Empowering citizens with behavioural science | LSE Event

Behavioural public policy has gained significant attention recently due to two key factors: political debates over government size and role, and the globally influential approach of nudging. This talk will outline recent developments in conceptual and empirical research that aims to empower citizens by boosting their competences.

Speaker:
Professor Ralph Hertwig

Chair:
Dr Barbara Fasolo

#Democracy #Events #London

Full details/attend: https://www.lse.ac.uk/Events/2024/01/202401301830/citizens

To turn on captions, go to the bottom-right of the video player and click the icon. Please note that this feature uses Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology, or machine generated transcription, and is not 100% accurate.

So good evening everybody and welcome to the LSC for this um annual behavioral public policy lecture uh which is supported by sticker and uh the department of social policy and funded by thei hyek program uh my name is Barbara folo I’m a decision scientist at the department of management at the LSC

I direct uh DC the uh behavioral research lab which is um directed way with mat galit at the different department of psychological and Behavioral Science and um we here it is uh some information if we want to be involved but really our mission is to boost rigor and impact in

Interdisciplinary behavioral research if you want to know more and get involved please scan the QR code go to our website which is brand new and one of the things we um we like about the lab is that it gets us to uh have a dialogue with uh behavioral researchers across

The LSC um most important one is uh Professor Adam Oliver uh there in the middle who’s really The Mastermind of uh tonight’s event and um one thing I want to acknowledge is also we have an initiative you put together which is a international uh behavioral public policy Association we’re members um it’s

Time to renew our membership so little if you if you wish um super cheap 20s a year and uh it has terrific financial and non Financial benefits for those of us who want to uh be at the Forefront of the latest research in Behavior public

Policy so with that um now I’d like to um introduce you uh to the speaker for tonight’s event and welcome you officially to V LSC uh professor Ral her big it’s a it’s his first visit in person um at the at the LSC but we discovered that actually he’s been

Connected with sticker and the LSC uh for a while since he was a student uh at University of constance um and he sat in the classes of our former um PhD student he had two phds and former LSC director Ralph dandorf um I’ll let uh Ralph perhaps tell the story about uh

His visit to Ralph Dar andor’s picture earlier today uh in the library but it was interesting because it was during uh Ralph Dar andor’s uh directorate that sticker was founded and um I believe has been a connection with your passion for social issues and uh applied research uh

I had the honor to work um at the max Blan Institute with Ralph and when Ralph was there as a research scientist and um it was um it was interesting it was a time when you were also prepping for the habilitation um which is a German term

For the uh kind of promotion uh Career Development track and it makes me feel a little bit better about the British uh way of things and um he still had the time to come Grill US during our post doc uh research seminars now that you I

Don’t know if you remember and then uh go to the Berlin Alle film festival for a good movie afterwards so thank you for that um and after a few years of full professorship in cognitive science H in Switzerland at University of Basel he decided to return to uh Germany to the

Max Bank uh where he’s now a managing director of The Institute and uh the director of a center called Arc adaptive rationality Center uh the reason uh I can tell you more but it’s it’s an opportunity hard to pass Max plun effectively funds any research

Project you can think of big or small uh you have pre-approved funding so all your brain is on actually designing studies and doing research um so Ralph’s uh work is fascinating and unique each project is kind of different because he collaborates and that’s how the center is built with Scholars across natural

And social sciences he collaborates with um biologist historians philosophers of course economists and psychologists and as is kind of fundamental but controversial questions that then kind of challenge existing theories or existing practices and we see tonight the application to um the practice of uh public policy he has

Over 260 4 peer-reviewed papers the last time I checked and it was pretty complex pick one paper to talk about so I used the a simple heuristic of this paper that is most cited which is a 2004 psychological science paper uh where he and coauthors introdu this new theory of

Risky choice and introduces a new language for decisions called decisions from experience and that is a key distinction that we’ll see matters to his talk uh tonight and matters to policy makers as well um for all of this great work he got several Awards um including I want to mention the liit

Prize uh in 2017 um which comes with um a good endowment I imagine um and he’s he’s been featured in media and so on and here in the UK I think last time um I saw a provocative piece was uh on the Guardian um where his work with uh

Historian Dagmar El Brock was was covered um asking questions like if you if you knew that the secret police had a file on you and you could check it would you um so with that question I’m ready to hand over to Ralph I’m not giving the talk um I wanted to remind everybody

That the event will be ending at 7:45 will be followed by reception afterwards hosted by uh um Professor Adam Oliva uh we will have some questions from here and from the online audience um if possible uh for those of you who are twitters or ex users uh the hashtag was

Before uh hash LSC um haek we are recording so can we please all have the phone on silent and I suppose we’re all on mute online and now like please join me in welcoming to hear to the Lector Professor Ralph [Applause] herf it’s not loud enough okay there is somebody who is

Going to now is it better okay now it’s better uh and also thank you very much Adam for inviting me uh and thank you for your interest tonight uh I could imagine that you have other things to do but here you are thank you very much um

And indeed um the title says it I would like to talk about ways to empower citizens with behavior signs and so what it means is that I will also contrast this approach to what has become very well known and highly influential in the Ning approach um and uh I will go with

You through a couple of conceptual arguments before I give you a few examples of what we call boosting or boosts um but I thought that before I go to these conceptual arguments I should give you at least an idea of what what is it that I could possibly mean with

Boosts uh and and the hope is that you can hold on to that and okay is it now better okay now now it’s perfect okay thank you very much um and so let me give you one example uh and this first example deals with I would say a minor public policy problem so

It’s not a huge one but nevertheless people die uh in these kind of accidents and other people get injured and it’s actually an extremely well-known problem it’s also a Time onor problem it’s probably as old as cars are uh and you all familiar with it it’s car

Dooring uh so it’s basically the problem that when people drive uh their car to the side of the street and park uh and then uh they don’t when they get out of the car they don’t look around they don’t pivot uh open the door and the bicyclist is possibly running into uh

The door and gets terribly hurt uh or can even die in in the worst case now it’s not that many people die of it and also that not many people uh get injured I mean it’s not a huge number nevertheless for instance in the UK about two out of five adults argue that

