Forgoodframework

In the mid to late 2000s I was teaching economics & psychology students about behavioural economics & a particular emerging interdisciplinary strand that was going to be applied increasingly to public policy & regulation. This led to regular & interesting discussions about issues like autonomy, potential manipulation & the institutional environment. A lot of the literature emerging after the landmark publication of Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein was either focused a lot on effectiveness or on the other hand quite high level and abstract in terms of philosophical stances. We began to keep a reading list to keep track of papers across disciplines that could be useful in helping develop pragmatic ethical positions. It is a little out of date now as it is hard to keep up but still contains dozens of interesting papers on ethics of nudging and related areas,  As you might imagine, students started to wonder whether this could be parsed in some way and Leonhard Lades and I developed the FORGOOD framework as an attempt to provide a solid anchor to discuss key ethical issues in applied behavioural science projects. I have used versions of this every year in classes across Dublin, Stirling, and LSE and in many policy and executive talks. They create some of the most interesting and engaging small group seminars with many discussions and arguments about applications across a range of areas. Increasingly, I use it to help students clarify their own ethical stances and how that might shape their career aspirations, and it has been integrated into teaching across undergraduate, postgraduate, and executive courses. We also use it as a pre-mortem tool in a variety of settings and along with Bishin Ho and Annabel Gillard have developed an initiative around it to developing a range of tools for the ethical use of behavioural science in finance, tech, and related settings. The framework has been widely used in other settings including as one of the main references for the recent and very useful OECD document on how to integrate ethics in behavioural science projects. Aside from the framework, the emerging literature on ethical aspects of behavioural science is in my view incredibly interesting, and creating many new possibilities for how we develop and evaluate behaviorally-informed projects at different levels of scale. It has been great again to work with students across different classes this year and I am looking forward to working on future developments on it that we are currently writing and using in seminars.