Nudging: How governments direct your behaviour
Nudging: How governments direct your behaviour (03:59)
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Welcome to lesson three, topic five: Nudging, how governments direct your behavior. Governments are increasingly using data collection to direct our behavior in different ways. This is called nudging. This term got populair back in 2008, when researchers Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler published their bestseller Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness. In this book they stated that Governments and companies shouldn’t force people to do certain things, but to seduce them. One of their examples was about obesity with American schoolchildren. Prohibiting them to get the unhealthy food would lead into them taking it with them their selves. But positioning the healty food in the front of the school canteen, made it so a lot of children chose the healthy food more often.
This is nudging in a nutshell: you know that when you force people to do things, you will trigger the opposite behavior. But when you seduce people into something while making them think they made the choice by their selves, you can change someones behavior. The taxation department of the government here in the Netherlands even has it’s own nudging unit called the Team of Behavioral Change. It’s goal is to make procrastinators pay their taxes in time. You could basically call this social control. Social control is a collection of different processes used to encourage certain type of behavior. Those techniques can be used for good and bad. It is basically impossible to change someones behavior without knowing how someone behaved in the past. This has led to the data hunger of public and private organizations. The more data you collect, the more you get to know about individuals and the easier nudging gets. If you know what drives someones behavior, then you know if that behavior matches your desired behavior.
Social control is not something that’s new. As long as governments exist they’ve been trying to steer a society into a desired direction. This varies from introducing certain laws, to enforcing it through the monopoly of violence. The same goes for companies, it’s basically called marketing. What is new however, is the technology that enables enormous amounts of data gathering, which can be used for social control. Behavioral data collection on a massive scale, that’s being used for behavioral control on a massive scale, to steer people into a desired outcome. You can basically say that the potential for nudging has never been as big as in current digital times.
Because when you, as a government or organization, make the decision to analyze someone’s behavior, where do you draw the line? So if you are a health insurance company that wants to make people make healthier decisions, for example: getting people to stop smoking, to drink less alcohol, to go out jogging more often, then you could make the argument that this is in the persons best interest. You pay less for your insurance and you are becoming healthier. But what if that smartwatch that the health-insurance is monitoring also detects when you are having sex, how long you are sleeping and how long you spend your time inside the house.
If we as a society accept social control on this scale, there will be no boundaries to the amount of data that will be used for nudging in the future. By being aware of this, you can take actions for your own personal life. See you in the next one.
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