Well that was the headline anyway … Firstly, the report didn’t actually attack nudging, only that it shouldn’t be applied in isolation and secondly the media reports seem to miss the fact that the select committee’s report was based on two case studies. One of those case studies was all about encouraging a significant reduction in car use, if we are to have any chance of meeting agreed carbon reduction targets. However, I’ve not seen any significant press coverage on this point.

The Baroness’ select committee report, apparently, at least attacks civil servants for their interpretation of the steer that they are getting from their political masters, or possibly the policies themselves.  On one hand, the Government are stating a preference for the consideration of behaviour science techniques (which the scrutiny committee applauded);  but at the same time, they are also taking away the financial freedoms for Government Departments to be able to do anything else anyway. The select committee argues that the nudge alone is not enough.

On the Today programme, the Times columnist, Philip Collins, argued that there is an ideology behind nudging: “There’s a feeling that it’s better if things are done in a voluntary way, rather than through regulation and the state.”  But, both agreed that nudging was only part of the solution. Philip trotted out defaults the classic examples of auto-enrolment on pensions, organ donation and “save more tomorrow schemes”. 

The truth behind the headlines, as ever, is more balanced. For instance, one of the key recommendations from the select committee report  is that the Government should appoint an independent Chief Social Scientist to provide them with robust and independent scientific advice and to advise and shape the development of such policies. If the Sub-Committee really felt that these policies had no part to play then what would be the point of such an advisor. The BBC was just trying to make a headline, along with previous ones such as “Nudge or Fudge ?”.

That isn’t to say that nudges are the ultimate panacea. Of course, many times we will need to consider the environment (such as regulation) within which  nudges will sit. If you’ve read Thaler’s book, you’ll know that the first “[i]N” in Nudge stands for incentives – he never saw “pure social science” standing alone. However, what is important with the behaviour science approach is to design the overall package of measures together so that they can be mutually re-enforcing. We all know what if we hear nine pieces of advice that we don’t like, but just one that we do like; then we’re much more likely to take comfort in the tenth piece of information as it sits nicely with our current world view and gives us an excuse not to have to change.

Baroness Neuberger also challenged whether there was any catalogued evidence that nudging works, at a societal level.  She felt the case had only been proven at an individual level.  She argued that you may get a marginal difference in individual behaviour; but the Government are not doing the evaluations correctly when applied to a population.  With organ donation, she argued that actually the thing that would make the difference was training of the staff.  (It is that classic problem that in the real world, you can never set up an “experiment” such that you can only change one thing at a time – not at a realistic level, for a topic that matters quite so much – and hence you can never be quite sure which of the interventions that you made that be be credited with causing the difference.)

Of course, there is a massive “Catch 22” situation in this argument. Unless we undertake the interventions then we’ve got no chance of being able to gather the appropriate evidence. Also, it is a brave project manager, who cancels something essential for his own project in favour funding the evidential framework in order to assess whether the intervention worked in practice and support future projects. (The solution, by the way, is for the programme manager to set the context and mandate the use of the appropriate evidential frameworks and to give the project manager freedom to set financial priorities within his project.  It also takes the right culture for the project manager and the programme manager to be prepared to willingly cut entire projects – even their own – because there aren’t sufficient funds to do “everything necessary” and it is better to do everything necessary on a smaller number of projects than it is to do a large number of parts of projects.  Unfortunately, such cuts don’t necessarily make the best PR when communicating this approach.)

Completely missing from the headlines was the fact that one of the two case studies that the Select Committee looked at was: reducing the reliance of the British public on the car.

One of their specific recommendations from the Select Committee was that the Government should:

(a)  establish and publish targets for a reduction in carbon emissions as a result of a reduction in car use;

(b) publish an estimate of the percentage reduction in emissions which will be achieved through  reducing car use and  the timescale for its achievement; and

(c) set out details of the steps they will take if this percentage reduction is not achieved by this time.

You can listen again to Tuesday’s Radio 4 Today Programme (at 07:50) at: bbc.

You can see a slightly longer video report by the Baroness on the www.parliament.uk site.

You can also download the reports there at:

As I write this, the remaining tickets are for a handful of sports including: volleyball,  football, women’s boxing, women’s weightlifting and wrestling. This got me wondering on the subject of my last blog post which was all about how humans make decisions, not in an absolute way but instead they apply heuristics (or short-cuts) based upon relativity.

The London Games provide a great example of this. Take a sport like volleyball – a pretty exciting sport. A team game that is great to watch. Why did it fare so badly in the popularity stakes ? One answer is relativity. There is another sister sport:  beach volleyball which is basically very similar and where the sessions are priced very similarly.  For both category E tickets are priced at about £20 to £65 and category A tickets span the £100 mark.

