I remain a supporter of the use of behavioural science in public policy, and of the Behavioural Insights Team, more commonly known as the Nudge Unit. However, witnessing how the UK and other governments have responded to the pandemic, I can now appreciate the vulnerabilities of well-intentioned, democratic regimes, and the potential for behavioural science to be used inappropriately.

I was a co-founder and leading figure within the Nudge Unit. Since its inception, in 2010, the unit has been a success story for the Government. When I joined we were a team of seven within what was called the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit. In 2014, we were able to “spin out” of government. We became an independent, profit-making social purpose company, a third owned by the Cabinet Office. We could sell our services to the whole of the UK public sector and any other government or organisation seeking to improve people’s lives.

A big part of my role was to introduce behavioural science thinking to public policy challenges in other countries. In doing so, we won new contracts and opened new markets, but also helped to spread the application of behavioural science. In 2010, the Nudge Unit was the first and only government unit dedicated to behavioural science in public policy. By 2021, there were over 400 globally. Post spin-out, we grew organically to 250+ people, with offices in nine major cities across the globe, working on projects in more than 35 countries. As civil servants, we were providing policy advice to the Cabinet Office; as a company we also provided dividends, international influence and, since the company was sold in December 2021, a healthy capital gain.

In the early days, we felt as if we had discovered a secret sauce and our mission was to share it as widely as possible. We had a time-limited licence to roam around government, seeking out areas of policy to improve. A two-year sunset cause stipulated we needed to deliver a 10-fold return on the cost of the team, one of the reasons for our early focus on tax — in a now famous example, we used “social norms” to boost tax compliance by telling debtors the true proportion of other people who have paid their taxes.

It felt very different from other parts of the civil service. We cared a lot more about academic research, and seeing the world through the eyes of the citizen. We would bring over famous academics such as Daniel Kahneman, Richard Thaler and Robert Cialdini for seminars in No. 10. We had strong sponsorship from the PM and reported through a high-level steering board, chaired by the Cabinet Secretary, Gus O’Donnell. We were passionate and hard-working but also informal, personable and fun. We sought to free useful information from the over-intellectualising of academia: our policy papers drew on complex concepts and research but described findings in simple and engaging language.

Most strikingly, in the broader context of recession and austerity, we were a can-do, technically competent team — the opposite of the stereotypically politically astute but risk-averse official. Like a lean start-up, we had high motivation but few resources. If there was no budget to make an app, we would learn how to do it and build it ourselves. We would never say “we can’t do it” but “‘how else can we do it?”. Expertise brought into the civil service from outside often fails as it can’t navigate the bureaucracy. But we were home-grown: we knew how to work with the system.

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Will nudge theory survive the pandemic?

By Freddie Sayers

There has, though, always been media scepticism about us. When science journalist Ben Goldacre called for us to be sacked, I remember David Halpern, my boss, telling us that the best compliment comes from a former critic. So we invited Dr Goldacre in to see that we were, in fact, doing exactly what empiricists like him advocate — systematically running large-scale randomised controlled trials (RCTs). Dr Goldacre apologised for his article and co-published a paper with us on policy evaluation, which at one point was the most downloaded Cabinet Office paper after the Coalition Agreement.

The more successful our results, the more the media supported us. In one piece of work, my colleagues Prof Elizabeth Linos, Joanne Reinhard and I managed to eliminate the substantial and historic underperformance of ethnic minority applicants to a police force with a cost-neutral and non-discriminatory intervention: adding a line to an email that prompted candidates to reflect on their values and what success would mean to them. The impact of this incredibly simple idea astounded me, but the data was checked, rechecked and published in a peer reviewed journal, and the result still stands.

There are many examples of our successes – some of which are celebrated on the Nudge Unit’s 10th anniversary website. But to my mind, it is the legacy of our approach which will deliver the greatest impact. We advocated two new dimensions to policy making: behaviour-focused models describing what drives human decision making; and the priority of empirical research over all other sources of information. I believe this contribution has — and can — continue to serve governments well. But it must be used appropriately. For me, it means seeing the bigger picture: recognising what you can and can’t measure, and seeing the potential for unintended consequences. For example, testing ways to make it easier for parents to engage with their children’s homework, and measuring improved education and parental engagement as a result, is a great idea. But invoking different emotions to convince people to stay at home during the pandemic is less appropriate. It could have negative consequences that are missed in the typical RCT evaluation. This is because metrics will focus on proxies for behaviour, but they probably can’t capture the potential longer-term effects of these campaigns beyond what is immediately measurable — such as worse inter-societal relations and reduced trust in institutions, the consequences of which could be significant.

