Fixing Society’s Toughest Problems? ‘It’s On You’

FLORA LICHTMAN: Hey. It’s Flora Lichtman, and you’re listening to Science Friday. Today on the show–

SPEAKER 1: When a beer tastes both refreshing and flavorful, there are some reactions you can’t control and some you can. Please drink responsibly.

FLORA LICHTMAN: We have all heard this on alcohol ads– please drink responsibly. You might have heard something similar on gambling ads, like when the fun stops, stop. There was even a moment of calorie caution in soda ads.

SPEAKER 2: All calories count. And if you eat and drink more calories than you burn off, you’ll gain weight. That goes for Coca-Cola and everything else with calories. Finding a solution–

FLORA LICHTMAN: The message behind these disclaimers are kind of the same. These products have risks, but mitigating them, well, that’s on you. So how did we get to this idea that it’s our personal responsibility to make a dent in big problems, not, say, the job of government to impose regulations? Well, behavioral scientists played a role, according to my next guest, Dr. Nick Chater, professor of behavioral science at Warwick University and co-author of It’s On You, How Corporations and Behavioral Scientists Have Convinced Us That We’re to Blame for Society’s Deepest Problems. Nick, thanks for being here.

NICK CHATER: Well, thank you very much for having me.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Did I get the big picture right in that intro?

NICK CHATER: Yes, I think you did. Absolutely. I should also put a shoutout for my close co-author, George Loewenstein at Carnegie Mellon University. So we’ve worked on this absolutely as a joint project from the beginning. And George is very relevant here because he was in there at the beginning of the time when behavioral science started to get engaged with public policy. And that, I think, was when things went slightly awry in a way that was sort of unpredictable at the time but led to the concerns you’re pointing out now.

So what happened in the early 2000s is that there were a variety of people thinking about the idea of trying to make the world better, improving our diets, dealing with obesity crisis, thinking about how to get people to save better for the future, given longterm pension problems, thinking about environmental problems, pollution, plastic waste, and so on.

Thinking about these problems from a direct behavioral point of view, attacking the problem as, one might almost think, at the root cause, the individual citizen and their behavior– so the thought was, if understand how individual behavior works, maybe we can get through all those political logjams, policy tangles, and ideological polarization and just cut to the chase and help individual people directly with behavioral interventions to make choices which are better for them for better for society.

And the trouble with that is that it frames these big social problems, which are things that have emerged over decades and differ greatly from one society to another, and it frames them as the problem of the individual. And we have a name for this, in fact. We call it i-frame thinking. You’re thinking about the individual frame of reference.

And that deflects attention away from some of the other things you might think about doing, which would be those sort of classic old regulatory taxation, subsidy, government type things that, inadvertently, we’ve kind of pushed the focus back onto the individual. And that’s been very, very much aligned– slightly to our embarrassment, in retrospect– with exactly the kind of messaging you pointed out at the beginning of the show.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Right, right. I want to get into this. So you’re not just a critic. You are actually deeply involved in this world. You advised the UK government on climate policy. Tell us a little bit of that story.

NICK CHATER: Well, I think there’s two parts of the story, really. So before the climate engagement, for me, I was on the advisory board of the Behavioral Insights Team. And in fact, that was one of the ways in which George and I met.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What’s the Behavioral Insights Team?

NICK CHATER: So the Behavioral Insights Team is popularly known as the Nudge Unit. And it was a unit created inside the UK government to advise the prime minister– this is in 2010 when David Cameron had just taken over– on these individualistic interventions. There was a very important book, Nudge, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. So Thaler won a Nobel Prize not just for this work, but for many other brilliant things he’s done. And Cass Sunstein is a very celebrated and distinguished legal scholar.

And so they wrote this book encapsulating the idea that maybe we can make individual-level changes. And the idea of the nudge is that it’s not infringing your liberty. It’s not controlling your options. It’s simply encouraging you to do the right thing. It’s making the right thing the easy thing. So the Nudge Unit was created out of that.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And that’s what we’re talking about with nudge. It’s a nudge in the right direction.

NICK CHATER: Exactly, exactly, which is a very laudable and reasonable thing in itself. And alongside that, of course, comes things which aren’t really exactly just nudges. They’re just information, so things like calorie labels on food, carbon labels on flights, and so on. So that was very exciting, and it’s a very big innovation. There are now about 150 and counting nudge units around the world in different bits of governments and in many different jurisdictions.

And many of them do really good work but became, I think, evident to George and I very early on that we were sort of finding ourselves feeling like we were tinkering with the edges of really big problems.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Like the nudges weren’t working to solve climate change?

NICK CHATER: Yeah. Well, I mean, climate change– let’s move on to that one because climate change was the one that really shook me, I think. Because I went onto the UK’s Climate Change Committee, which sets and monitors the targets for carbon reduction. And so it’s a pretty significant committee in terms of its influence. And they wanted to have a behavioral person. And that itself is remarkable. And I was that person, it turned out. So I took this role with great enthusiasm, thinking I’ll have all these brilliant ideas about how to change individual behavior in a helpful way.