That’s one of the reason why I don’t cycle in a city because I’m afraid of these kind of accidents now you may Wonder so what can we do as policy makers uh to reduce that risk and in a way you see here that’s the traditional way of uh telling people about the risk

And basically telling them to please watch out both to the bicyclists here on the on the left side uh but also of course to the car drivers themselves that they should be more careful and they should pivot but the problem of course is and we all experience that you

Sit in a car uh you listen to the radio or or you are under time pressure and you leave the car and you don’t look around so the question is what can we do uh and here’s a very simple intervention and it’s in my view what I mean with

Competence formation or what I mean with empowerment or the the building of competences it’s uh what is uh called in the literature the Dutch reach the Dutch reach is very simple uh and very straightforward essentially it’s the idea that uh when you leave the car you

Don’t open the door with the hand next to the door but you do it with the other hand that is further away and if you do that you cannot help but to turn around you pivot and basically suddenly you look at the blind spot uh now that’s a

Very simple um behavior that you could routinize uh and that you can do in order to prevent these kind of accidents now right is so you argue yeah but I may then forget again in the situation unless I have really routinized it uh and for that reason there’s one other

Little intervention you basically give yourself a memory prompt uh you for instance tie a red ribbon to the door handle and this red ribbon reminds you oh there was something I was supposed to do right I was supposed to use the other hand that is further away from the door

Now this is a very nice example for giving people giving citizens a little bit of extra education competences in order to deal with a public policy problem and it’s really up to them whether they use it or not um but it basically teaches them a new ability now

This is what I have in mind uh so what what I mean with that is that uh boosting doesn’t mean that we have to send people back to schools boosting can be very efficient it can be very cost uh it can be effective and it can be

Efficient uh and here’s one example of it okay but um before I talk about more boosts let’s go back and look at some conceptual arguments and I would like to start here with a quote that I recently came across and I would love to ask you

Guys whether you have any idea who wrote this quote who is the author of this quote uh let me read it to you I I really like it a lot um so the person says uh whoever it is it’s now widely recognized that great chances must be

Made to our way of life not only can we not face the rest of the world while consuming and polluting as we do we cannot for long face ourselves while acknowledging the violence and the chaos in which we live the choice is clear either we do nothing and allow a

Miserable and probably catastrophic future to overtake us or and that’s now my emphasis we use our knowledge about human behavior to create a social environment in which we shall live productive and creative lives and do so without jeopardizing the chances that those who follow us will be able to do

The same any idea who the author of those lines is say no it’s not hiek alore alore not bad no no it’s also not alore no also not any idea when this was written when was it written 10 years ago 20 years ago well if you do collective

Intelligence and would aggregate all the numbers then we would be right it’s about 50 years ago it was written in 1976 and the author was BF Skinner BF Skinner wrote that so BF Skinner the psychologist and father of behaviorism uh the basically the inventor of uh instrumental learning and reinforcement

Schedules and so on uh he wrote this pretty it’s actually I I find it relatively boring but still interesting to read he wrote this utopian novel uh Walton 2 uh and uh in a pref and he wrote that in 1948 so he wrote it right after the second world war in which he

Basically applied behaviorism in order to basically shape the world in a different way to make it more possible that people are happy and reach the kind of goals that they want to reach now when he used the word we use our knowledge about human behavior he meant his

Theory uh and at the time that’s what he tried to do he tried to create a behavioral public policy that would allow us to construct a better world now I think it’s fair to say that he was very successful in many applied areas but it didn’t amount to a behal public

Policy that we know today but of course today we also have a much richer understanding and a much richer knowledge about uh human behavior now what is interesting that the problems that he pointed to 50 years ago they haven’t gone away if anything then these problems have gotten even worse and I

Just wanted to basically mention these three the problems that he’s mentioning because we are facing them right now and we Face them today and let me start just I mean I know that you all know them but uh let me use this great graphic here because it also shows how far-reaching

Uh the impact of climate change can be and to what extent we our welfare our health and our well-being is affected by it this is a wonderful graphed by the national Center for environmental health and basically it shows in the Inner Circle uh the the Vicious Cycle of increasing carbon dioxide uh footprint

And as a result of that uh uh Rising temperatures more extreme weather events which again lead to rising sea levels which again lead uh to more carbon dioxide in the air and this has consequences for the environment for nature and terms of severe weather extreme heat Environmental degreg water

And food supply impact and so on and so on and so on and that in turn of course affects us it affects us in a variety of way in terms of forced migration civil conflict mental health impact heat related illness injuries asthma and so

On and so on and so on and there are people who argue that it’s really only one crisis that we currently have I mean other people would argue we have a poly crisis many interconnected crisis but some people would argue that’s the crisis of all crisis that causes all

Other crisis such as for instance and in in a way uh Skinner was talking about that too another crisis that we are currently facing uh in Europe but far beyond Europe is the state of liberal democracies uh and I’m sure that many of you are familiar with these kind of

Graphs that show the liberal democracy index which goes back to the Democracy Institute and the Democracy Institute is basically looking at different benchmarks of the state of liberal democracies around the around the world and what you see here is that in for about 10 years we are basically experiencing a backsliding of

The Democracy around the world and there are other indicators that you can quantify such as for instance uh when in 2011 toxic polarization was observed in five countries in 20 21 it’s in 32 countries uh if the number of countries that threatened freedom of speech were five in

201 currently we are well 2021 it’s 35 and look at this number which is also equally scary in uh 2011 49% of the population worldwide population lived in auoc authoritarian States in 2021 we are speaking of 70% of the world po population who lives under those circumstances um and with that let me

Come maybe to a final uh challenge uh in which human behavior also plays an enormous role and it’s a challenge that Skinner would not have anticipated and it’s the challenge of AI and the potential opportunities but also the potential risks that come with it uh this is an open letter that was

Published among others in the New York Times uh in which a group of thousand uh scientists and researchers and owners of the big companies uh were basically uh speaking of an outof control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds and they were calling for

