Behavioural Science and Policy Links 18th March 2023

 I am currently on a social media hiatus of sorts. I still can't find a way of engaging with post-Musk twitter and I am just hoping he gets bored and hands it over. I found Mastodon very promising and have not ruled out trying it again. My current main professional role is as head of the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at LSE. UK HOD roles can be very demanding from a time and mental energy perspective and that has been my experience. But I am also proud of how the Department is evolving and excited by the type of projects, programmes, and ideas circulating here. Research-wise, I am continuing to work with colleagues on three basic streams - mental health and economic outcomes,  use of day reconstruction and related methods in behavioural policy evaluation, and ethical and professional aspects of the development of behavioural public policy. Unfortunately, I am not taking on more PhD students for the next couple of years as the current role is too much and sorry to those who have inquired. 

Below are some papers and articles that made me think in the last few weeks. 

1. Recent Nature Human Behaviour article "Behavioural science is unlikely to change the world without a heterogeneity revolution" 

In the past decade, behavioural science has gained influence in policymaking but suffered a crisis of confidence in the replicability of its findings. Here, we describe a nascent heterogeneity revolution that we believe these twin historical trends have triggered. This revolution will be defined by the recognition that most treatment effects are heterogeneous, so the variation in effect estimates across studies that defines the replication crisis is to be expected as long as heterogeneous effects are studied without a systematic approach to sampling and moderation. When studied systematically, heterogeneity can be leveraged to build more complete theories of causal mechanism that could inform nuanced and dependable guidance to policymakers. We recommend investment in shared research infrastructure to make it feasible to study behavioural interventions in heterogeneous and generalizable samples, and suggest low-cost steps researchers can take immediately to avoid being misled by heterogeneity and begin to learn from it instead.

2. Wall Street journal article by Shlomo Benartzi on behavioural science and encouraging saving.  

3. Cass Sunstein "on certain misconceptions of the role of behavioural science in government". 

In some circles, there is a misconception that within government, the only or principal uses of behavioral science consist of efforts to nudge individual behavior (sometimes described, pejoratively and unfairly, as “tweaks”). Nothing could be further from the truth. Behavioral science has been used, and is being used, to help inform large-scale reforms, including mandates and bans directed at companies (as, for example, in the cases of fuel-economy mandates and energy efficiency mandates). Behavioral science has been used, and is being used, to help inform taxes and subsidies (as, for example, in the cases of cigarette taxes, taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages, and subsides for electric cars). Behavioral science has been used, and is being used, to help inform nudges imposed on companies (with such goals as reducing greenhouse gas emissions, improving occupational safety, and protecting personal privacy). Some important interventions are indeed aimed at individuals (as with fuel economy labels, nutrition labels, and calorie labels, and automatic enrollment in savings plans); sometimes such interventions have significant positive effects, and there is no evidence that they make more aggressive reforms less likely. It is preposterous to suggest that choice-preserving interventions, such as nudges, “crowd out” more aggressive approaches.

4. Continuing its tendency to publish some of the most interesting pieces on behavioural science and policy, the paper "Cultural evolutionary behavioural science in public policy" is well worth a read. 

Interventions are to the social sciences what inventions are to the physical sciences – an application of science as technology. Behavioural science has emerged as a powerful toolkit for developing public policy interventions for changing behaviour. However, the translation from principles to practice is often moderated by contextual factors – such as culture – that thwart attempts to generalize past successes. Here, we discuss cultural evolution as a framework for addressing this contextual gap. We describe the history of behavioural science and the role that cultural evolution plays as a natural next step. We review research that may be considered cultural evolutionary behavioural science in public policy, and the promise and challenges to designing cultural evolution informed interventions. Finally, we discuss the value of applied research as a crucial test of basic science: if theories, laboratory and field experiments do not work in the real world, they do not work at all.

5. Kaiser and Oswald "The scientific value of numerical measures of human feelings". It generated a backlash online about whether what the authors were saying was an obvious restatement of the predictive power of Likert scales but I think that wasn't fair. It is pointing to a different debate about the role of subjective utility indices and making a summary of the case for readmitting them into the economic canon following their near-abolition in the mid 20th-century.