The differences are that for virtually no cost, you can get a “super-improved option” in which volleyball gets “souped up”.  Add a bit of glamour, add an iconic venue in Horseguards parade, add a bit of sex-appeal .. and the beach volleyball tickets go like hot cakes. What is weird though is the volleyball tickets actually fare much worse, just because they got “bench-marked” against their sexier cousin. If they’d been compared to other similar sports like basketball or handball, then perhaps the tickets would have sold more quickly; however the comparison is harder to make so the simple human brain sticks with the easy comparison. What could be easier to compare than the addition of “beach” on the front of the name of the sport ? Luckily, for athletics, there weren’t options for  “beach decathlons”, “beach marathons” or “beach discus”.

There is, of course, an element of “herd mentality” in here too.  Beach volleyball tickets were selling like hot-cakes; therefore they sell even faster. Perhaps there is something to do with a (logical) view that their re-sale value will be higher; but mostly likely it is human instinct for humans to join to herd and go for the tickets that their peers are buying to.

There we go … …. Behavioural science, even in the selection of Olympic tickets.

Rory describes that the problem is that most train journeys start with a car journey.  Hence,  he describes modal shift as an “asymmetric decision” because the vast majority of time, you take the decision on whether to get the train when you’re already in a car. There is all sorts of extra anxiety such as “When is my train ?”, “Is it running on time ?”,  “Will I get a parking space ?”, “Will the car be safe ?”, “Have I got change to buy a parking ticket ?”.  Hence, it is much easier to stick with the status quo and stay in that warm comfy car.

Hence, the technological solution – the journey planner – can help lift the decision-making into a fair playing field. Journey planners, such as Transport Direct, allow the would-be traveller to make the decision on how to travel before they set out.  The best course of action might still be the car, but at least the options are more likely to be considered fairly.

Quick link (whilst I sort out the embed feature).

Undoubtedly, it can really help for your idea to be “sticky” so that it catches on, and hence it helps if you are able to articulate it quickly and succinctly. Thus, there are a lot of benefits to a sound-bite culture and some would argue that it is an absolute necessity.  I’ve previously blogged about memes and their importance in behavioural change.

Today’s post was penned on AV referendum day (or super-Thursday as it has been coined) has largely been cribbed from the Independent with my own slant added. Two related stories caught my attention, because they cast doubt on whether social media is 100% a good thing and how we need to exercise caution when quoting others. The two articles were:

• How the No campaign twisted Clegg’s words, and
• Credit where credit is not due.

The conspiracy theorist in me then got wondering whether the two articles were connected … …

1) “AV is a dirty little compromise” – This is a true quote from Nick Clegg, one which he probably regrets, but he did say it. The No campaign have certainly capitalised on it.  My first key point is  about quoting other people.  Even if the quote might be perfectly accurate, it doesn’t mean that it is set within the right context. In this case, it is important to both look at the context of within which Clegg actually made this statement and the wider context at the time. I think this is a general danger for quotations and dealing with the media, who both like to boil a subject down to its essence and also turn it into something newsworthy. After all, they have to “sell copy”. (Equally, we have to sell our ideas in behavioural change campaigns.)

In this case, the wider context was mid the live US-style television debates for the last election, which resulted the coining of the phenomenum Cleggmania. The Liberal Democrats were being courted by both Labour and Conservatives alike, but at the time, still during the election, Clegg was rightly sticking to his guns on what his party stood for.

The full quote is:

“AV is a baby step in the right direction – only because nothing can be worse than the status quo.  If we want to change British politics once and for all, we have got to have a quite simple system in which everyone’s votes count. We think AV-plus is a feasible way to proceed.

The Labour Party assumes that changes to the electoral system are like crumbs for the Liberal Democrats from the Labour table. I am not going to settle for a miserable little compromise thrashed out by the Labour Party.”

I think you’ll agree that the full quote puts quite a different context onto what Clegg actually said, especially when it is viewed in the context of the time and the on-going electoral hustings. For instance, who at that time, would have predicted a Conservative / Liberal Democrat Coalition ?

We’ll have to wait for the votes to be counted to see whether the Yes or No campaigns won the argument with the public.

2) The second piece was  by Natalie Haynes in Viewspaper and had the headline:  “Credit where credit is not due?”.  There were three or four social media angles to the death of Osama Bin Laden that Natalie could have taken. Firstly, the news was apparently first broken on Twitter.  Secondly, we watched the viral effect of news headlines in which the typo: “Obama Bin Laden” was spread around the world even in traditional news media.  However, Natalie’s article focussed on the apparent quotation from Martin Luther King, which spread like wild fire on the Twitter-o-sphere: “I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.”

