Promoting agency – people's ability to form intentions and to act on them freely – must become a primary objective for Behavioural Public Policy (BPP). Contemporary BPPs do not directly pursue this objective, which is problematic for many reasons. From an ethical perspective, goals like personal autonomy and individual freedom cannot be realised without nurturing citizens’ agency. From an efficacy standpoint, BPPs that override agency – for example, by activating automatic psychological processes – leave citizens ‘in the dark’, incapable of internalising and owning the process of behaviour change. This may contribute to non-persistent treatment effects, compensatory negative spillovers or psychological reactance and backfiring effects. In this paper, we argue agency-enhancing BPPs can alleviate these ethical and efficacy limitations to longer-lasting and meaningful behaviour change. We set out philosophical arguments to help us understand and conceptualise agency. Then, we review three alternative agency-enhancing behavioural frameworks: (1) boosts to enhance people's competences to make better decisions; (2) debiasing to encourage people to reduce the tendency for automatic, impulsive responses; and (3) nudge+ to enable citizens to think alongside nudges and evaluate them transparently. Using a multi-dimensional framework, we highlight differences in their workings, which offer comparative insights and complementarities in their use. We discuss limitations of agency-enhancing BPPs and map out future research directions.

Over the past decade, behavioural scientists have identified five different holistic effects which can all impact on the overall effectiveness of a behaviour change intervention. Some of these effects or concepts can be positive, whereas others may end up neutralising the effect of any nudge, or worse, having a negative impact: Licensing effects Compensating effects Positive spillover effects Displacement effects Systemic effects or what we are calling ‘nudge fatigue’

Our results show that a decadeslong effort to educate the U.S. public about recycling has succeeded in some ways but failed in others. These efforts have made recycling an option that consumers see as important – but to the detriment of more sustainable options. And it has not made people more effective recyclers.

The toolkit presented here guides the policy maker through a methodology that looks at Behaviours, Analysis, Strategies, Interventions, and Change (abbreviated “BASIC”). It starts with a BASIC guide that serves as an indispensable and practical introduction to the BASIC manual.

But this deluge of information — in which you are naturally very invested — can also prove overwhelming and unhelpful. We’re big fans of brands like WHOOP and Oura, and regularly encourage readers to dig through Apple’s Health app…but you need to be honest with yourself. If fitness tracking is psychologically increasing your feelings of inadequacy and physically increasing your perception of pain, it’s not worth it. At the least, it’s going to torpedo your performance (at work, in workouts, etc.)

To solve problems and suggest solutions on behalf of others is to have power. As a result, we behavioral scientists have a heightened responsibility: Being in this privileged position requires recognizing when and where assumptions about “what good looks like” might creep in. When we design interventions—even just determining what options are available, or what the default choice should be—we shape other peoples’ experiences in ways we may not always fully appreciate. And our decisions to address certain problems while leaving others aside implicitly declares what challenges, and audiences, we think are worthy of receiving attention.

I - Intended Behavior N - Non-targeted Audiences C - Compensatory Behaviors A - Additional Behaviors S - Signalling E - Emotional Impact

The following is from Dr. Bucher’s forthcoming book, Engaged: Designing for Behavior Change. I chose this section because it touches upon a PeopleScience theme: being successful and effective behavioral practitioners while also, and primarily, being good.

In this presentation Liz Barnes, Vice Chair of the CIM Charity and Social Marketing Group, will discuss which tactics we should be worried about, which techniques might be considered unethical and ways we can influence and persuade with integrity.

Insights from the behavioural sciences are increasingly used by governments and other organizations worldwide to ‘nudge’ people to make better decisions. Furthermore, a large philosophical literature has emerged on the ethical considerations on nudging human behaviour that has presented key challenges for the area, but is regularly omitted from discussion of policy design and administration. We present and discuss FORGOOD, an ethics framework that synthesizes the debate on the ethics of nudging in a memorable mnemonic. It suggests that nudgers should consider seven core ethical dimensions: Fairness, Openness, Respect, Goals, Opinions, Options and Delegation. The framework is designed to capture the key considerations in the philosophical debate about nudging human behaviour, while also being accessible for use in a range of public policy settings, as well as training.

In this paper, we discussed multiple ways how behavior change interventions can backfire. We provided a framework to help facilitate the discussion of this topic, and created tools to aid academics in the study of this realm, and support practitioners to remain mindful of the potential risks.

There are 6 implications I've drawn from this initial analysis: Authentic engagement - embed authentic engagement and feedback processes all through the campaign development journey Behaviour change levers audit - identify and review all of the behaviour change levers, not just those where communications can make a difference Medium, message, messenger - critically analyse the relationship between these for each creative execution Authentic inclusion - ensure diversity is embedded into your teams and planning processes and that this inclusion is authentic and supportive The constraints of comms - recognise circumstances where communications are not the most effective behaviour change and/or confidence building lever Remember that communications don't take place in a vacuum - reflect on how communications can have an impact on the system outside of comms touchpoints

Yet the characteristics of online environments – the deliberate design and the ability to generate enormous quantities of data about how we behave, who we interact with and the choices we make, coupled with the potential for mass experimentation – can also leave consumers open to harm and manipulation. Many of the failures and distortions in online markets are behavioural in nature, from the deep information asymmetries that arise as a result of consumers being inattentive to online privacy notices to the erosion of civility on online platforms. This paper considers how governments, regulators and at least some businesses might seek to harness our deepening understanding of human behaviour to address these failures, and to shape and guide the evolution of digital markets and online environments that really do work for individuals and communities.

Consumers, employees, students, and others are often subjected to “sludge”: excessive or unjustified frictions, such as paperwork burdens, that cost time or money; that may make life difficult to navigate; that may be frustrating, stigmatizing, or humiliating; and that might end up depriving people of access to important goods, opportunities, and services. Because of behavioral biases and cognitive scarcity, sludge can have much more harmful effects than private and public institutions anticipate. To protect consumers, investors, employees, and others, firms, universities, and government agencies should regularly conduct Sludge Audits to catalogue the costs of sludge, and to decide when and how to reduce it. Much of human life is unnecessarily sludgy. Sludge often has costs far in excess of benefits, and it can have hurt the most vulnerable members of society.

However, nudges aimed at reducing carbon emissions could have a pernicious indirect effect if they offer the promise of a ‘quick fix’ and thereby undermine support for policies of greater impact.

So what counts as the “right” kind of problem for behavioral science to solve? Put more bluntly: How might our sense about what we should solve, or even what qualifies as a problem worth solving, be biased by how we think about what we can solve?

To ensure these partnerships are beneficial to all involved—companies, employees, customers, and researchers­—behavioral scientists need a set of ethical standards for conducting research in companies. To address this need, we created The Behavioral Scientist’s Ethics Checklist. In the checklist, we outline six key principles and questions that behavioral scientists and companies should ask themselves before beginning their research. To illustrate how each principle operates in practice, we provide mini case studies highlighting the challenges other researchers and companies have faced.

In that study, gender and ethnicity information was removed from descriptions of potential job candidates. It was a study designed to interrupt unconscious biases against women and ethnic minorities. The results were surprising - blind recruitment made things worse for women and members of ethnic minorities. These results illustrate the limits of behavioural economics in action.

A study find that just asking about behavior can lead to an increase in that behavior -- whether positive or negative.