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The new public health despotism

By Matthew Crawford

Because behavioural science can be so broadly applied, it is equally broadly defined. Of these two examples, the first sticks closely to Richard Thaler’s mantra – making it easier to overcome a clearly defined barrier to achieve an uncontroversial gain; the second, however, feels more propagandistic. In my mind, the most egregious and far-reaching mistake made in responding to the pandemic has been the level of fear willingly conveyed on the public. Initially encouraged to boost public compliance, that fear seems to have subsequently driven policy decisions in a worrying feedback loop. Though I don’t think it’s fair to blame behavioural scientists for propagating fear (I suspect that this was more to do with Government communicators and the incentives of news broadcasters), it may be worth reflecting on where we need to draw the line between the choice-maximising nudges of libertarian paternalism, and the creeping acceptance among policy makers that the state should use its heft to influence our lives without the accountability of legislative and parliamentary scrutiny. Nudging made subtle state influence palatable, but mixed with a state of emergency, have we inadvertently sanctioned state propaganda?

The second principle, empiricism, can also be misused. It is an admirable intention (I have often argued for public services to draw on empirical methods to assess impact and improve outcomes), but not when pursued at the expense of other fundamental principles of good policy-making designed to help us see the bigger picture. Placing all value on data risks de-prioritising reflection, reason and debate — and obscuring the limitations of that data as a depiction of reality. The more we measure something, like Covid infections, the more prominent it becomes and so the more it matters. But what’s most feasible to measure now is not necessarily what’s most important overall. Behavioural science was conceived as a means of recognising and correcting the biases that lead humans to make non-rational decisions. But it’s not obvious to me that the trade-offs many governments are making in their responses to the pandemic are grounded in utilitarian rationality.

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The Government's Covid comms failure

By Stuart Richie

Perhaps the most important attribute of empiricism is objectivity. So it has been surprising that the most ardent proponents of empiricism in policy have not been inoculated from identity politics and their own echo-chambers. In fact, it is the proponents of evidence and empiricism, our best and most educated elites, who are now often the least willing to hear information that challenges their worldview or runs contrary to their identity. Many have written about this trend on university campuses. Even at the Nudge Unit, an organisation designed to make others aware of biases, where Jonathan Haidt has lectured staff about his work unpicking the routes of cancel culture, an academic speaker was cancelled for an innocuous, historic tweet.

So where does that leave nudging?

Behavioural science in policy can help us improve people’s lives, but we shouldn’t become complacent – as I was in 2015 in Lucerne – to the potential for unintended harm. We must always look beyond the immediate policy objective and be alive to the critical roles that institutional trust, accountability and legitimacy play in successful societies. Those who commission behavioural experts to provide policy advice must themselves understand how best to use it. The former Cabinet Secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, knew how to use the Nudge Unit effectively, to challenge departments to think more expansively, or assess existing programmes with greater scientific rigour. But he also knew when to temper this thinking, when to nudge was less appropriate.

As we’ve learned over the past two years, focusing on “the science” is blinkered, which is why we need multidisciplinary teams, a strong culture of intellectual humility and designed-in cognitive diversity to tackle problems, especially in times of uncertainty. And this commitment to cognitive diversity needs to be deep and effective: at the Nudge Unit, we created a product to de-bias recruitment in order that we would find successful candidates from a diverse range of backgrounds. Despite this, fewer than 1% of staff supported Brexit.

Finally, accepting Kahneman’s doctrine that we are all susceptible to automatic thinking, rather than accommodating it by bending the choice architecture to lead us down the desired path perhaps there are occasions where we can try to jolt people out of their automatic stance into active consideration. I have often argued – like Richard Thaler did here on UnHerd – that there is no neutral way to present a choice. But this doesn’t mean that, in certain circumstances, we shouldn’t try.

I am angry. And I’m pretty sure I am not alone.

The proximate cause of my anger is the ludicrous non-quarantine quarantine to which my family is currently subjected, after a brief trip to France. It’s not that I object to making a sacrifice for public health. It’s that I’m pretty sure, from the way they’ve gone about things, that the Government has absolutely no interest in whether I break the rules or not. There was no information or signage at the Channel crossing, and at no point has anyone told me what the rules are. I got more information from a twitter quiz in the Telegraph than I did from our government.

