ABSTRACT
The past two decades have seen concerted shifts in the rationales, techniques and methods of public policy making and governance, which have been well documented in social and political science (Rhodes, 1997; Newman, 2001; Bovaird and Löffler, 2003; Le Grand, 2003). Since at least the late 1990s, there has been an increased policy emphasis on enhancing citizen involvement in government through personalising responsibility, tailoring public services to citizen-consumers and co-producing policy in dialogue with representative communities. These changes have been particularly marked in the UK. Yet conversely, we have also witnessed a move away from the traditional channels of representative parliamentary democracy towards the increasing dominance of expert-and evidence-based policy, focusing on ‘what works’ – a trend prevalent in both the UK and the USA (Sanderson, 2002). This has included more experimental forms of policy trialling, development and adaptation that are informed by ‘design thinking’ (Bason, 2014) and ‘nudging’ people towards making decisions in their own best interests by shaping the environments in which decisions are made and clearing the psychological ground for more rational behaviours (Thaler and Sunstein, 2008). This move is inspired by a perceived need to innovate, to provide creative, future-proof solutions and to adopt policies shaped around the needs, aptitudes and indeed the technological and behavioural habits of service ‘users’. Such design thinking has been prominent in countries such as Denmark and Singapore and, more recently, in the UKwhere the Government Office for Science Foresight team, the Cabinet Office Policy Lab and the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) have played key roles. There is now also a sense within the policy-making process that pragmatic,
efficient and cost-effective policy change can and should be delivered through new forms of discursive fora and co-produced through participatory engagement with citizens (Mahony, 2010). This can involve, for instance, getting the best experts in a room together and ‘workshopping’ ideas, rapid prototyping, agile development, experimentation, trials, local pilot projects and rolling out change through government innovation networks, perhaps communicated through stylish infographics and facilitated by market research companies, social marketers and communications agencies. Crucially, these new forms of public policy making represent citizens’ needs, values, attitudes, preferences and
behaviours to policy-makers through specifically mediated channels, such as public opinion polling, focus group research or community consultation initiatives. Sometimes those mediators are academic researchers, perhaps giving evidence to parliamentary or presidential committees, conferences or proceedings. They might also be more self-organising groups such as political lobbyists, pressure groups, advocacy organisations or initiators of online petitions. But increasingly, it is a cadre of behavioural experts and consultants operating within the commercial or social enterprise sphere who are called upon to provide policy advice and contribute to policy strategy, design, testing and implementation. In all these cases, considerable work goes into constructing authoritative claims to knowing how and why citizens behave in certain ways and how their behaviour can be changed in the course of addressing specific policy problems. In this context, the ‘behaviour change industry’ has emerged as a body of
actors – sometimes governmental, sometimes commercial, sometimes third sector organisations (and often a mixture of these) – who are skilled in identifying, delimiting, measuring, modelling, changing and evaluating the behaviour of individual citizens, communities or particular social groups. In particular, this industry draws on a medical paradigm (e.g. randomised controlled trials – see John, this volume) and the theoretical precepts and experimental methods associated with psychology, behavioural economics and neuroscience as both rationale for and means of achieving specific public policy goals. This behaviour change industry has only recently grown in global significance, playing a crucial role in shaping psychological forms of governance. The notion of an emergent industry denotes the work and effort that has been involved in the construction of contemporary formations of psychological governance. This book considers the research, policy and practical challenges associated
with psychological governance where behavioural change is posed as a means and an end of liberal governance. We define psychological governance as forms of largely state-orchestrated public policy activity (though ‘non-state’ actors are widely involved) that aim to shape the behaviour of individuals, social groups or whole populations through the deployment of the insights of behavioural and psychological sciences. The book considers the varied scope and scale of psychological governance techniques and examines to what extent we can talk of a co-ordinated shift in governance as opposed to a pragmatic set of techniques for improving the efficacy of policy-making in straightened financial times. Contributing authors provide analytical accounts of the wider political significance of psychological governance by investigating what kinds of knowledge claims are made in support of it, its historical and sociological significance, how it operates and its methodological precepts, and its effects in terms of citizen-subject formation and the framing of social and mental problems. Psychological governance specifically denotes (public, commercial and/or
non-governmental) interventions targeted at the interface of conscious and non-conscious thought and action, connecting emotional response and rational deliberation. Chief Executive of the UK’s BIT, David Halpern, has described this interface in the following terms:
Behind the shroud of our consciousness, a myriad processes race to work out what is going on in the world around us, and how we should respond… our brains ceaselessly infer, overlay and interpret new information and memories. It’s an incredible performance.