And after six years of finding it incredibly useful, and I hope contributing in some valuable ways, I really don’t think I came up with a single brainwave which really made any difference to individual behavior. Just individual behaviors wasn’t where the action was. So it was a sort of demoralizing thing. When you think about the problem of climate reduction, the things that were really mattering– in the UK, anyway– were things like decarbonizing the grid, so just closing the local coal-fired power stations and reducing the amount of gas in the system and just pushing wind and solar and so on.

And this is just power. There’s obviously some very, very big things you have to do to food production and transportation and so on. And so these massive-scale changes are things that really make a difference. And the kind of things that I would have been able to suggest if I’d had the gumption to actually even raise them– I would have felt foolish to do so, really– would be small nudges which would help people reduce their heating costs by 1% or 2%.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Well, I think this is the thing that’s so fascinating about this, because I remember this time very well. And I was actually in media at the time. And I did a whole project about climate guilt. Because I feel like we were taught to believe that this is our problem to solve on an individual level.

NICK CHATER: Yes, I think that’s absolutely right. And if you’re in the fossil fuel industry, it’s a really, really useful thing for the public at large to own the problem themselves.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yes. And that is the perfect segue because I want to talk about this in particular. Listen to this clip.

SPEAKER 3: We all have a carbon footprint which contributes to climate change. To discover yours and how to reduce it, visit direct.gov–

FLORA LICHTMAN: The carbon footprint, right? Where did this idea come from?

NICK CHATER: Well, it came primarily from a big publicity campaign by British Petroleum, so one of the world’s largest oil companies. The point of the carbon footprint and the PR behind it, which was a very big and successful– indeed, awardwinning– campaign, was to frame the problem of climate change not as a problem for the very existence and business model of fossil fuel companies, but to frame it instead as a problem for each of us.

So we need to be blaming ourselves and also blaming each other. That’s also a very, very effective strategy, that we can start to see hypocrisy everywhere and start to point fingers at each other. And then we’re in a kind of a doom loop of despair and disarray rather than thinking, well, clearly, we need to make major structural changes to the way energy is provided.

Now, BP had posters saying things like perhaps it’s time to go on a low-carbon diet, so sort of saying, we’re so much on your side. We’re really trying to solve this problem. But at the same time, of course, they were working hard and the fossil fuel industry in general has been working hard to slow down any progress towards national and international agreements on switching away from fossil fuels.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That’s amazing. That’s an amazing insight that carbon footprint was invented by BP.

NICK CHATER: It is astonishing, isn’t it? Yes. It’s an alarming sort of shock to discover that.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I think there’s a temptation in conversations like this to say, oh, well, yes, of course. Corporations are evil. But it can’t be that simple, right?

NICK CHATER: No. No. And I think it’s sort of wrong, in a way, to think– and we do naturally have this tendency to think either the corporations are evil, or the particular people inside the corporations are evil, or the people who invented the advertising campaign are evil. And that’s, I think, completely the wrong perspective.

So what George and I are arguing for in the book is that instead of thinking from the i-frame perspective, thinking about the individuals, whether those individuals are chief executives or everyday folks, we should be thinking about systems. So this is the s-frame. This is thinking, how is the general economic and social and political game working? And when things are going wrong, we should be thinking, well, clearly, there’s something wrong with this game. We’ve got the rules wrong somehow. And so that’s the thing we need to be worrying about.

So it’s not sort of surprising that fossil fuel companies are trying to find strategies to reduce regulatory pressure on them and then, most of the time, doing things which are allowed within the rules of the game. But if that’s the case, we need to think about how we make the rules work differently.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Right. But this gets back to the original reason that we got to the i-frame or the individual responsibility in the first place, which is that systems are hard to think about and they’re not tidy narratives, right? Which I wonder if psychology has something to tell us about that. Like, can we train our brains to think about these problems in a systemic way?

NICK CHATER: Yeah. I think we can to a degree. But you’re completely right that there is an inherent tendency to think in an individualistic level. We have a strong psychological bias to see the patterns in individual behavior as stemming from the characteristics of specific individual people. And I think this has very deep roots. So human beings are not evolved to deal with a world of extremely complicated societies with large corporations and governments and systems of laws and so on. We’re evolved to work in small groups where we’re dealing with small numbers of people.

And then in those groups, really, the action is all about individuals and which individuals have which characteristics and which ones are trustworthy, which ones aren’t trustworthy. And everyday navigation of the social world is something that encourages us to see problems as problems of individual praise and blame and character, essentially, characteristics. But I don’t think it’s hopeless.

