reduce burden on citizens and increase uptake of important programs.

Consider organ donation. Survey data shows that 90 per cent of Canadians support organ donation. Yet uptake is dismally low for this critical, life-saving act – just 32 per cent of Canadians are registered donors. In Ontario, a complicated enrollment process meant that many residents didn’t know how to sign up, or simply forgot to do it. In 2016, Ontario’s “nudge unit” worked with Service Ontario to insert a prompt in the health card renewal process. The nudge considerably enhanced uptake.

The benefits are clear, but the politics aren’t always so simple. At its best, nudging can help citizens access public services. This is especially important for those who have been marginalized or excluded by government.

But concerns about the ethics of nudging are well documented, with particular attention to the idea that well-intentioned interventions could give way to outright manipulation. Further, some of the issues that nudging touches can be viewed as political such as organ donation, vaccine uptake and recruitment for the Canadian Armed Forces.

In recent years, nudging has given way to a more structured approach: the application of behavioural insights (BI). BI relies on expertise in public policy and behavioural science and recognizes that data-driven experimentation isn’t always the first-best option. If nudging improves policy implementation, BI goes that extra step to include policy design – doing the work in advance to ensure citizens can access services without wasting their time and energy.

One strength of BI is its transparency. It makes clear assumptions, and its proponents are committed to testing those assumptions through rigorous evaluation. Earlier this year, BI practitioners collaborated with researchers from Berkeley. Together, they published the results of 126 studies covering 23-million individuals. In a world of scientific uncertainty and mixed results, they found strong evidence that behaviorally informed public policy can work. Overall, nudge interventions improved target behaviours by eight per cent.

In real terms, this results in social and economic benefits. When it succeeds, BI can help citizens avoid feeling regret from making under-informed or myopic decisions based on intuition and emotion, rather than deliberation and reasoned analysis. When it fails, it provides quality evidence for policymakers to find alternatives – and quickly.

What does BI in Canada look like now? Since Soman’s piece was published in Policy Options in 2013, the federal government has introduced the Impact and Innovation Unit (IIU) in the Privy Council Office. The interdisciplinary team consists of policy experts with a variety of educational backgrounds ranging from education to neuroscience. The stated goal of is to reduce barriers to innovation within government and to “leverage the benefits of impact measurement to support evidence-based decision-making.”

While the IIU works in tandem with other departments on a contract basis to pilot and implement RCTs around discrete policy problems, small BI enclaves have also emerged in other departments such as Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada and Canada Revenue Agency. The IIU also supports a broader agenda around policy innovation and responsiveness with projects such as the Impact Canada Initiative and COVID-19 snapshot monitoring (COSMO).

At the provincial level, the governments of British Columbia and Ontario have also established BI units – the former within the B.C. Public Service Agency and the latter in the Treasury Board Secretariat. Similar work (though not a standalone unit) was found in Alberta’s CoLab (though the unit was dismantled in 2020).

Together, provincial and federal ministries have reported 59 BI trials (see Figure 1) with many more in the works. The majority (39 out of 59) of the trials fall into one of three policy areas: government operations, health, or social welfare.

Cities have also taken up the challenge with projects like City Studio (Vancouver) or Civic Innovation (Toronto) that focus on improvements to service delivery and increasing citizen participation.

Governments aren’t the only actors in the BI game either. The Canadian Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), established in 2014, emerged from the original “Nudge Unit” in the British government, which was founded in the Cabinet Office in 2010. It uses a consultancy model to support government and the not-for-profit sector to support BI policy interventions.

BIT is a major player. It has offered advice and conducted hundreds of RCTs in policy domains ranging from health and social policy to natural resources and government operations. In 2019, BIT opened its first Canadian office, headquartered in Toronto. Since then, BIT Canada has helped lead pathbreaking work on tax benefit claims, employment services and other pressing issues.

One of the interesting features of BI in Canada is the collaborative approach embedded in BI units. Not only is the work indicative of the many cross-cutting relationships across government, but it highlights the ability of government and academia to form meaningful partnerships. They bring together a variety of financial and human resources to drive evidence-based policy change

Chief among them is the relationships BI units have formed with academics. They include the Behavioural Economics in Action at Rotman and the Decision Insights for Business and Societyteams.

Looking at the context of nudging in present-day policymaking, it appears we may have arrived at a new equilibrium. Some were skeptical about nudging. There are concerns that it’s threatened to overtake policymaking with novel, experimental methods or that it would be used unethically to trick people or undermine their self-interest. There are also concerns that it would somehow cheapen or gamify policy development.