In this latest phase of Covid-restrictions, we’ve gone for full-throttle half-arsed-ness. Wear a face mask, but don’t worry, we won’t check and no one will enforce it. Go to school, and if you don’t we’ll fine you, except we probably won’t because headteachers won’t bother reporting you. Do a quarantine, but you can still go to the supermarket, only once, and don’t worry no one will check. Submit your details for Test and Trace, but we probably won’t get around to calling you or telling you what to do.

This is much more than a recipe for confusion. It’s a clear path towards growing resentment and division between citizens, who find themselves surrounded by Other People behaving badly and not being punished. And from there a collapse in trust between people the institutions they look to for guidance.

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Will the Conservatives start conserving?

By Tom Holland

Before ministers take another step down this path, they should read The Hidden Wealth of Nations, by David Halpern, which argues that social trust is the essential foundation not just for wellbeing, but for economic growth.

Of course, Halpern is in many quarters persona non grata these days, because of the perceived failings of the Behavioural Insights Team, which he leads, during the early phases of the pandemic. He was on TV mid-March using the phrase “herd immunity” which gave him a passport to cancel-land.

But Halpern’s work on prosperity, published in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, is vital reading. He shows that “our ability to get on with our fellow citizens oils the working of markets, lowering the costs of transactions and speeding the flow of information on which economies rely”. Countries and regions with the highest levels of social trust tend to have not just the strongest growth, but the greatest levels of subjective wellbeing, too.

Halpern goes on to observe that: “The resilience of a community or nation to survive through economically difficult times rests heavily on its hidden wealth — not the money that its citizens have squirreled away under their mattresses, but the preparedness of citizens to help each other.”

Britain scored well on this metric in the early months of the pandemic. We volunteered in our hundreds of thousands. We suffered the hardships of isolation or overcrowding in lockdown for the sake of others. We cheered on our care workers. We had a single, simple set of rules that applied to everyone. Even those who disagreed could see that those rules were broadly and justly applied. But since rules got complicated, and attempts at enforcement were replaced by a vague plea to be sensible, that unity and solidarity is ebbing away. In Mid May, the ONS recorded that more than 60% of people believed Britain would be “very” united after Covid-19. By the end of June that was down to 28%.

Halpern’s book is a vital reminder that this division is not just a sideline issue, to be worried about by soggy social scientists. If we can’t find a way to get along, we can’t rescue our economy.

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A portrait of power, warts and all

By James Kirkup

Our Treasury is now desperate for growth. To save town centre economies from collapse, the Government has unilaterally decided that workers are more productive in offices, and is trying to bully people back to them. The Prime Minister launched an all-out war on obesity, and then the Government spent a month subsidising fast food with Eat Out to Help Out. They will reach for anything, no matter how contradictory, to leverage up the economy, and with a wall of redundancies coming this autumn, I can’t blame them

They imagine that the best path to growth is complex public health rules, varied by postcode, age, ethnicity, risk factors, and a general sense of whether you can be bothered doing what the Government says. This is because their mathematical models show that complexity liberates the maximum number of people possible.

But their utilitarian calculation misses out the basic societal principle that all should be equal before the law. If you want a strong, trusting society, then fairness has to be a factor. Halpern’s book suggests to me that if public health strategy divides and discombobulates the population, stimulus will not thrive.

The Government should base its economic and health policies on the goal of rebuilding social capital. Covid-19 brought mass volunteering. It stopped millions from commuting, freeing up more time for family and neighbourhoods. It helped us see the networks and connections between people more clearly than ever. That social trust was not some fluffy distraction from the real business of the economy: it was a great foundation for recovery. We just need to hang on to it before it disappears.

Then some of the most famous studies from social psychology’s 1970s heyday fell apart on closer scrutiny. The Stanford Prison Experiment, where people were assigned roles as “prisoners” and “guards”, and the guards ended up treating the prisoners abominably? Probably misreported. The study where “pseudopatients” admitted themselves to psychiatric hospitals, acted entirely sane, and were locked up and medicated regardless? Possibly fraudulent.

Now, psychologists are disgracing themselves anew over the coronavirus.

It started with articles relying on psychological “insights” to downplay the severity of the problem. In early February, social psychologist David DeSteno wrote a piece in the New York Times arguing that people get so caught up with their fear of the virus, they fail to understand that they’re unlikely to get it. Referencing some of his own lab experiments, DeSteno wrote that “…quarantine or monitoring policies can make great sense when the threat is real and the policies are based on accurate data. But the facts on the ground, as opposed to the fear in the air, don’t warrant such actions.”

