The Softer Side of Behaviour Change

Behaviour Change is my job and it’s very easy to see it as just that, a job; just a process. The human side of it can become lost in the theories and equations and so on. But at its core behaviour change is about people.

Behaviour change is often criticised for being too mechanistic and harsh; more interested in the results and not the process. This is, in part, a holdover from the halcyon days of lab-rat testing and pidgeon-boxes of yore. Yet it is also down to the seemingly heartless way businesses re-organise to maximise efficiency – oh and get rid of some ballast along the way – and the way governments blithely ban or restrict activities they see as inappropriate (or worse, politically useful) and so behaviour change has become synonymous for some with things like the horrendous Soviet social experiments, and the austere white-coats of scientists in lab prodding and poking and shocking and starving animals all in the name of science.

But this is a myth.

Yes, once upon a time in days gone by behaviour was seen as something mechanical, to be reduced to equations and symbols (you can thank Watson and the Logical Positivists for that) but nowadays behaviour change is anything but mechanistic and reductionist!

A brilliant paper by Delprato and Midgely explores some of the aspects of Behaviour Analysis and put those (and other) myths to rest. But nonetheless the myths persist.

We are seen as manipulative and controlling; for example Nudge by Sunstein and Thaler was hailed as revolutionary in it’s simple portrayal of complex ideas that appealed to a broad audience, it showed how we can nudge behaviour to be better and more effective without restricting the freedom of the individual. 

Despite this the reaction from some was vehement – to say the least. People were shocked that governments could be inspired by such a supposedly totalitarian idea. This article here explains in the typically hyperbolic terms of sensationalist media how inevitably the nudge will become a shove, citing Mayor Bloomberg of New York’s efforts to control NY citizens behaviour, presumably alluding to the soda ban that hit the headlines recently, but completely ignoring the fact that outright bans are simply NOT allowed in Nudge theory.

So what can be done? Well better effort on our part to down-play the talk of controlling and manipulating and instead highlight the inherent freedom a behaviour change allows. The assumption of a lot of critics is this; we are behaving rationally but not in the way we are “supposed to” as defined by some shadowy agency. So along comes behaviour change techniques to force us round pegs into some government-approved square holes. This is simply not true; yes we can act rationally but we don’t. It’s learned. And it’s damn hard to actually learn.

Second we have to re-assess our own goals within the science. I am relatively new to academia and far be it from me to start demanding sweeping changes in the way we think and act. Yet, it seems to me, with the fresh eyes I bring, that a bit of positive PR would do us no end of good. Not to mention a focus on inter-disciplinary efforts to make our work more aesthetically pleasing to the man on the street, and in turn, more acceptable.

I don’t want to rattle on about this because it can become dry quickly but it’s worth remembering that what is perceived as behaviour change by the man on the Clapham omnibus and the scientists working on it can sometimes be at odds. This is our fault for not portraying it in proper terms. We aren’t against freedom, we aren’t against rationality, we aren’t against a good life. We don’t want big brother, we don’t want intrusive regulations where unnecessary, and we don’t want to control people like puppets.

I don’t have the answers, but maybe if we start asking the right questions the answers will come.