Gerry Stoker, Peter John and Graham Smith have written a
paper concerning two different approaches to behaviour change, entitled ‘Nudge, nudge, think, think: Two strategies for changing civic behaviour’ The paper highlights that policy makers want to change the behaviour of citizens to tackle a range of acute social problems, such as obesity, climate change, crime, binge drinking, petty crime and community cohesion.
In one corner is the ‘nudge’ approach, described in Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s popular book
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness
.
It stems from behavioural economics and psychology and argues that citizens can be offered a ‘choice architecture’ that encourages them to act in a way that achieves benefits for themselves and for their fellow citizens. For example if I am enrolled by default in a pension plan, I am more likely to stay in the plan because of my psychological inertia. Thus the Government has changed my behaviour without restricting my free choice by making use of a psychological quirk of the human mind.
In the other corner is the ‘think’ approach, which has developed out of normative theory and political science. It involves giving people the right context and framing, so that they can think themselves collectively towards a better understanding of problems and more effective collective solutions.
Mathew Grist argues that there is something cynical at the heart of ‘nudge’ though. Its advocates categorise people into three camps: those who will make the right free choices off their own backs and thus don’t need ‘nudging’; those who need to be ‘nudged’ but will realise, to a lesser or greater extent, that they have been; and those that will neither decide aright for themselves nor realise they have been nudged, so that all we can do is nudge them. This last camp are simply given up on in terms of being empowered to change their own behaviour, rather like the patrician classes of the nineteenth century thought the poor unworthy of education and suffrage.
He also highlights the naivety of ‘think’. If its approach to behaviour change is that we reflectively endorse all our choices according to deliberatively agreed goals, then this expects too much from human psychology and cognitive capacity. We can, from time to time, think in this way about what we are to do. But any new behaviour needs to bed down and become more or less automatic (people will take reusable bags to the shops not because they think about it every time they go shopping, but because it becomes habit, what everybody does). Policy which aims to get people thinking about every single thing they do is doomed to failure: the vast majority of people just do not and cannot work like that.
Learning is about behaviour change and it’s interesting to consider how ‘nudge’ and ‘think could be used in a learning context. By default a lot of learning programmes use the ‘think’ approach; information is communicated in an engaging way and time is given to reflect on the problem and its solution. For example a case study that describes the poor performance of a team can be used to build empathy with the main character, identify underlying problems and how they can best be tackled within the context of that situation.
However the weakness of the ‘think’ approach is its inability to convert ‘knowing’ to ‘doing’ and this is where nudges can support learning.
Donald Clark has identified a number of ways in which this can be done. The challenge for learning design is to build on this list and incorporate them into learning programmes.
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