A six-month pause on the development of the largest uh AI models at this point now if you think about how we are supposed to solve this problem then of course human beh faor is one key is is one key factor that we need to conceptualize think about and possibly

Change if we think about how to steer human behavior and prevent harms um I think it’s important to keep in mind that there won’t be any one solution to it that in the end what we need in all likelihood for many of these problems is a smart policy mix a policy

Mix in which law and ethics regulation in which technology in which school education and in which also psychological and social sciences have to play a role now I say this so clearly because I don’t think that boosting is the solution to this problem I also don’t think that ning is the solution to

This problem I do think that we have to play a role but we should see it in a larger picture we should see it as a smart policy mix that would be my argument now um of course in the last 10 to 15 years a lot of the public attention was drawn to

The Ning approach uh and I think this is the great uh achievement and they deserve all the thanks in the world uh for bringing the behavior science evidence to the public forum of Rick dick theor and Cass sunstein that’s an enormous achievement uh that we as behav scientists cannot be

Grateful for enough but I would also argue that uh what these two authors did is they brought a certain view of human cognition to the public forum that is not necessarily repes representing the balance of the empirical record in Psychology so let’s look at few of the assumptions about the human mind that

You find in theor and sunstein sunstein writing uh and I I I bet that many of you are familiar with that but let me repeat it anyhow according to dick theor and that goes back to his early work uh going back to his collaboration also with

Danny kman and uh Amos tski he considers metal Illusions these are the kind of cognitive biases that the heuristics and biases program became very famous uh for demonstrating that mental Illusions should be considered the rule rather than the exception and think about it this is a very strong claim so mental

Illusions are not the exceptions they are not at the margin of our Behavior they are at the core of the behavior they are the rule rather than the exceptions and in this pathbreaking paper the American Economic Review paper in 2003 they say people do not exhibit rational expectations they fail to make

Forecasts that are consistent with base rules they Ed juristic that lead them to make system blunders people exhibit preference reversals and they make different choices depending on the wording of the problem and then uh in the notbook itself there are more of these descriptive and often of course also very evaluative statements about

The human mind we are somewhat mindless passive decision makers we often make mistakes because we rely too much on our automatic system and many people also have motivational problems they take whatever option requires the least effort or the path of least resistance and we are characterized by inertia the

Status quo bias and the yeah whatever heuristic now in this sense in this sense people seem like loose cannons and if you accept that premise then it also makes perfect sense to invest in a choice architecture because you cannot really rely on people to be allies

You cannot rely on them because they are you know uh they make all these mistakes and they are inert uh and they have self-control problems so in that sense the real innovation of the Ning approach in my view is the emphasis on the choice architecture and it follows from that

Particular synthesis of the research record and theor and sunstein uh in 2008 2029 defined a nudge basically in terms of an architectural nudge a nudge as we will use the term is any aspect of the choice architecture that alers people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly

Changing their economic incentives now a few years later then uh kassin in a paper uh proposes the distinction between architectural nutes that we are all familiar with defaults friction positional effects and educative NES now my personal interpretation and that may be self serving is that educative nches

Was to some extent the response to boosting um but it’s a very narrow interpretation of Education it’s a narrow interpretation in terms of warnings in terms of reminders in terms of disclosure of information it’s very different from the kind of education or formation of competences that uh we have

In mind when we talk about boosting now let me also point to a few I mean there’s no question nuding was incredibly and is incredibly influential around the world uh and deserve for their impact also a lot uh of admiration but there’s also serious criticism that

Uh was raised and uh I will not go into much detail of that criticism but I want to at least remind you because for us it was the reason why we also thought about Alternatives so there is the criticism that was raised that nudging and only investing into Choice architecture

Interventions undermines or at least there’s a risk of undermining people’s autonomy to some extent their agency and certainly their self-efficacy uh that’s an important concept that comes out of the work of Albert bandura and it’s people’s belief about their capabilities to produce effects um if you only steer Behavior

Through choice architecture it’s almost impossible to get the feeling that uh you are the ones who is bringing about the kind of effects that you want to see there’s also the argument that um the reversibility which is a key Criterion for the libertarian paternalistic paternalism for the libertarian part of libertarian

Paternalism so uh being able to undo the effect of nudging constitutes the reversibility but rebonato in his really very insightful book uh points out that reversibility in principle is not the same as reversibility in practice if people are really so inert if they really make constant errors why can we

Be certain that people can actually revert the effect of the nudge uh if otherwise we trust them so little there’s also the problem of preference identification not just can only be successful and ethical if the policy makers know what makes individuals better off in the long run

By their own standards but as we know there’s often a heterogenity of preferences and it’s not that easy to figure out what people’s preferences are but typically we respond to that heterogenity of preferences with a one size fits all n there’s also the issue at least conceptually speaking of

How longlasting a behavior change is think about it if the political situation changes and an intervention in a choice architecture is being changed because a political a different political party is voted into Power then it may well be that the very behavior that we wanted to change

Reverts back to the pre-nut level so in other words there is always the risk at least conceptually speaking that our Behavior change that we try to achieve is not long lasting because it’s so contingent on the choice AR architecture itself because we haven’t invested into people uh and there’s also another

Problem that I find conceptually interesting namely that nuding interventions they should occur in the public space right and they shouldn’t intervene in people’s uh in the privacy of their homes but that also means that a lot of the kind of behaviors that potentially can cause all kinds of detrimental effects health effects

Wealth effects happen in the privacy of people’s homes but in a way we leave them alone in their homes uh we deal with them in the public space but not where most of our Behavior occurs in the privacy of our homes um and let me point out two more

Um criticisms that we have raised and when I say we uh let me really acknowledge my colleague here tanov who uh is a philosopher at Stockholm University and a lot of the work for reasons that are not totally clear to me I did with philosophers in that domain

Basically I guess because they are so good at thinking about conceptual issues and it’s just fun uh to to do that with them and uh till and I had great fun doing that so two arguments that we were pointing out is that I I wrote these statements about

The human mind that kassin and Dick theor wrote in their books in different Publications and I think this is not a good representation of the balance of the uh empirical record I would argue that the balance of the empirical record by no mean means implies that betting on

