The world, especially our current world, is full of people who are eager to proclaim their brilliance. In general, on any topic imaginable, a sneering “I told you so” fills the air.
Maybe it’s because of the ubiquitous bluster on display that I find myself more interested in people who cite their errors instead. Those people have the multiple perspectives that experience lends and curiosity on their side — a desire to iterate and improve.
On that note, let me introduce Nick Chater and George Loewenstein.
Two people who now think they were wrong
Chater is British; Loewenstein is American. The two are noted behavioral scientists — in other words, they study what people do in different situations. Loewenstein, for example, has done a lot of research on figuring out “how people decide whether to sacrifice now for a future reward, or to enjoy themselves in the present.” Do you save money so you can take a vacation later, or spend it now?
Behavioral science as a field of study has exploded in recent decades. People want to understand how they cognitively operate. Businesses especially want to understand how people behave, so they can tailor their products or presentations to sell more.
It doesn’t stop there, though. Governments — policymakers specifically — employ teams of behavioral scientists to try to figure out how to get their citizens to operate in societally beneficial ways. Chater worked on the United Kingdom’s “Behavioral Insights Team,” or “BIT”, established in 2010, studying aspects of how British society might improve if given small “nudges” in the right direction.
For example, Britain was trying to get more people to pay their taxes on time. So officials put BIT on the case, and researchers tried a number of reminder messages. It turned out that sending folks the message “9 out of 10 people in the U.K. pay their tax on time. You are currently in the very small minority of people who have not paid us yet” was more effective than other messages. The imposed feeling, that “nudge,” of being part of an out-group increased the tax collected by 2.3 million pounds. Cool.
This approach has now been copied by governments the world over — not just on taxation but on everything. How do you get people to take care of their health? How do you get people to save for retirement? How do you get people to use less electricity? How do you get people to stop committing crimes? In short, leaders are frequently asking a team of behavioral scientists to study why people are doing what they do now, and then choosing to steer them in a better direction with the insights of psychology.
Chater and Loewenstein, who are among behavioral science’s principal practitioners and proselytizers, now believe this approach has gone too far. Chater wrapped it up on the “Ratio” podcast:
“Both George and I, having spent a lot of time enthusiastically trying to get behavioral interventions up and running ... always found it disappointing that the effects were always much smaller, or sometimes nonexistent, much more than we’d hoped.”
The I-frame vs. the S-frame
Was this disappointment their fault or more universal? Two researchers, Italian Stefano DellaVigna and American Elizabeth Linos, decided to examine the issue, looking at a group of 126 trials run by two large BIT equivalents in America.
In the end, they found that the behavioral science interventions, the “nudges,” had an average impact of about 1.4%. We should note that it was statistically significantly positive — in other words, we know that behavioral science works. It just works pretty meagerly.
Look at that taxation example above again. It’s the first item on BIT’s Wikipedia page. And it made just 2 million pounds more in taxes from it? That’s it? In the scope of tax policy, that amount is nothing. Audit a big company, Britain. Raise the tax rates by a millionth of a percentage point. Hire more tax agents to catch mistakes. Invest incoming taxes more quickly. Reduce unemployment. There are a thousand things, at least, that Britain could have done to raise tax revenue by 2 million pounds that weren’t “guilt your citizens into paying taxes faster.”
Chater and Loewenstein came up for a name for this problem: I-frame thinking vs. S-frame thinking. I-frame thinking ascribes problems to individual decision-making — persuading Harold to pay his taxes on time. S-frame thinking ascribes problems to systemic issues. Maybe taxes would get filed on time more frequently if the tax code wasn’t so byzantine, or if taxes were filed automatically, or if more people weren’t choosing between paying their taxes and feeding their families.
Published last month, their paper’s title, “The I-frame and the S-frame: How focusing on individual-level solutions has led behavioral public policy astray,” is pretty clear on its conclusion. In the paper, they establish that I-frame “nudges” tend to act as a distraction from bigger system-level policy changes that would really work to solve problems, not just improve them by 1.4%.
Right now, we’re getting too cute.
A Utah perspective
Since reading the paper, I’ve come to see this “I-frame” vs. “S-frame” perspective in a lot of areas in my own life. Take a moment and think: How often do I blame an individual for an issue that’s really systemic? I certainly do all the time.
Getting back to the realm of public policy, it doesn’t take a genius to see how the “I-frame” vs. “S-frame” perspective might apply to Utah, but here are some examples:
• Water. Look at conservewater.utah.gov, launched in 2021. It does its best to convince Utahns that water shortage is a problem that can be solved with I-frame solutions, with three main steps: “Do your part,” “Every bit counts” and “Efficiency is Utah’s ethic.” There’s even a “charming” parable on there.
Sure, I’m pro-water conservation. But you know what actually addresses the water shortage in a substantial way? Laws. Actually limiting, or further limiting, how much water can be used, especially by the businesses that are using the most water. Crazy, I know.
• Abortion. A Utah lawmaker recently suggested that women need to control their “intake of semen.”
Strengthening the social safety net to put women and children in a better position before and after childbirth is an S-framed solution to reducing abortion. I’m pro-safe sex, but women controlling “their intake of semen” is an I-framed solution.
• So much about Utah’s (and America’s) COVID-19 response was about I-frame solutions — wearing masks and staying home. And sure, I’m all for making smart COVID choices. But there were S-frame solutions — say, federally mandated sick leave — available as well.
This isn’t really a Republicans vs. Democrats thing, by the way. Although I do think it’s fair to say that Republicans more often see problems as I-framed, Democrats do their fair share of this, too.
But at this moment, too much burden is being placed on individual, regular people to solve society’s problems. As a result, not a lot is getting done about society’s problems.
This doesn’t have to be the way it is. By tackling our problems head-on — and with a dose of humility about our past failures — we can make more progress in making our world a better place.
Andy Larsen is a data columnist for The Salt Lake Tribune. You can reach him at alarsen@sltrib.com.
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