Sustainable & Resilient Economy — October 12, 2015

Behavioral Sciences: The Key to Our Sustainable future?

A recent Executive Order from The White House indicates that insights from the behavioral sciences “can be used to design government policies to better serve the American people.” The order calls for executive departments and agencies to recruit behavioral scientists that can help increase the effectiveness of policy mechanisms. The assumption is that strategic framing of information presented to the American public, as well as careful structuring of the decision options, can encourage more consistent, thoughtful and informed decisions.

A “good” decision is often defined as one that reflects the values that an individual holds dear. Research on human values has identified a relatively small set of values that are shared across the globe, such as freedom, happiness, equality, pleasure and security. However, it is quite clear that to pursue all these goals simultaneously is challenging, if not impossible. A classic example is the conflict between the pursuit of pleasure in the short-term versus security in the long-term. For example, we may neglect our retirement savings in order to buy a luxury car, but years later we may wish that we had the foresight to make a different choice.

A major finding that emerged from the study of these challenging value-based tradeoffs is the idea that individual preferences are inconsistent, malleable, and highly dependent on the decision context. For example, studies have found that public support for addressing climate change in the United States varies with the weather (increasing on days when it is hot, and decreasing on days when it is cold). Even more problematic, we don't often realize what influences our choices, yet we are quite skilled at rationalizing our behavior after the fact.

Two lines of research in the behavioral sciences are particularly relevant to dealing with inconsistent preferences, and engaging the public in more informed decision making. One focuses on how information needs to be presented to work with, rather than against, existing beliefs and to motivate someone to take action. This strategic framing of information can help to overcome short-sightedness and a host of other biases in human decision making.

A second line of research focuses on the idea of “nudging” individuals to make better decisions. For example, individuals are unlikely to opt-out of a default option, so the “architects” that design the choice (like the government) can formulate the default option to support a desired outcome for the collective good. Of course, it is important to ensure that this paternalistic approach is not abused and that individuals still have the ability to freely choose what they think is best.

Ultimately, no innovation can be effective without accounting for human behavior. History is littered with well-intentioned policies and technologies that failed to achieve the intended outcomes because decision makers did not account for the behavioral responses of their intended audience. (A notable example in Mozambique is the misuse of mosquito nets intended to protect public health.) The lesson here is that policy makers should take advantage of the wealth of knowledge available in behavioral science to ensure more successful policy outcomes.

See these resources for more information:

Slovic, P. (1995). The construction of preference. American Psychologist, 50, 364-371.

Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2009). Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth and happiness: Penguin Books.

Wilson, R. S., Hardisty, D. J., Epanchin-Niell, R. S., Runge, M. C., Cottingham, K. L., Urban, D. L., . . . Peters, D. P. C. (2015). A typology of time-scale mismatches and behavioral interventions to diagnose and solve conservation problems. Conservation Biology. doi: 10.1111/cobi.12632

Hardisty, D. J., Orlove, B., Krantz, D. H., Small, A., Milch, K., & Osgood, D. E. (2012). "About time: An integrative approach to effective environmental policy". Global Environmental Change: Human and Policy Dimensions, 22, 684-694.

Robyn Wilson

The Ohio State University

Robyn Wilson is an Associate Professor in the School of Environment and Natural Resources. She studies individual decision making process under risk and uncertainty, specifically the interplay between experiential and analytic information processing and the influence this has on risk perception and ultimately judgment or choice behavior.