Human competences and rationality is a lost cause and I would also argue that there are several major reasons why we should invest in people and not just in choice architectures and you hear what I’m saying is I’m not saying that we should not invest in choice architectures because they are important

Driver of behavior but in my view we should also invest in people and I tell you in a second why I think that now let me first give you uh a first impression of what the the balance of the empirical evidence is and uh you all know that

Feeling you go to an academic bookstore and you may end up in a psychology department or if there it’s a very sophisticated bookstore then you also end up in a decision science department if there is one and then you read all these books and they seem to suggest people they are predictably irrational

They irrational exuberant uh they are misbehaving uh that and of course there’s the most famous One thinking fast and slow and you can away uh but you can also if it’s a it’s a bookstore that also offers you a wider View that you can easily find very successful

Books that actually convey a very different message there’s for inst Gary Klein the founder of natural decision making research psychology police offices Fighters and he wrote a book The Power of intuition in which he he admires people’s ability to make good decisions professionals to make good decisions or think of Robin hogar

Educating it intuition uh or think of get Giger risk Savvy or think of Steven Pinker rationality or think of more applied books such as the checklist by Atul gandi who basically argues that very simple means like checklist we can really improve medical decision making enormously so in other words if you go

Into a bookstore you get to also see a very different view on human decision making and I want to give you one more argument uh as to why that is important and also what may explain why we have in Psychology and behavioral economics such a almost conflicting or opposed view on

How good bad people are uh in their reasoning and let me for that uh illustration turn to statistical reasoning now statistical reasoning is basically dealing with risk and uncertainty that’s the kind of research uh that was the beginning of juristic and biases and a lot of the cognitive Illusions base rate fallacy conjunction

Fallacy and so on and so on they deal with statistical reasoning and one of the core arguments at the time and actually even today is how good or bad are people in terms of basin reasoning now Basin reasoning as many of you know is the pillar is one of

The pillars of rational Choice Theory right if we don’t reason basic if we don’t update uh our beliefs in a basin way then we never can be rational so why that’s the reason why this became such an important issue and Conan tski based on their experimental papers in 1972

Concluded in his evaluation of evidence men people uh are apparently not a conservative basan he’s not basan at all now there’s an interesting term here conservative basan with that they referred to a line of research that came out of the 1950s and 60s and uh that concerned the work by Ward Edwards and

His colleagues Ward Edwards is the founder of Behavioral decision-making research in Psychology and he started the work on studying basian reasoning in an empirical way now Edwards looking back at his research and we are talking about many experiments concluded opinion change is very orderly and usually proportional to numbers

Calculated from base theorem but it’s insufficient in amount so what he’s basically saying that people are pretty good basian they are a bit too conservative because they stick too much to the base rates and don’t update enough but basically they are basian and think about it that was 1968 four years

Later Kanan tski came around and basically rebooked uh rebuked uh Edwards and told him told him off and told him go away you’re wrong they are not conservative basan we are no basian at all and in a way I would argue both are right but how can that be how can they

Both be right well we try to figure that out when I say we I mean Thomas leaga and myself in this paper few years ago in which we raised the argument that it could be that these conflicting views Steam from very different experimental protocols uh protocols that we in terms

Of K manski called description based and experience- based in terms of w Edwards what does that mean that sounds abstract now I need to walk you through one of the typical tasks that has been used by Kanan and tski to study based in reasoning it’s very boring you will be

Surprised how boring it is um but I need to torture you anyhow uh so that’s the typical task that kanaman turski have used consider two earns denoted A and B which are filled with a large number of colored balls earn a contains 70% red balls and 30% blue balls earn B contains

30% red balls and 70% blue balls I told you it’s boring one ear has been selected by chance and 12 colored balls have been drawn at random from it of which eight are red and four are blue did you get it now here comes the question what do you

Think the probability is that the 12 balls were drawn from NN a which is from the ear that is predominantly red you have exactly one chance to give an estimate and based on that estimate I will then tell you that you’re a basian a conservative basan or no basian at all now

Typically somebody daring answer typically these kind of studies lead to the result that people are really bad basian now what did what Edwards do now the fascinating thing is what Edwards did these kind of earn experiments and he started out also with the text that there are two ears and

They have certain composition balls but then once uh the experimentor picks one of the earns the earn is instantiated there’s suddenly an earn not suddenly there is an earn and the experimentor draws from that ear and he does it one time or she and asks the question what is the revised probability

That the selected earn is the predominantly red one then the experiment draws the next ball uh and the next ball and the next ball and the next ball 12 balls you give 12 estimates and then you do that not only only once but you do it with different proportions

Many many times so by the end of the day you not have one estimate you have hundreds you have hundreds of estimates and the question that I’m that we try to ask and that’s very representative that was our hypothesis of the kind of experiments that were

Done in the program that was started by Ward Edwards it’s called the intuitive stat the intuitive statistician program and kki did something totally different they took what Edwards did and turned it into descriptions into vignettes into text based symbolic forms and you typically had one a few answers and

Based on that you were considered to be basing or not or you were following the conjunction rule or not and so on now what we did is we went back to that research in the 5 in the 1950s and 60s and to the research after with Conor

Manki and after Conor Mani we analyzed a total of 604 experiments in in terms of the methodology being used we were looking at these kind of Dimensions whether there was feedback given whether there was practice opportunities where stimuli were physically present or invoked descriptively whether there was multiple testing and whether stimuli

Were about objects or people and I can tell you right away kanaman and TWY did research about people Linda uh top W problem and so on W Edwards did problems about CH events erns um balls um dyes and so on but what were the other differences now here you see the

Difference across these uh 600 experiments basically in the poor performance tradition that’s korski heuristics and bises and the many followers later there’s hardly any ever feedback there’s hardly any ever practice the stimuli are descriptively invoked they are never physically instantiated there is multiple testing I say more about

That in a minute it and the stimuli are people and not objects in the W Edwards tradition intuitive statistical reasoning there is in half of the experiments there is feedback uh there’s often practice Trials of multiple testing and stimuli our objects rather than let me say one word