For those people concerned about the glorification of another person’s death, the quotation seemed to capture the moment and was tweeted around the world. The only problem was that Martin Luther King never actually said it, instead it was traced to an English teacher working in Japan. I’m not sure that quoting the previously unknown Jessica Dovey has quite the same cache, but nevertheless the captured the mood of a significant proportion of the Western population.

The second key point is that things that are catchy might not necessarily be fully accurate, but perhaps they are “good enough” for their purpose?

Out of interest, King’s actual quote was (although there will be a real irony, if I get this wrong, especially as I have just copied it from the internet):

“Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that.”

Dovey’s quote got added in to King’s words, then for reasons of space in Twitter’s 140-character limit, her quote became King’s. Except he never said it. Twitter is just an exaggerated case of how our stories get truncated and simplified, if they are to spread.

Above I mentioned the possibility of a conspiracy theory – perhaps, the editor of the Independent was seeking to re-enforce the meme that “memes are flawed” in that edition of the paper, because he felt that the largest AV meme was currently not pro-AV and hence was detrimental to his message. He might have wanted to change the media landscape.

However, if there is a choice, I nearly always plump for the cock-up theory over and above the conspiracy nature. It’s just inherent in our human nature. We make mistakes. We are flawed.

They had been invited in to study a day care centre in Israel to discover whether the introduction of a fine for parents arriving late to pick up little Jonny would act as a useful deterrent. They concluded that the fine wasn’t a very effective deterrent and worse than that it has long-term negative effects. Before the introduction of the fine; there was a social contract in place and hence there were effective social norms about it being unacceptable to keep the carers waiting and in standing out so far from the other crowd of timekeeping parents. In this case (in Israel), the guilt from keeping people waiting, made parents think twice before doing it again. Persistent offenders found the peer pressure from the other Mums (and Fathers) unacceptable. However, after the introduction of the fining system, the nursery inadvertently replaced the social norms and the social contract with market norms and a market contract. Now that the parents were paying for their tardiness, they could now make a judgement as to whether the impact of them having to leave on time outweighed the fines that they knew would be imposed. The number of cases of parents arriving late increased, not decreased, after the introduction of the fine. (Perhaps, they set the value wrong; but I’ve got no information on that.)

However, the story then took an interesting turn for the worse. Recognising the error of their ways, the nursery then decided to remove the fine. They figured that they would then be back to the social contract. Right ? – Wrong ! Once the fine was removed, the behaviour of the parents did not reverse. In fact, when the fine was removed there was a further slight increase in the number of late pick-ups by parents. After all, both of the social restorative effect and the market force had been removed.

The moral of the story is that once a social norm collides with a market norm, the social norm goes away for a long time. In other words, social relationships are not easy to re-establish.

My next post applies this behavioural economics to the implementation of road pricing in the UK and cautions transport policy makers to “mind the gap”.

It was mostly a political decision and an electoral campaign pledge but Boris has consulted widely and the result was that the central congestion charging zone should stay, but the western extension zone should go. London joins an elite band of cities who have actually implemented road pricing and then decided to turn it off. In the rest of the country, many cities have struggled to even get on the band wagon: Manchester, Edinburgh and Cambridge all had negative referenda and voted against road pricing (or, in Manchester’s case, against a £1.6bn investment in the transport infrastructure of the City). However, London is now prepared to jump off the band wagon, or at least within one foot anyway. So what happens when you jump off the wagon ?

On hearing a talk from TfL about the forthcoming changes to the zone, I was reminded of some great behavioural science about a nursery in Israel which decided to fine parents who turned up late to pick up their children. What’s interesting in that case is what happened when they decided to take the fine away.

Professor Dan Ariely describes it really eloquently in his book: “Predictably Irrational”. We live in one of two worlds. One world is characterised by social exchanges, the other is characterised by monetary transactions. Unfortunately, these two worlds cannot co-exist. Imagine that you’ve been invited around to your first Christmas meal with your new girlfriend and her family. Her mum cooks up a sumptuous feast and there is everything there that makes the meal special: sausages in blankets, your favourite stuffing, both turkey and ham interlaced together … You get the idea. But, imagine the sound of the “scratching of the record”, as you get up and stretch and proclaim what an amazing dinner that was. However, instead of offering to wash the dishes, instead you break open your wallet and offer to pay for your share of the meal. This approach just doesn’t sit well within the social world. It jars and it grates and it destroys any social relationships. The world of social exchanges, where people amicably take it in turns, return favours and think of each other; and the world of monetary exchanges where we expect hard-nosed contractual arrangements just cannot co-exist. And, the policy-maker who tries to combines these two worlds in his policies does so at his peril.