However, BI now occupies a useful, if modest, place among policymakers’ tools. We consider this success not just in the number of BI units, but in its incremental application across policy areas where the tool is well positioned to improve policy design and implementation.

As Soman noted, the behavioural approach to public policy is reflective of a set of guiding principles for policymakers even if a “grand unified theory” is not yet on the books. But perhaps one is not necessary. Nudging has grown – perhaps not prolifically – but it now appears to be an accepted tool to promote policy compliance and enhance policy uptake.

Source: Nudging the way to better public policy

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Delacourt: ‘The nudge unit’: Ottawa’s behavioural-science team investigates how Canadians feel about vaccines, public health and who to trust

2021/02/23 Leave a comment

Innovative and appropriate:

Vaccines are one miracle of science in this pandemic. But another scientific experiment has also produced surprisingly speedy and widespread results over the past year. It happened in the realm of behaviour science — and ordinary citizens were the laboratory subjects. 

One year ago, few people would have believed that science would come up with a vaccine, ready for mass immunization around the world, by the start of 2021. 

But who would have also predicted that citizens could be persuaded to turn their lives upside down, wear masks and isolate themselves from their families and friends for months on end? 

“I know we’re asking a lot,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in early April, when no one knew just how much COVID-19 would force Canadians into behaviour change on a grand scale. “A lot” is an understatement: not since wartime has the government had to request this much of the citizenry for so long. 

Yet while the government’s medical scientists have been front and centre on the public stage almost every day since last March, the behavioural scientists have mostly been operating under the radar. If you know where to look, though, evidence of the behaviour-nudging team keeps peeking out under all those public proclamations from Canada’s COVID-19 crisis managers. 

When Trudeau and the premiers use their podiums to calm fears or tell hard truths about the pandemic, for example, their words don’t just come from hunch or political instincts. Reams of behavioural data is being collected by government throughout the pandemic, on everything from people’s general emotions about COVID-19 to their willingness to get vaccinated. 

Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, spoke earlier this month about the problem of vaccine hesitancy in this country and what the government knows about it. It was one of the few times that public officials have made direct reference to the behaviour-studying unit inside government. 

“Some of the studies are actually carried out by the Privy Council Office, where there is a behavioural insight team,” Tam said. “We do know that the intention for Canadians to get the vaccine is actually quite high and I think has improved since we started the vaccine campaign itself.” 

Tam went on to explain how people’s views on vaccines are shaped by where they get their information. Since you are reading this story in a mainstream news medium, you might be interested to know that you’re more likely to feel positive about getting immunized. Consumers of traditional information sources tend to have more trust in vaccines and what the government is saying about them. Conversely, if you’re the kind of person who gets your news from social media, you’re likely more wary of vaccines. 

So the government is doing some fine-tuning of its communication channels, Tam explained at this Feb. 5 briefing. “We know that we have to work with the internet and social media companies and that has been happening with Facebook, Google, YouTube and others,” she said. 

That behavioural-insight team Tam mentioned is actually called the “impact and innovation unit” of government, which was set up within the PCO in 2017, meant for more low-key work than it has been doing, now that the pandemic suddenly created an urgent need for its insights into how citizens behave.

Headed up by veteran public servant Rodney Ghali, this group has kept its eye on the huge social-science experiment of the COVID-19 crisis. (Ontario too has a behavioural insights unit, which has been working closely with the federal government over the course of the pandemic.) 

In normal times, this federal team would have been researching questions such as what would motivate people to invest more in RRSPs or cut down on food waste. 

Its members prefer to remain low-profile — a couple of them talked to me for this article, but on condition that they would not be named or quoted.

Results of the team’s research are quite public, though — anyone can check them out on their web page, along with reports of some communication campaigns they’ve tested on the population and what the ads were supposed to achieve. The most visible ad — one Canadians may remember — is one that depicted COVID-19 as a green cloud, spreading noxiously over the buttons in an elevator. 

The behaviour being studied by the government has shifted as the pandemic has dragged on, naturally. In the beginning, the research focused a lot on compliance with public health measures, what it would take to get people to wear masks, and so on. 

Nowadays, the main concern is with vaccines and whether enough people will take them to achieve herd immunity. Medical science handles the immunity part of that equation — behavioural scientists have to build the herd. For that to happen, the government has to know where and how to administer the nudging. 