On the multiple testing and net drives the difference really home in a good performance view we have a me across these experiments a median of 77 answers that people give actually the mean is 417 in a poor performance view the median answer is three you have three

Chances three strikes and you are out um and the mean is eight and I think this is really striking I couldn’t believe it when I saw it because I think what happened and I’m I’m not saying that was intentional or ill meaning or whatever but it was an methodological Innovation

That was brought about by kanaman and tski in the field of judgment decision making it happened also in other fields by the way that basically made experimentation much cheaper much faster because you could now use these vignettes and you didn’t and and they didn’t feel like they have to collect

Many data from one subject uh one answer is enough to basically conclude that you are a good or a bad bad basan and we argue in this particular paper that this methodological change explains a lot of why there is this enormous difference between the uh W Edwards kind of tradition and judgment decisionmaking

And today’s juristic and biases and until today we are basically using vignettes we are basically using text based way of studying people uh and we are and and that’s fascinating because come on psychology is the field of learning right right I mean Skinner remember we are the field of learning

But somehow in decision making judgment decision making we seem to have forgotten about the importance of learning now so I do think that if you look at the balance of the record uh there is a point to be made for empowerment and for competence people can learn and I would argue that for

This reason because of the empirical record uh these kind of Investments are not a Fool’s errand uh and in fact would argue it’s absolutely needed why would I think so let me give you three arguments um there are more but these are for me key arguments I think we need to empower

People because we also face them and confront them with what I’ve called ultr processed environments and I tell you in a second what I mean with that what are ultr processed environments uh and we cannot let them alone in dealing with these environments uh I also make would make

The argument that if we think about the global challenges in all of them human behavior plays a role and in many of them we need competent and active citizens but we only get them we only get competence and active citizens and agency if we also invest in that and I

Give you later an example of that and there is also the ethical dimension of it uh there is a lot of research in Psychology by Ryan and others also in his meta analysis here in psychology local bulletin that shows that there’s an ethical intrinsic value of agency and competence development nurturing basic

Psychological needs for autonomy competence and relatedness do facilitate learning and do facilitate Behavior change and also by the way they contribute to Greater Life satisfaction well-being and positive Health outcomes again I’m not saying that we should not change Choice architectures I’m saying we should do both we should all Al invest into

People now let me just walk you in more detail through the ultr processed environment because that’s particular dear to my heart now you all know this this is a paradigmatic example of a pro ultr processed food uh some people would argue it’s not even clear that it’s

Really food um it’s basically what it is it’s uh a high point of uh science of the application of science this is one of the most sophisticated consumer product you could imagine there’s hardly any aspect of wrinkles that has not been studied whether it’s the shape whether

It’s the taste whether it’s the color whether it’s the naming whether it’s the packaging whether it’s the sound when you bite on it whether it’s the feeling of crispiness this has all and the these are just a few example of the kind of studies that are available now it’s very

Clear so much research went into it it for one purpose only right it’s clear which purpose it is I mean once you open it you should not stop eating it and by the way then of course you should get go back and buy more of it that’s the

Purpose uh and this is just one of the example of alra processed foods and alter processed basically means that these are foods that would not naturally occur in the world these are foods that are high in salt often sugar oils and fats and they include all kinds of

Ingredients such as flavors colors Foams thickening agents cling agents emal barers and so on and so on now at this point it’s estimated that nearly 60% of The Da calories that are consumed by us adults come from alter processed food and for kids and teenagers the estimate it’s it’s almost

70% now here comes an interesting for also I think for economists an interesting finding that’s uh was a finding from last year fascinating that actually the consumption of that food changes our preferences as we speak as we eat daily consumption of high fat high sugar snacks alter reward circuits in the

Human brain and they reduce the preference for lowf fat food so while we are consuming it and eating it our preferences change online uh and there’s of course the argument and empirical evidence that ultr processed foods have a high addictive potential and an increased risk of all cause modal mortality by 25%

Now food and the Food domain is only one area in which we are dealing with what one could call ultr processed environments and consumer goods if you think about the digital world that’s the perfect conditioning machine that’s the perfect alter processed Choice architecture that has again most of the time the

Functionization not per se bad or evil but of course it can be in real conflict with your health with your well-being uh and with your happiness now this is increasingly recognized also in the medical Sciences it has led to This research that today is called the commercial determinance of Health uh and

For instance last year in lensed there was a paper that concluded is growing evidence that the oh now it’s back I think it’s back um there’s growing evidence that the products and practices of some commercial actors notably largest transnational corporations are responsible for escalating rates of avoidable ill health planetary damage

And Social and Health inequity these problems are increasingly referred to as the commercial determinance of Health if you want to get really upset read that book and there’s also the really interesting paper by Nick jader and George Lowenstein in which they make the argument that one of the rhetorical

Strategies of various Industries is to basically cast these problems in terms of individual responsibility and individual weakness uh and that means that your responsible for it if you can control your consumption of uh ultr processed food if you cannot control cons consumption in a digital world that’s

Your problem uh it’s not the industry’s fault but it’s the weakness of the individual one and again I don’t want to blame uh the nuding researchers uh for portraying a particular uh particular way of how we are as people but of course this is the this is the perfect

Argument that could also easily be used uh by the industry and that’s a bit of the argument that Nick jader and George longstein have proposed now if I could convince you perhaps I did that next to ning we need to invest in people um and this was the starting

Point of uh our thinking about it of till GRE and K yanov and myself and let me talk uh you through a few examples of boosting just that you get an impression what could we possibly mean with that um so booing is a policy approach that targets people’s competences and thereby

Should help people make good informed Decisions by and for themselves um and it is an intervention that can enlist human cognition but he can also enlist the environment it doesn’t need to only happen in the mind it can also happen in interaction with the environment or both to Foster people’s existing consequence

Uh competences also or develop new ones now I can spell that out in much more detail uh and in this table we basically talked about the different uh conceptual differences between ning and boosting but perhaps the most important one is this first one that boosting doesn’t try