Two days later, the New York Times’s Interpreter column quoted psychologist Paul Slovic, who noted that “[o]ur feelings don’t do arithmetic very well”, and that focusing on the coronavirus fatalities, and not the “98% or so of people who are recovering from it and may have mild cases” is skewing our judgement. The article argued that our fears, triggered by disturbing reports of “city-scale lockdowns and overcrowded hospitals”, overload our critical faculties, making us overreact to the threat the virus poses. The thought that those city-scale lockdowns and overcrowded hospitals might be a mere month away from the United States didn’t seem to occur.

Further psychological insights were provided by Cass Sunstein, co-author of the best-selling book Nudge, which used lessons from behavioural economics (essentially psychology by another name) that could inform attempts to change people’s behaviour. In an article for Bloomberg Opinion on 28 February (by which point there were over 83,000 confirmed coronavirus cases worldwide), Sunstein wrote that anxiety regarding the coronavirus pandemic was mainly due to something called “probability neglect”.

Because the disease is both novel and potentially fatal, Sunstein reasoned, we suffer from “excessive fear” and neglect the fact that our probability of getting it is low. “Unless the disease is contained in the near future,” he continued, “it will induce much more fear, and much more in the way of economic and social dislocation, than is warranted by the actual risk”.

On 12 March, the day after Italy had announced its 827^th death from the virus, the eminent psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer published a piece in Project Syndicate entitled “Why What Does Not Kill Us Makes Us Panic”. It was, to say the least, confused: it opened with an acknowledgement that we don’t know how bad this epidemic could be, but immediately went on to make the case that we’d likely overreact, and failed to consider any opposing arguments.

Gigerenzer’s article discussed the 2009 swine flu pandemic, which affected hundreds of millions but killed relatively few, particularly in Europe, where the fear was nonetheless high. It also likened the coronavirus pandemic to terrorist attacks, which similarly kill small numbers in a relative sense, but — according to Gigerenzer — garner disproportionate attention. If only we could improve our “risk literacy”, Gigerenzer maintained, then we could “approach situations such as the COVID-19 epidemic with a cooler head”.

At the time of writing, Italy’s death toll is now above 10,000, with over 900 fatalties being reported in a single day. The epidemic in the UK has reached 1,000 deaths; in France, 2,000; in Spain, nearly 6,000. New York City is setting up makeshift morgues for the first time since 9/11. The suspiciously uniform daily death figures from Iran might belie a truly devastating epidemic in that country. The world’s economy has largely closed down, as we all anticipate the pandemic getting far worse before it gets better. How could all those psychologists have gotten it so disastrously wrong?

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Would you take a coronavirus risk?

By Tom Chivers

To back up his points about “probability neglect”, Sunstein had referred to a 2001 paper in the journal Psychological Science. It reported three experiments; Sunstein focused on the third one, which included 156 participants, all of whom were undergraduate students reasoning about how much they’d pay to avoid an imaginary electric shock. It’s not a criticism of the scientists to say that this experiment is only tenuously relevant to a global pandemic.

Indeed, alongside talk of the “replication crisis” there’s been discussion of a “generalisability crisis”, with renewed realisation that results from lab experiments don’t necessary generalise to other contexts. A global pandemic of a completely novel virus is, by its very definition, a context never encountered before. So how can we be sure that the results of behavioural science experiments — even those that are based on bigger or more representative samples than 156 undergrads — are relevant to our current situation?

The answer is that we can’t. Exploring the human capacity for bias and irrationality can make for quirky, thought-provoking articles and books that make readers feel smarter (and can build towards a tentative scientific understanding of how the mind works). But when a truly dangerous disease comes along, relying on small-scale lab experiments and behavioural-economic studies results in dreadful misfires like the articles we encountered above.

Although there are many behavioural phenomena that certainly seem relevant to today’s news — bias, sunk costs, the tragedy of the commons — it’s not at all clear how these concepts would be practically applied to do what needs to be done right now: slowing the spread of the disease.

We can even play the psychologists at their own game: there are also biases in the opposite direction to those discussed above. For instance, “exponential growth bias” might mean that our standard ways of reasoning break down in a situation where a threat accelerates like this virus. As observed in an insightful article on Italy’s ongoing horrific experience, there’s also “confirmation bias”, where we seek out evidence that confirms our previous beliefs or desires.

In this case, many were understandably desperate to believe that the virus wouldn’t be too much of a problem, and it seems to have led them to underreact very badly indeed. None of the psychological writers above seemed to consider these opposing biases — and ironically, it might have been because they were biased against thinking about them.

