h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hiya, good to see you again at the meet, although didn't end up chatting much.
If you have any references or books titles on the economic psychology we were discussing - I think you mentioned you'd recently read a good one? - I'd be very grateful for them. Like you say, an interesting area but not one I know much about yet.

p.s. thought your t-shirt was ace!

Hiya! Good to chat to you again too! My tee shirt comes from the coelacanth conservation site, http://www.dinofish.com/ and the money helps to save an endagered species.

I haven't read any books but I made some notes when I first came across the idea we spoke about and did a bit more research. It's called Behavioural Economics and the key word to look for is a Nudge. The original book was by Thaler and Sunstein, called "Nudge - Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness".

The idea is that there are certain behavioural interventions, or cues, that can nudge people and encourage behaviour that they might have started or intended to. For example strategies for getting people to actually keep doctors appointments that they have made, making sure pledged donations to charity are paid up, paying taxes on time, reducing energy consumption and so on.

There's definitely a cognitive element to it. I first came across Behavioural Economics when I heard an interview on Radio 4 with Gerry Stoker from Southampton University who has written a paper "Nudge Nudge, Think Think". He was talking about the theory and gave the example of how the name of a benefit can influence what people spend the money on. So by naming a "Winter Fuel Allowance" it does seem to actually nudge people into using it on fuel, despite the fact that it is paid into accounts with no way to track what pensioners actually spend it on.

The government are very interested in using the behavioural sciences to meet policy challenges and mindspace is the website with more information about this. http://www.mindspace-online.org/

Another use is to use apathy in a positive way, so by making people auto enroll into something, eg organ donation, the assumption is that people will be too lazy to opt out. This will result in more organs available for donation than the present opting in scheme.

It's not really a new idea, maybe just an old idea with a new name. I remember being taught about Vance Packard's Hidden Persuaders, which is from the 1950s, and just today I was telling students about how Government policy can be included in soap opera plots, such as having characters talking whilst standing in front of a poster about sending back tax returns, or having people get new glasses, attend adult education and so on.

Perhaps today it's just not hidden, people are well aware that they are being nudged!

Just nudging this while you're online!

eep!
Sorry, I missed your reply

Nice use of 'nudge' there
I do recall seeing various things about nudge policies with the last govt., hadn't caught on to such with current. I'd thought it part of his Blairnesses 3rd way, but yes, I can see the links.

I suppose it may suffer academically from the negative associations with 'Behaviourism', although that seems to be receding with the new research and ideas coming out. I think there's also a bit of concern in some quarters about overt prodding of the populace by the govt. Weird they're against beneficial subtle things and not the more gross swaying of the electorate. But maybe the subtlety is it, they fear it is underhand and secretive.

Shall go do some reading though, thankyou for the links and your input, I shall be back