“Nudge” is the operative word. Britain blazed the trail for the use of behavioural insights in government back in 2010 when it set up a team inside the cabinet office nicknamed ‘the nudge unit.” The name comes from the hugely influential book “Nudge” by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, which laid out how people could be influenced to make better choices in their lives. 

Sunstein is now the chair of an advisory group for the World Health Organization, set up specifically to use behavioural insights in COVID-19 management. And that leads us right back to Canada, which has taken the WHO’s tool for tapping behavioural insights in the pandemic and put it to comprehensive use in this country for nearly a year now. According to officials inside the behaviour unit, Canada has made the most comprehensive use of the WHO tool, creating a chronicle of behavioural ups and downs throughout the COVID-19 crisis. 

Since last April, a static group of about 2,000 Canadians — chosen randomly but in proportion to statistical, demographic considerations — have been taking part in a rolling series of surveys, plumbing their attitudes and behaviour on all things pandemic-related. The process is called “COVID-19 snapshot monitoring,” which has been shortened to COSMO.

In the early months, the COSMO respondents were a dreary lot, reporting that they believed things would get worse before they got better. But they were keen on vaccines — keener than they are now, in fact. Last April, more than 70 per cent of respondents were interested in a vaccine if it was either safe or effective. By the end of 2020, that enthusiasm had dropped to the low and mid-sixties. 

Herd immunity is generally accepted to be around 70 per cent, so governments — with the help of the behaviour scientists — need to get those numbers up again. 

The COSMO group has also been asked regularly about which people they trust to provide information — perhaps one of the more important pieces of insight sought by government in this pandemic. If you’re going to nudge the population in one direction or another, after all, it’s crucial to know who should do the nudging. 

Repeated waves of data on this issue show that public health officials rank high on the trusted list, whereas politicians and the news media rank lower. This would explain why Tam and her provincial colleagues have become household names over the past year (the provincial public-health chiefs have actually been rated slightly higher for trust than their federal counterparts). 

On top of vaccine hesitancy, the biggest concern right now for the behaviour monitors is simple COVID-19 fatigue. For almost a year now, governments have been asking, imploring, begging and arguing for citizens to keep large areas of their lives on hold. The same tools that worked last April, when Trudeau was “asking a lot,” may not keep working over the long term. 

In December, the COSMO participants started being asked about pandemic fatigue. Here’s what the behaviour unit learned: “Adherence to key protective behaviours remains reportedly high, and many participants are not getting tired of having to wash their hands frequently, physical distancing or wearing a mask. However, most participants (80 per cent) indicate they are getting tired or somewhat tired of having to avoid gathering with loved ones.”

It’s probably safe to assume that the weariness has only grown since then, but the results of more recent surveys haven’t yet gone online. 

Whenever the pandemic is over, most Canadians may be too busy getting back to their normal lives to reflect on the massive social-science experiment that has taken place over the planet this past year. But that radical change in people’s lives is the other great scientific achievement of COVID-19, one that may have given government important clues on how to modify citizens’ behaviour for other big global issues — such as climate change, for instance. 

“The behaviour and choices made by each and every one of us matter a great deal,” Tam said in a briefing earlier this year, which is why a small behavioural-science unit inside government suddenly became a big deal in 2020. 

Source: https://www.thestar.com/politics/political-opinion/2021/02/21/the-nudge-unit-ottawas-behavioural-science-team-investigates-how-canadians-feel-about-vaccines-public-health-and-who-to-trust.html

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Why policy-makers should care about behavioural science: Supriya Syal

2018/01/24 Leave a comment

As someone who likes ‘nudge’ and related behavioural approaches, liked this article for the examples it cited, both outside and inside Canada:

Classic examples of behavioural interventions for the public sector include measures that help people save more for retirement, consume less electricity, be more likely to pay taxes, sign up for organ donations and get jobs. But the application of behavioural science to policy-making is becoming increasingly diversified around the world. For instance, the Copenhagen Airport in Denmark, in partnership with iNudgeyou (a Denmark-based social purpose company), combatted the problem of people smoking just outside terminal entrances by using stickers that guide them to a designated smoking area a few metres away. Instead of telling people what not to do (no-smoking zones near doors), providing guidance on what behaviour is desirable (smoking zones away from doors) proved more effective. In South Africa, the government of the Western Cape, in partnership with Ideas42 (a US-based nonprofit behavioural design and consulting firm) and the University of Cape Town, used a computer-based “HIV risk game” to educate at-risk youth about HIV. Instead of the typical one-off information brochure, a gamification approach that got youth to make repeated decisions about HIV risk and provided immediate feedback about their choices was a more powerful aid for increasing young people’s understanding of such risks. In Australia, Alfred Health (a hospital), working with Deakin University, Monash University, VicHealth and the Behavioural Insights Team (UK), increased healthier food choices in its cafés by using a traffic-light colour system to classify nutritional value and portion sizes of beverages. Instead of telling people about the health costs of sugary beverages, the team marked drinks as red (most unhealthy), amber or green (most healthy), and “red” drinks were simply removed from the displays and self-service refrigerators and placed under the counters — still available for sale, just less obviously so. The total number of beverages that were sold didn’t change, but the sale of unhealthy sugary beverages went down by 28 to 71 percent in a range of trials.

Meanwhile, in Canada, the Canada Revenue Agency is successfully using behavioural nudges to get people to pay outstanding taxes and to file their taxes online. The Privy Council Office Impact and Innovation Unit (IIU) is using behavioural insights to help Statistics Canada increase its survey response rates, and to help the Department of National Defence recruit more women into the armed forces. The Innovation Lab at Employment and Social Development Canada has used behavioural insights to help people find jobs and has partnered with the IIU to increase uptake of the Canada Learning Bond among low-income families. And the foremost public sector behavioural insights group in Canada, the Ontario Behavioural Insights Unit, has succeeded in increasing organ donation rates and online licence-plate-sticker renewals using behavioural insights.

Despite these initiatives and widespread academic expertise, support and talent, the public sector application of behavioural science in Canada lags behind that of other comparable nations, and the opportunity to create better outcomes for Canadians through behavioural evidence-based policy is immense. Moreover, the bulk of behavioural-insights policy work in Canada amounts to what one might call repair jobs — it is as if we were retrofitting old buildings to make them work in the modern-day context — and behavioural science interventions are used mainly to improve implementation or compliance with a pre-existing policy. Which is important, no doubt, but we could also be building new structures that benefit from modern advancements and would be much better suited to their users’ needs. Indeed, behavioural science provides powerful tools that could help us get it right at the policy design and formation stages. And, in addition to using behavioural science to design better for the public, we could also be using these insights to design better for public servants. But there are few, if any, applications of behavioural science interventions to organizational decision-making within the Canadian government or the bodies that it regulates, so this is a significant area for exploration.

Some of our greatest challenges today are large-scale, complex problems of public policy, public perception and public action: climate change, vaccinations against infectious diseases, diversity and inclusion of historically marginalized groups, humanitarian crises, to name a few. Behavioural science promises empirically validated solutions that are derived from an understanding of the human beings that make up that “public.” And it rests its propositions on evidence in favour of what works to help people themselves make decisions that are better for them, so they can lead better lives. A pretty irresistible call to arms, wouldn’t you say?

via Why policy-makers should care about behavioural science

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Daniel Kahneman Testimonials

2014/04/05 Leave a comment

For policy wonks and “nudge nerds”, a good collection of testimonials to the impact of Daniel Kahneman’s work, summarized in his best-selling book, Thinking Fast and Slow. One example from Richard Thaler and Sendhil Mullainathan:

Kahneman and Tversky’s work did not just attack rationality, it offered a constructive alternative: a better description of how humans think. People, they argued, often use simple rules of thumb to make judgments, which incidentally is a pretty smart thing to do. But this is not the insight that left us one step from doing behavioral economics. The breakthrough idea was that these rules of thumb could be catalogued. And once understood they can be used to predict where people will make systematic errors. Those two words are what made behavioral economics possible.

Consider their famous representativeness heuristic, the tendency to judge probabilities by similarity. Use of this heuristic can lead people to make forecasts that are too extreme, often based on sample sizes that are too small to offer reliable predictions. As a result, we can expect forecasters to be predictably surprised when they draw on small samples. When they are very optimistic, the outcomes will tend to be worse than they thought, and unduly pessimistic forecasts will lead to pleasant but unexpected surprises. To the great surprise to economists who had put great faith in the efficiency of markets, this simple idea led to the discovery of large mispricing in domains that vary from stock markets to the selection of players in the National Football League.

ON KAHNEMAN | Edge.org.

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