Unwittingly, the nursery in Israel broke the social norms by introducing the fining system in the first place, and then when it didn’t work for them, they ended up with the perception of a fine that just happened to be set at zero. Social relationships are not that easy to re-establish. As Professor Ariely puts it “once the bloom is off the rose, or once the social norm is trumped by a market norm, it will rarely return.” The owners of the Israeli nursery found that they then had a double whammy working against them and the parents became even more tardy at picking up their children. After all, there was now no social contract and the economic contract had also been taken away.

So the question is: Will London’s road system grind to a halt on 4th January 2011 ?

1) If we want to be innovative, Cleese advises us to create a “tortoise enclosure” i.e. to create boundaries in time and space which help to avoid interuptions and destroy the creative flow.

2) When it comes to creativity, the subconscious brain does the vast majority of the heavy lifting. In just the same way that humour can be laboured, when the so-called comedian tries too hard and uses the conscious brain; so it is true of creativity. When we have a mental block, Cleese advises us to “sleep on it”, because unconsciously stuff just continues to get better, to such a degree that sometimes we can’t even remember what the mental block was the next day.

3) An amazing implication of the unconscious brain taking the strain is that the brain continues to work on the masterpiece even after the conscious brain has moved onto new things (or the deadline has passed).

This has a down-side: Because the unconscious brain keeps working on your masterpiece after you have submitted, then in your head your masterpiece continues to get better and better. Of course, the physical deliverable just says the same, which can lead to you remembering it as great masterpiece (which unfortunately, it might just not have had time to become). You might not want to admit it, but does this ring any bells ?

There is an up-side as well: Ever spent ages on something that you’ve then lost before you had time to deliver it ? How annoying is that ? What seems most gaulling is that you’ve already spent all of that time, but then at some point you need to cut your losses looking for it, and decide to write it again from scratch. But, once you reach that point; do you know what happens ? Not only, do you write your masterpiece much more quickly second time around; but also you benefit from that sub-conscious brain and it comes out better second time around. Not quite sure I’m suggesting loosing your work to make it better; but don’t worry so much if it does go astray.

First up is supposed to be Norman Baker, Transport Minister. He’s the first ever transport minister to have responsibility for alternatives to travel!

Low Carbon future must happen at the same time as creating jobs.

Govt is committed. Transport fared well in CSR as it is investment for the future.

Stimulation at consumer and supplier end of a new market eg new bus fund.

Carsharing, cycling and walking all still get investment.

Focus is on behavioural changes for journeys of 5 miles or less. Cycling and walking have a good return, by any form of economic analysis. Plus, evidence suggests that shoppers actually buy more, when they travel in by sustainable transport. (minister quipped about “I’m not sure but perhaps they spend what they saved on their parking fee?”).

£560M for local sustainable transport fund in urban areas.

Reducing the need to travel by virtual working. Exciting agenda. As per my intro.

The timing was interesting, as it came about just as an application purporting to be TfL’s “official” journey planning application made it onto the app store, but only for one day, when it was subsequently pulled. The @MadProf is a member of London’s Digital Advisory Board and long-time proponent of open innovation tells the story in his blog and the subsequent post. Not seen a post yet giving any insight into whether this was indeed discussed at the last Digital Board meeting.

I came across the second emerging saga via @Paul_clarke on Twitter. This saga involves the second behemoth of the traveller information industry: ATOC or NRES (the Association of Train Operating Companies and their National Rail Enquiries Service). You can read this saga of the disappearing APIs in following blog post. NRES currently charge £4.99 for their official application on the UK iTune store.

There is, of course, a big difference between TfL and NRES. TfL are a public body and hence have been lent on heavily by the Greater London Authority with their datastore initiative. NRES are a private body and hence for them the choice of business model is commercial decision. There are pros and cons of embracing open innovation and according to the post above, their intentions appear to be much more financial in nature. The Chief Executive of NRES tells a different story in his blog in which he heralds initiatives such as NRES on Facebook.

If innovation is to flourish, it is essential that innovators and ther innovations are encouraged. I’ll be intrigued to watch this one play out …

What’s different about Laurie’s talk is the idea that some of our terrible human habits might be 35 million years old. The basis for some of why we eat too much, smoke too much, munch our way through stale popcorn at the cinema, don’t save up for the future etc. etc. can lie in some behavioural traits that date back to when we were primates. Our travel habits, such as the heads-down commute, have the same genesis and hence there is no wonder when we have 35 million years of baggage that perhaps we have trouble shaking off some of our old habits. There’s truth to the adage that old habits die hard. But I hadn’t quite realised how old some of these habits are. The dice are loaded against us, so no wonder we need quite a lot of help to help ourselves.

Hope you enjoy this as much as I did.