Behaviour battles
Whether persuading us to give up smoking or stop carrying knives, politicians are making behaviour change a goal of policy. But will it make us mend our ways? By Matthew Taylor
JUST A FEW YEARS AGO the idea of behaviour change as a goal of policy might have seemed vaguely sinister, and to some people it still is. But starting with the 2004 report on changing behaviour from the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, this concept in its various forms has become a central part of social and public policy debate.
Yet the goal of all policy is at some level to change behaviour, so why has this idea taken on such significance and is it at all useful as a frame for developing and evaluating policy?
The emphasis on behaviour change can be seen to reflect the pursuit of different (in practice, overlapping) objectives. Despite rising public spending in the post-war decades, key social problems persisted and new ones emerged.
Defenders of welfare provision faced a crisis of legitimacy. In particular, welfare recipients were widely portrayed as becoming dependent, and sometimes exploiting their status.
In response to this, modernising progressives sought to re-legitimise welfare, a strategy summed up in Bill Clinton’s promise to provide a hand-up, not a hand-out. This theme was taken up by New Labour in the New Deal programme, which made explicit that those rejecting the routes to employment and training offered would see welfare benefits withdrawn. This idea of conditionality is a subset of a wider communitarian commitment to rights and responsibilities going hand in hand.
It is now conventional for any announcement about new or additional provision to the public (especially the disadvantaged) to be accompanied by a strong statement about the conditions attached. Conditionality is not just about legitimacy. It is often argued that those to whom it applies also benefit; the disadvantaged need clear signals and incentives if they are to try to improve their lives.
But as well as applying to a strata of society, behaviour change has extended into a set of behaviours (often but not always legal) deemed too destructive to the individual and society. Thus behaviour change has become a key objective of public health and environmental policy, in areas ranging from obesity to recycling, from sexual health to energy use.
Generally, the idea of behaviour change focuses on strategies of communication and incentive rather than legal compulsion. It is noteworthy that even in relation to smoking, a legal ban on lighting up in public places was justified on the classic liberal grounds of defending the rights of the innocent non-smoker. Supporters of the policy are now pointing to higher smoking cessation rates as evidence of success. It seems it is only when the change has been safely implemented that policy makers are willing to admit paternalistic motives.
As the explicit aim of behaviour change spreads first from the disadvantaged to any of us deemed to be behaving in self-destructive or anti-social ways, so it takes on a more positive connotation.
It has long been commonplace to recognise that the outcomes of public services depend on the ways in which the public use those services. Thus health treatment is more effective if patients pay regard to health advice, schooling is more successful if parents get their children to follow school rules and read and study at home, policing is more powerful if the community is also committed to crime prevention and detection.
This insight challenges the idea of public service ‘delivery’ with its connotation of service users as passive recipients. The government is placing ever more emphasis on user satisfaction in public service evaluation; it was, for example, an important strand of Lord Darzi’s NHS recent review (see box). Building on this, it is likely that future evaluation of public services will contain explicit measures of success in shaping user behaviours.
Research and innovation result from, and add to, the growing interest in behaviour change. Public policy makers must now have a decent grounding in subjects such as behavioural economics, social psychology and even neuroscience. The rational utility-maximising man of neo-liberal economic theory has been replaced by a more complex, idiosyncratic, game-playing subject. We are all becoming experts in the apparently hard-wired decision-making heuristics (rules of thumb) that lead people to put the short term over the long term, to follow the crowd and to fill in missing knowledge by what is expected rather than what is there. The goals of behaviour change have also driven innovation ranging from new forms of social marketing (‘five a day’, for example) to emerging models of co-production (the Expert Patient Programme is often cited).
For argument’s sake
While we would all presumably like policy to be based on the best knowledge available about what influences behaviour, the more ambitious claims made for behaviour change strategy are subject to several important critiques. For libertarians, the idea of government seeking to manipulate public behaviour can be seen as a further unwelcome extension of the state’s reach. For some on the left there are the criticisms, first, that conditionality seems only to be applied to the disadvantaged and thus is a form of victim blaming and second, that policies which reward active service users may give extra benefits to those with more confidence and influence. Many schools are ambivalent about putting greater emphasis on parental engagement as this could further disadvantage and stigmatise those from poorer families. Finally, many social scientists object to the simplistic and overblown claims of behaviour change, pointing out that behaviours are complex, reflexive and socially embedded.
These are all legitimate objections, but they are unlikely to reverse the growing interest in behaviour change driven as it is by powerful social, fiscal and political forces. Indeed, behaviour change can be seen to figure in what is emerging as the key ideological battleground between Labour and the Conservatives.
David Cameron’s party is developing what can be seen as their own third way. Whereas Thatcherite Conservatives eschewed social ambition and were sceptical about the state and Labour has tended to combine a big social project with confidence in the capacity of the state, today’s Tories seek to combine a commitment to goals such as social justice and community cohesion with a critique of big government. This is what opposition ministers mean when they talk about pursuing ‘progressive ends through Conservative means’. Responding to the Tory critique and to public perceptions that services are not delivering value for money, Labour has sought to make the case for an ‘enabling state’.
Ministers promise greater decentralisation to local government and local institutions and more power to service users, including innovations like personal budgets in social care that were until very recently seen as highly controversial.
The parties seem willing, for once, to agree on what they disagree about. Labour ministers and progressive commentators like Polly Toynbee warn loudly about the impact on public services and poor communities of the Conservative approach, while Opposition spokespeople lose no opportunity to attack what they see as the innate statism of the Brown government. Intriguingly, both parties face a credibility gap.
In my interview with Oliver Letwin, I asked for some examples of the kind of civic initiatives the Tories rely upon to take up the place of a retreating state. He offered Dick Atkinson and his campaign against curb crawling. However, this example must be a decade old and its high profile underlines the relative rarity of successful community initiatives in poorer areas.
Also, the implicit Tory faith in charities may seem misplaced. Not only are many not-for-profits as guilty of ‘producer capture’ as the most offending public sector agencies, many are deeply wedded to an ‘old left’ structural account of disadvantage.
The Conservatives will need stronger evidence that civil society can square the circle of social ambition and a receding state. Labour can point to real gains in public service performance, for example, shorter average NHS waiting times and a declining number of ‘failing’ schools, but it is far from clear that those communities most dependent on the state have been ‘empowered’ by ten years of Labour rule. Some disadvantaged estates have seen real improvements but for most the dependency culture appears alive and well.
Furthermore, new public concerns like the epidemic of knife crime in London leave state agencies seemingly powerless to address either the expressions or the causes of social dislocation (see ‘Final word’ for more on this issue). Labour is trying to tackle some of the most deep-seated drivers of disadvantage such as worklessness and family dysfunction. It will need a more compelling story of successful behaviour change to respond to public scepticism.
New research, like the RSA’s own work on ‘pro-social behaviour’, improved data and more powerful computing power will offer policy makers ever more sophisticated models to understand social norms and habits. We, the public, will no doubt continue to behave in ways that appear harmful to ourselves and others.
And yet, policy makers have still not found a convincing strategy to close what I call the social aspiration gap; between the future we say we want and the future we are going to create relying on current models of thought and behaviour. Maybe a reformed state can genuinely empower us to be better citizens. Maybe it will take a power shift from the state to charities and community groups.
One thing is certain: as the battle wages over the state’s future, the new science of behaviour change will provide weaponry for both sides.
Further reading
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Matthew Taylor is Chief Executive of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA). Visit: www.thersa.org