FLORA LICHTMAN: After the break, that’s what I want to talk about. If it’s not nudges and disclaimers, how do we solve these big problems? Stick around.

[INTRIGUING MUSIC]

Right now especially, definitely in America, we often hear that problems people face, they’re personal failings. Like, people with strong willpower or good values will make the right choices if given the right information or all the information. What does the research say about that?

NICK CHATER: I think the research says that comprehensively about as wrong as it could be. Although, you’re entirely right. It’s a message that we get a lot. So I think there are a couple of very broad-brush things to say. One is that most of the social problems we face are not eternal problems. So if we look at something like the rising problem of obesity in many Western nations, that’s a relatively recent problem. It’s sort grown up over the last 40 or 50 years and become a pretty severe problem. But it cannot be that the willpower or moral fiber or somehow has been terribly eroded across the whole of the Western developed world.

And the obvious explanation is that what foods are primarily being pushed at us, which are cheap are radically changing– so the cheap, easy things to eat unfortunately have been getting less and less healthy. So the food environment has become very, very different. But it’s a case of having a tide rapidly moving out. And you can point to a few swimmers and say, well, they’re actually swimming so fast against the tide. They’re doing fine. But on balance, if the tide is going one direction, that’s where we’re all going to be heading.

And I think you can say the same for a whole range of issues. I think a very interesting example of this, a very relevant one at the moment, is Big Tech. So if you think about issues like, for example, privacy or questions of–

FLORA LICHTMAN: Screen time, social media.

NICK CHATER: –screen time, yeah, social media use can cause you, it’s clearly very, very helpful if you’re Big Tech, rather like the oil companies, to say, well, really, it’s over to you, the consumers. But it’s a pretty weak argument in general because you’ve got what appears to be a fairly gigantic social problem emerging, which is clearly, you knew. The exhortation to solve the problem one by one is inevitably not going to work. And of course, that’s one reason it’s so attractive to people who are opposing change. Because they know, really, that if you simply exhort people to try a bit harder and take responsibility, that’s going to be no change at all.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK. Well, I mean, behavioral science helped get us into this mess. I’m not trying to point the finger too much. But is there a role for behavioral science in helping us reframe, in helping us solve this problem?

NICK CHATER: I think there is. So, like you, I don’t want to point the finger too much. I need to be pointing the finger at myself primarily, in terms of the source of the problem. But I think we really haven’t helped much. I certainly, from a personal point of view, feel like I’ve been, at best, just distracting myself and other people in my orbit from thinking about the systemic solutions that will actually be helpful.

So I think behavioral science can help us. And there are two key things, I think. So one is that if we’re thinking about policies that are going to really make a difference to big systemic policies, then we kind of what to do. But the crucial question for psychologists, behavioral economists, and so on is, how do we frame and explain those policies in a way that makes them attractive to people?

So if you take something like carbon taxes, the very idea of a carbon tax seems like a doomed idea because people don’t like taxes. They try to sell you on a tax and say, well, this has got this great tax, and it has all these wonderful consequences. You’re sort of off on the wrong foot.

FLORA LICHTMAN: It’s tricky. It’s tricky.

NICK CHATER: Yeah. So thinking about how you can pitch this more as a matter of redistribution– so we’re going to just shift money around. We’re going to take it away from people who are doing lots of carbon burning but give it to other people. We’re not just throwing it into the government coffers. The way in which we change in diets is another one. So in fact, in the UK, there’s been some substantial, actually, quite successful legislation reducing the amount of sugar that’s in certain kinds of drinks and ready-prepared foods and also salt.

Now there, actually, I think behavioral science can be quite helpful too because we know that it’s actually very hard for us to detect absolutely how much sugar or salt we’re ingesting, except what we’re used to. So if you gradually reformulate things so that the sugar and salt levels go down, we don’t even really notice. So it turns out that–

FLORA LICHTMAN: We could be tapered off–

NICK CHATER: You can be tapered off–

FLORA LICHTMAN: –of our addiction to salt and sugar.

NICK CHATER: Yeah. If you give the industry the time to do it, they’ll be able to reformulate, and no one’s really any the worse off. And it’s not even bad for business. So I suppose there is these sort of two elements. One is, what policies will actually work from a behavioral point of view without causing any consumer detriment? And there’s also just this sort of sales pitch question of, well, how do we formulate messages that really land with people?

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah. Well, Nick, thank you for being here. Appreciate it.

NICK CHATER: Well, it’s been a real pleasure. Thank you so much.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Dr. Nick Chater, professor of behavioral science at Warwick University and co-author of It’s On You, How Corporations and Behavioral Scientists Have Convinced Us that We Are to Blame for Society’s Deepest Problems. Shoshannah Buchsbaum produced this episode. There are no warning labels on this podcast, but it is on you to give us a good review on any platform, wherever you listen, I’m Flora Lichtman. We’ll catch you next time.

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