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I'm frightened I'll die of Covid-19

By Stephen Pollard

That latter idea is just speculation on my part — which is the whole point. As the psychologist Stefan Schubert has noted, “[i]t’s too easy to make up a just-so-story” about us being biased in one direction or another. “The ‘psychology of X’ (e.g. risk, disease) can only tell us so much about X. We should mostly look at X itself”.

Quite so: the critical task for now is not to try and get inside people’s heads, but to learn from the experience of other countries (like Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore) that have been more successful in containing covid-19; and to build realistic mathematical models of the epidemic, and to pour resources into medical advances — like tests, vaccines, and antivirals — that might help us to track and inhibit the transmission of the virus and prevent its symptoms.

Sunstein himself appears to have undergone something of a Damascene corona-conversion. On 26 March, he wrote another column for Bloomberg Opinion, entitled “This Time the Numbers Show We Can’t Be Too Careful”. In an argument that was directly opposed to his own reasoning of a month earlier, Sunstein suggested that the potentially ruinous effects of the pandemic mean that “the benefits of aggressive social distancing greatly exceed the cost”. Remarkably, he made no reference whatsoever to his previous article on this specific crisis — an article which, as the writer Ari Schulman has pointed out, had said that if you held the view Sunstein now holds, you were the sad victim of a cognitive malfunction.

It’s impossible to know how many people changed the way they thought about the virus after reading one of the misconceived articles above. But a consistent set of articles by credentialed scientists telling people they shouldn’t worry so much about the pandemic was the precise opposite of what was required in a situation where governments would eventually, and rightly, be imploring their citizens to stay at home at all costs. At best, the advice from psychology was unhelpful. At worst, it constituted dangerous misinformation.

And what of those governments? Could the “don’t overreact” advice from behavioural science have led politicians to drag their feet in dealing with the crisis, as some clearly have? Again, it’s hard to say — but it’s very possible that the broad message got through to the decision-makers.

Thankfully, the advice given to the UK government by behavioural scientists, which was published just over a week ago, didn’t contain any minimisation of the risks. In fact, it was — in my view at least — mostly banal and common-sensical, noting for instance that using the word “isolation” might have “negative overtones for older adults”, and that there might be unintended consequences if we closed schools.

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Other government behavioural advisors, though, were less circumspect. The Behavioural Insights Team, a consulting company nicknamed the “Nudge Unit”, has been brought in to assist the UK’s response. At first it seemed their focus was on how to encourage handwashing, but there appears to have been mission creep.

For example, the team’s head, David Halpern, was interviewed as a “government coronavirus science advisor” about broad policies of “cocooning” older people. He was also quoted in support of the idea — which might yet seem grievously misguided in hindsight — that social-distancing measures should only be brought in gradually, to avoid people becoming fatigued. After he was reportedly “bollocked” by No.10 a fortnight ago for introducing the unfortunate phrase “herd immunity” into the national conversation, Halpern hasn’t (to my knowledge) been heard from again in public.

And perhaps that’s for the best. As intriguing as many psychological studies are, the vast majority of the insights we’ve gained from our research are simply not ready for primetime — especially in the case of a worldwide emergency where millions of lives are at stake. Much of the useful advice behavioural scientists can give isn’t really based on “science” to any important degree, and is intuitive and obvious.

Where they try to be counter-intuitive — for instance, arguing that people are wrong to find a global pandemic frightening — they simply end up embarrassing themselves, or worse, endangering people by having them make fewer pandemic preparations. This isn’t to say that psychology isn’t useful when it stays in its own lane: it’ll be important to ensure that as many people as possible have access to psychotherapy for the mental-health effects of the pandemic, for instance. But that’s a secondary effect of the virus: my argument here is that psychology can give little reliable counsel about our immediate reaction to the pandemic.

Psychologists should know their limits, and avoid over-stretching results from their small-scale studies to new, dissimilar situations. Decision-makers should, before using psychology research as the basis for policy, know just how weak and contentious so much of it is. And everyone else should stay at home, wash their hands — and beware psychologists bearing advice.

That’s according to a new study by Chris Chabris and colleagues, entitled “Objecting to experiments that compare two unobjectionable policies or treatments”. It’s a clever study – and, importantly, a large, preregistered one, which asked the same question 16 times in three different populations and found compatible answers, so it’s probably not garbage. What it did was look at how people feel about randomised experiments between unobjectionable policies or treatments.

