By Dan Williams
When President Trump took office nearly five months ago, he disbanded the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team, which was created by President Barack Obama in September 2015. During its existence, the team’s goal was to apply research from social science to make federal programs better at serving people.
Obama had experience with using behavioral science. A reputed “dream team” of academic behavioral scientists served as pro bono consultants for Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, and they may well have been the difference in an election that was all but a foregone conclusion.
Depending on your intuition about the trustworthiness of the federal government, you either think it’s a good idea to introduce behavioral science into governance or you think it’s another step in the creation of a more intrusive, more annoying, more paternalistic federal government.
For my part, I remain suspicious. It is easy to see that this can make the elitist system we live under better at manipulating populist sentiment, better at creating the illusion of a consensus, and therefore more resistant to reform, more distant from people. But I will admit that some of my instinctual reactions were quelled by the book that popularized the idea of using behavioral science in government.
The book is Nudge, by Professors Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, published in 2008. (Thaler was on Obama’s “dream team.”) I recommend it, especially to those who share my suspicions. It’s worth noting that Thaler and Sunstein come from the free-market oriented, hyper-rational University of Chicago, whose Economics Department is no friend of socialism. If it finds a position called “libertarian paternalism” coherent and acceptable, it’s worth considering.
So, what’s to prevent a government from using behavioral science to not-so-gently “nudge” us in a direction that is not in our interests but in the interests of the ruling class?
Nothing, really, except for transparency and what is called the “publicity principle” (basically, government cannot enact policies that it wouldn’t or couldn’t defend publicly). If you don’t believe that transparency and the publicity principle can serve as adequate principles for maintaining a leash on legitimate government, then you aren’t really arguing against governmental use of behavioral science so much as against legitimate government altogether.
If you think that there is no difference between a government and a corporation, in other words, that both act purely out of self-interest, then you don’t have much of an argument for a government that is distinguishable from a corporation in the first place. And the bottom line is that if the government is doing it, you can bet the private corporations are light years ahead.
And this is another reason to feel less queasy about the government using behavioral science. We are already eyeballs deep in the “attention economy.” A great deal of thought, money, and behavioral science goes into monopolizing our attention. This is how Facebook makes money: by getting 2 billion people to click on an advertisement .003 percent more than they would.
Ever wonder why you spend five hours a day on your smartphone? Ever wonder why you consistently regret the time you spend on Snapchat? It’s no mystery. Your attention is their money, and there are powerful techniques in place to bring us back to them.
The government, at least, is mandated to act with our best interests in mind. The same does not apply to the private sector. If transparency is maintained, there’s good reason to believe that behavioral science can streamline a bulky federal government. Still worried? Read a book about the science of persuasion (such as Nudge) and inoculate yourself.