To change behavior in the first place Behavior change can be a result uh of competence enhancement but it’s not the Target and nuding I would argue that is the target you want to change behavior and boosting you want to change competences let me talk about two more differences that are

Important uh one important difference is the again the conceptual longevity of the intervention uh and I talked about that earlier once in boosting at least conceptu in nuding at least conceptually speaking if we undo the change in the choice architecture chances are that the behavior is going to revert back to the

Pre-nut level and we have nothing achieved uh and we are living in highly volatile political times things can change Choice architecture decisions can change now in boosting the at least concept conceptually speaking the idea is that if we have enhanced the competence think about the Dutch reach

That should last and it should last independent of what public policy makers want or do or different ones want or do and there’s a normative implication namely that boosting is an offer to Citizens uh it does require that people engage with the Boost think about the Dutch reach again if people are not

Interested uh if they are not motivated to learn it they won’t learn it and it won’t have an effect but it what what it means is it’s also highly transparent and it’s the choice of the citizen whether or not he or she engages with the Boost now in nuding and that’s an

Argument that has repeatedly been raised is that that there is at least the risk that autonomy concerns are violated and there is also the issue of transparency uh to what extent people see that their behavior change and understand the mechanism that underlies their behavior change now in in boosinger would argue

That’s very to or that’s totally transparent okay now let me end this uh with uh G giving you at least a few examples of boosts uh after all these conceptual arguments uh and uh if you are interested there’s a boosting website which tries to keep track of the

Ongoing research but let me give you three examples and let me not uh be misunderstood here what I’m showing you are individual examples I’m not saying these are solving the problems but I’m giving you them as illustrations for what boosting could mean uh I’ll give you an example for how to deal with

Disinformation in the digital world there are other boosting interventions of that sort I want to give you a great great way of uh how avoiding the loss of control over your digital consumption uh I think you will love it and I will tell you about bedtime math um so these are

The three examples there are many others but they are quite illustrative now you know this problem um you are Googling for particular content you want to figure out uh what are the causes of climate change uh and then you Google offers you certain websites and this is

One of the websites that you being offered it’s actually uh I checked it yesterday it’s um a very convincing website there are lots of um scientific looking figures and text and references it’s very convincing it’s the center for the study of carbon dioxide and Global change uh and basically uh argues that

We are going to inform you about the newest evidence there is as to climate change um now the question that you’re not familiar with that website nor are you familiar with this Center and the question uh that is in your mind is whether or not you should trust

It the problem here is that we are really bad at figuring out whether or not we can trust a website uh the person who invented this intervention is Sam Weinberg he’s a educational scientist from Stanford University and he was studying his own colleagues and his own students often considered to be the best

Students in the world they are really bad figuring out where whether a website is credible or not and the reasons are good ones namely that what we typically try to do is we critically think that’s what we have learned in schools at the University and we basically look at the

Content try to Think Through the content we look at surface features such as whether there is scientific evidence whether there are references whether there are graphs and based on that we make a judgment whether we trust it or not problem is this can all very much be

Fabricated by now I mean you can basically create a very convincing website that otherwise pedal uh pretty bad information so what Sam Weinberg was arguing is we need to use a different strategy we cannot just rely on our critical thinking we need to do something else and basically what he

Suggested is that why don’t we do what professional fact checkers do professional fact Checkers don’t look at the website they immediately leave the website and check the credibility check the credibility of the producers of the website so in other words they leave the page and search the web to see what

Others whether it’s Wikipedia news organizations or other trustworthy institutions say about the source and its claims so in other words the idea here is use the internet to check on that’s what they called uh that’s what that’s that’s what that’s what they call lateral reading it’s not vertical reading you are not

Staying on the website you laterally read you step outside of the website uh we actually have called that an instance of critical ignoring which is a fascinating concept uh I can tell you about it another time not today um there a reception afterwards so can okay great wonderful and leral reading actually has

Been shown to be really working uh across numerous studies uh with in in many different countries and with many participants now what would that mean for instance in a current case so all you do and what fact checkers do is they for instance Google carbon dioxide signs

Then the website itself shows up and then you find entries such as this and there are others who converge and for instance Wikipedia would tell you at this point now you should be aware that this particular Center is seen as a front group for the fossil fu

Industry and what that means is that I mean it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t trust it what it means is that you enter that website if you still want to enter it with a certain mindset with a very critical mindset and also know that there may be a particular perspective

Being offered so the idea is not immediately content but first stepping out of the and checking who the produc maybe not okay great um now again don’t get me wrong this is not going to solve the misinformation disinformation problem uh there are you need more than one intervention

And you need more you need reg I mean there’s regulation there’s technology there’s school education but this and by the way Sam Weinberg being an educational scientist he is now really working to board bringing a leral reading into school curriculum now let me give you a different example uh which at least I

Love and and you may like it too uh and and I’m not earning any money here so but I I I really like it it’s one sec uh and it actually came out of the work that we’ve been doing in in Berlin at our Center um so the problem here is

You’re all familiar with that uh that you’re in the middle of your work and suddenly there’s this impulse that you could check on a social media on your favorite social media or we side and see whether something else is going on or you check on your email uh and there you

Are interrupted and 20 minutes of your time is gone by the time you realize that you should be going back to work now what one sec is it’s a so-called self ning app and I tell you more about self notching in a second but first let

Me tell you about this app so let’s assume that for instance you want to click on Instagram uh and see what’s going on in Instagram Mo most recently and you do so and then what happens is that it doesn’t open up but instead this app opens up produces some

Friction only for 3 seconds it tells you how often in the last 24 hours you have opened Instagram it interrupts your behavior for 3 seconds and then asks you do you really want to open it that’s all it does nothing else so you’re still free to open it and do whatever you want

And this little introduction of self-imposed friction has an enormous effect uh it so here’s a study that these guys did uh in the first week there were 100 on average uh across the subject 166 um attempted openings uh of whatever website people were interested in or wanted to control and by 6 weeks

Later that has been reduced to 105 so this is an average reduction of nearly 40% of app openings across 6 weeks this is an enormous effect um now this this thing is available you can download it you can try it out and I by now I I