That sounds a bit dry; here’s what it means. Imagine, for instance, a doctor’s surgery is trying to reduce deadly infections by providing doctors with a checklist of standard precautions to take before each procedure. The participants were asked how they felt if the checklist were displayed on the doctor’s badge, or on a poster on the wall. And they also asked them how they would feel if, instead, one room had the poster, and the other had the badge, and patients were randomly assigned to one or the other to test which worked best.

They asked the question four times of different groups, and on the whole, people were comfortable with either of the two options. People preferred the poster, but the percentage objecting to either poster or badge was never more than 25% and usually more like 15-20%.

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But when they were asked about randomly assigning patients to one or the other – “A/B tests” – then the percentage objecting leapt up, to 30% in one test and 40-50% in the other three. They found similar results if the question was about a doctor choosing between one of two FDA-approved blood pressure drugs or randomly assigning patients to one or another, and then on other questions involving autonomous vehicle control systems, genetic testing, online dating and several more.

Even when people don’t mind option A, and they don’t mind option B, they really do mind you randomly assigning people to one or other of the two. The effect was just as strong among people with science degrees and professionals in the relevant field.

This is, obviously, a problem. The A/B test described is essentially a randomised controlled trial, and an RCT is the best way of establishing whether some intervention actually causes the good (or bad) things you want to happen. It is the gold standard for medical research, and there is no good reason not to use it in other policy areas – you can randomly assign patients to have either a drug or a placebo, or you can randomly assign schoolchildren to either have phonics or traditional reading lessons. While the interventions are entirely different, the structure of the test is exactly the same.

Not all policy can be evidence-based, in the sense that the evidence decides the policy. For instance, should we build another runway at Heathrow? There’s one body of evidence that says that it will significantly increase the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions and will not be compatible with our commitments under the Paris Agreement. There’s another body of evidence that says it will create jobs and grow the economy. But there’s nothing that says you have to choose the climate over the economy; that’s a political decision, or even a moral one.

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Why I welcome our post-Truth era

By Giles Fraser

Sometimes, though – often – there is a clearly defined goal, and two or more possible options for achieving it. Most of us would agree that, say, it would be good if we could stop drug addicts from relapsing or reoffending. Imagine we honestly didn’t know whether locking up drug offenders was more effective at reducing their relapse rate or their drug-related crime rate than putting them into rehab.

The best way to find out which of those options is most effective would be to randomly assign drug offenders to one or the other intervention, and seeing which had better outcomes. But, apparently, that would be far less popular than simply arbitrarily picking one and going with it.

This is, on the face of it, strange, because for at least 20 years we’ve had governments that, at the very least, pay lip service towards evidence-based policy. The Blair government loudly repeated that “what matters is what works”: one thing it did was to set up the (excellent) National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) in 1999 to evaluate new medical treatments for cost-effectiveness.

But sometimes, lip service is all it is. When, recently, the government decided to push through an age verification system for porn sites, it commissioned an impact assessment which purported to look at how this ban would affect users. But the impact assessment was shonky as heck: it misrepresented the statistics it was quoting, was heavily reliant on a silly poll which made obviously untrue claims, and at one point apparently didn’t understand the word “correlational”.

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Why does our expert class fear democracy?

By Salvatore Babones

“The dirty secret of almost all government is that we don’t know whether we’re doing the right thing.” That’s according to David Halpern, the psychologist and civil servant who ran the UK government’s Behavioural Insight Team, aka the ‘Nudge Unit’, a programme designed to improve policy, in an interview with the website Apolitical.

“Whether what we’re doing is helping the patient or not helping the patient, or even killing him. People are often running blind, overconfident, and dispensing massive sums of money.” That’s despite 20 years of people making the right noises about evidence-based policy.

I had previously thought that this was largely a cynical thing, or an incompetence thing. Ministers want to look tough on drugs or porn, so they make a decision to crack down on them, and then retrospectively cobble together evidence to support that decision – policy-based evidencemaking, as I’ve heard it called. Or perhaps they just lack the understanding of what constitutes good evidence, and the skills to gather it.

But perhaps, also, it’s that they – like, apparently, around half the population – find the very idea of randomised controlled trials, the very thing that they need to do to best assess the effectiveness of the thing they want to do, deeply uncomfortable.

Chabris and his colleagues speculate that one reason behind this discomfort is “a lack of familiarity”: the RCT has only really existed for two centuries, which isn’t long for human brains, and they aren’t very good at thinking about them. Hopefully that’s right, and we’ll get more used to it. Because at the moment, people seem to be happier with barging randomly into a policy than with actually checking if it works.