Government using ‘nudges’ to change bad habits

Tiny tweaks to our environment are subsciously encouraging Britons to break bad habits from speeding to drinking sugar-laden drinks, the Government’s so-called “nudge unit” has revealed.

Successful experiments include “putting ‘stop’ signs on shelves next to sugary drinks in three hospital stores in Liverpool and rewriting letters to drivers caught speeding in the West Midlands to draw attention to why speed limits are set,” The Guardian reports.

In both instances, there was a noticeable change in behaviour - 7.3% fewer sugary drinks were sold while the signs were in place, while the number of speeders reoffending within six months of being sent the updated letters dropped by a fifth.

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The policies are the brainchild of Whitehall’s Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), which is charged with finding creative small-scale solution with the potential to bring about major social shifts.

The potential of “nudges” to bring about behavioural change is a subject of increasing interest to social scientists and governments around the world. Earlier this month, the Nobel Prize for Economics was awarded to American academic Richard Thaler for his work on “nudge theory”.

His work is credited with helping economists build better prediction tools, replaced old models that failed to account for the extent to which human caprice can prevent us from embracing the most rational course of action.

For instance, “if we find a fine old bottle of port in the attic, we might refuse to sell it for hundreds of pounds, even though we would not dream of spending a three figure sum on a bottle of anything,” says the Financial Times.

Nudge theory examines how small changes can subconsciously steer people away from these irrational instincts to produce more logical and beneficial outcomes.

Civil service chief Sir Jeremy Heywood applauded the work of the BIT. “As the first government unit in the world dedicated to the application of behavioural approaches to policymaking, the team has brought novel solutions to the most persistent policy challenges,” he said.

The unit’s next task will be to “examine the links between human responses to uncertainty and business decision-making in the run-up to leaving the EU,” The Times reports.