Encounter many people who have done that and are fascinated by how quick how quickly it has positive effects the kind of effects they want the app itself has all kinds of features that you could also change so instead of 3 seconds you could also wait 20 seconds if you need

That if you you feel like more time is needed but the important point is it’s self-imposed you do it and that’s what we really mean with self nudging self- nudging is a category of boosting so what happens here is that you become the citizen Choice architect you choose to

Use nudging principles that have been used in the public sphere to be adapted for use in a private sphere but only if you wanted to and the way you want it to uh and I would argue that this idea of self ning which means that we use ning

Principles should I speed up uh yes if you want questions maybe couple minutes um so yeah yeah finish the thought yeah okay um we respect it in in my view it’s a fantastic way of respecting people’s autonomy and also promoting their agency and selfefficacy uh and it solves a lot of the problems

That in my view have been raised as criticism against nuding now again this is not a solution to everything but this is something we can do it means basically we share our knowledge of psychology and that’s not rocket science let’s be honest positional effects friction uh all these things defa Falls

It’s not rocket science we can easily share that with citizens and why should we not why should they not become competent citizen Choice Architects uh and with that let me uh end with one final example um uh which is a wonderful example also for boosting

Uh and it’s a research that has done by uh has been done by Shen bog who’s a wonderful educational scientist was published a number of years ago in science and it deals also with a public policy problem namely with math anxiety in the US it’s estimated that

97% of adult US citizens uh feel some sense of anxiety when they need to deal with numbers and with math 70% of the student population says they have severe anxiety of math and that has consequences both for their school Success and also for professional careers this costs them

Dearly uh and what these authors were able to show is that if you even as a math anxious parent read very little simplistic stories in the evening for instance about your cat and end these stories with a MTH question these are very simple questions which involve addition or subtraction or

Something but it forces the kids and the parent by the way to deal with math and what they were able to show is that and it works even if you do it only once a week and what they were able to show is that kids who were listening to these

Kind of bedtime math stories had an increase in their math competences that was translated into a 9 month uh school year where the equivalent of three additional months of school teaching in math that’s an enormous effect and we can do that and we can do that with parents who

Are math anxious and we can do it with with children who are math anxious but that’s a way of overcoming some of the anxiety there is and with that let me come to my conclusion and let me go back to the pandemic because I for me the

Pandemic was for very I mean for all of us was a challenging but also a fascinating time because I was fascinated as a behavior scientist I was fascinated about the fact that policy makers during the pandemic made desperate appeals to what needed to be active pro-social responsible and

Competent citizens think about it we asked people to self-control we asked them to stay at home we asked them to change their working environment we asked them to understand Concepts such as exponential growth or our factors we asked them to get vaccinated and understand risk communication we wanted a competent self-responsible pro-social active

Citizen and I would argue that there are many great crisis that we’re dealing with in the world that require the same kind of capabilities but such capable citizens don’t come for free they need investment they need investment in the same sense as we are investing in Choice

Architecture we need to invest in people we need to invest in schooling lifelong learning trust positive Liberty and I would also argue in in the area of behaved public policy we need to invest in boosting not just nuding I hope I convinced you but if not I hope it was

Entertaining enough thank you very much [Applause] thank you so much for uh your engaging presentation and the Boost um I’m not sure I’m going to be doing bedtime but I have done yeah come over here um but I have download one sec app I was just

Worried that I’ll not be able to get you on time and not not be able to uh use the screen uh we have a reception planned Adam uh I don’t know how long do you want me to go with uh with questions questions can we just have a few yeah

Because at least we’re all here and let’s see if online want to chip in um so Ral is going to take uh a question at a time um make sure it’s not too long and you can say who you are quickly just um where are you coming from as in

Affiliation so uh if you want to ask a question please indicate it to the stewards with a ro mic and um start to raise your hand um there uh my name antonus uh PC student from the UCL uh so uh my question is about the a comparison between the Ning

And boting uh in my uh perspective the Ning is about the system one uh dominance and the boosting is about how we train the system to if we uh uh borrow the terms from kand uh uh is it there is is is there any like um Market Target preference for this boosting

Let’s say like a a Aid reader that have a knowledgeable uh about the situation because like uh in the Gen Z like a instant generation like a yeah maybe that quite lazy it it is better for ning than the boosting so my question is like is there any like a market preference

For this boosting thank you um you said Market preference is that what you said uh sorry uh it’s wrong terms but like it’s Target like a for like the the the generation that uh like quite lazy it’s better to use the nink or like it’s the first step than boosting when when they

They have the enough knowledge to have a boost something like that yeah I mean there two layers uh in my answer the first answer is that um I’m and that may not surprise you I’m more itical of system one system two distinction this is a very simplistic

Dichotomy of which Danny caraman in his book himself said he’s using it only metaphorically and I think what has happened over the years that we take that for granted the distinction and uh indeed there’s very little evidence that we have these two I mean neuroscientific or cognitive evidence that we have these

Two um uh system uh of thinking now that doesn’t mean that we don’t have routinized automatic processes and more deliberate processes but they many people think of them more as a Continuum than system one system two that’s one answer uh the other answer is that I think you are raising an important Point

Namely uh that indeed if you want to boost people it presupposes a certain level of motivation and it presupposes a certain level of cognitive abilities and uh I I would argue that’s a challenge uh for the boosting approach which often means that one way of dealing with that challenge is that you

Need to think about good ways of communicating the Boost to people and that means that for instance we need to think about these kind of apps that I showed you we may think about games that make it easier to access and make it fun think of the bedtime story so I also Ed

These examples to show that boosting does doesn’t need doesn’t need to be tiring and doesn’t need to be an imposition on people and if you think about for instance the Dutch reach that’s an intervention you all will I bet with you that you won’t forget this intervention anymore in all likelihood

And that was essentially a 30- second intervention and I think that’s important because I do remember that uh when we started talking about boosting there was the argument raised in a literature oh come on that’s just education education doesn’t work and education takes too much time and too

Much effort and I hope I have convinced you with some of the examples that I gave you that this doesn’t need to be the case boosting can again be very quick very efficient uh and can be scaled up with various uh ways of bringing that to the to the

Public I see a few questions can we go there and yeah um you want to wait for Robie Mike yes please hi thank you uh I’m bana I’m um L student from the master of public administration I mean I graduated last year but still thinking I am student um

Just one question I mean what link do you make between a building habit basically forcing yourself to acquire new habit and uh boosting MH and is there any I mean is the same or completely different thank you um I actually I think that’s a question that one could both direct to nudging and

Boosting because you could also argue that uh for instance in terms of nudging uh nudging you sometimes have one-time events like a default you are being defaulted into something and you are never engaging with that behavior again so there we wouldn’t necessarily expect uh routinization or uh the formation of

Habits to occur but sometimes in ning if you if it’s about repeated Behavior it could well be that uh a change in a choice architecture also establishes routin Behavior so and and that would be fine because then uh we are not having the problem that the behavior reverts

Back once you remove the choice architecture but that’s a question that’s hardly been discussed in the literature which I find unfortunate at least not to my knowledge now of course also in boosting it’s it’s it’s a similar issue uh the take again the Dutch reach ideally what you want this

To you want this to become a habit you also want the bedtime story telling uh a kind of habit but there are other boosting which are one-time boosts uh where we are not talking about the repeated behavior and then it’s much less uh much less necessary to to to

Think of a habit so I would say that habit formation uh and boosting or notching they they both can go together and and in some cases we do want an habit to a the formation of an habit to occur because then the likelihood increases that people will automatically show that

Behavior there a red ribbon on the handle so let’s see the hand was the hand rights there and then I’ll go for back yes I’m stepan from Oxford sustainable development Enterprise we are dealing with data and my question is regarding data you don’t think that a datadriven approach and therefore this

Concept of evidence basic can together with the let’s say botam approach or community building on data evidence better convince politician so the question is what about data now I would argue that in each of the interventions that I presented to you there’s lots of evidence available

Uh that you could use in a public discourse with politicians so whether you talk about lateral reading whether you talk about bedtime math stories uh whether you uh talk about other boosting but also nuding interventions there is evidence available and of course you absolutely we I mean that’s the the big

Innovation that I also credit um sunstein and saor 4 namely that the broad empirical evidence into the forum my argument would be that they are not necessarily presenting the balance of the data and of the record on human achievements and performances so in in other words I

Would to the policy makers I would not only talk with them about a particular intervention and the evidence that supports that intervention but I would also want to talk about the underlying evidence as to how good or bad people’s uh cognition and performances are but I you may mean something else with data

Could that be I mean data science yeah absolutely I mean uh there are many ways of integrating uh and and I I would argue that we in Berlin are of course also using data science there are computer scientists mathematicians and of course I mean so or let me step back

I think what that was my impression when I went to a recent event of the oecd in Paris and I think there is the danger that because we have now really cute tools whether it’s defaults whether it’s framing whether it’s positional effect or friction that the hard work of

Analyzing the problem and for that you need the data of analyzing the problem is no longer done or at least it’s not done enough as I wanted to there were people speaking up in that um in in that conference who basically said well I know what I do I here I do position

Positional effect and here I do default and then I’m done and walk away and that cannot be uh we need data when we analyze the problem we need data when we design the intervention and we need data when we evaluate what we do so data is

Of course it’s key to all of this you need data about preferences preferences of people and you need data on preferences you’ve been arguing yes um so um can I please have hands raised again and see so yeah go for it yes last question thank you very much so there

Yeah brown brown sweater yeah yeah I’m very interested to understand more about how boosting is um to understand how boosting is specifically different to education um because I think other people might be thinking that as well um and then if you could just sort of take us through the example of um boosting

People to identify disinformation as to how that would differ to what like a traditional awareness sort of campaign would do I think that’d be quite interesting MH so boosting doesn’t mean uh that you send people back to schools um boosting can be I boosting for me lifelong learning uh because the

The problems that we face in the world in in a such a volatile fast changing World occur all the time and they occur also once we have left schools so again think of the examples disinformation when I went to school disinformation and misinformation in a digital world there

Wasn’t a digital world uh let alone that somebody talked about dis or misinformation in the digital world so this is a new challenge and it’s also a new challenge for adults whom we want to empower and Equip to deal with that kind of problem and so in that sense that

Doesn’t mean that boosting an education cannot go together of course you can also bring boosting elements into the in the into curricula that’s what uh basically um Sam Weinberg tries to do with lateral reading now to go back to lateral reading it’s really interesting because if you typically read an

Educational science book then the Way teachers and educational scientists talk about misinformation is very often not all the time but very often is in terms of we need to educate people to critically think and critically thinking means engaging with the content analyzing the content thinking through the content evaluating it and that’s

Exactly what the history professors in the studies by Sam wiberg and and and his students at Stanford did they used the powers of their critical thinking because that’s what they have been trained to do and basically people are really bad at it uh I think if I remember correctly the the ability to

Figure out whether a website was credible or not was on chance level um and what uh Samberg is arguing uh on top of critical thinking we need the ability to critically ignore and to do what the professional fact checkers do and what that means is that you may be tempted to

Open that website and to read it and to walk your way through it but you have no chance they are really good at coming up with content that traps you and so what he says is no you leave that behind the first thing you do is you ask one

Question who’s behind this website who produced this website uh and what kind of information is on the web available about The credibility of this website or The credibility of the producers of this website so in in a way you are not engaging with the content but you

First figure out should I even enter that website or not uh and that’s a totally different approach I mean it’s one there are other boosting like uh interventions and to deal with Miss and disinformation but lateral reading is a particularly interesting one because it challenged this idea that we deal with

Misinformation in the world by critical by critically thinking our way through it but that’s impossible I mean there are too many there’s too much information we can never critic through critical thinking alone deal with the problem of missing disinformation great well it’s been an amazing pleasure to listen to your

Lecture and all of this engagement uh we now have opportunity to continue a discussion outside at the at the reception um just thanks uh thank for coming and thanks all for joining and forging