Want to Change Behaviors? Got Ethics?
Friday, November 11th, 2011
Improving employee productivity, reducing obesity, addressing global warming, getting customers to purchase your product and a host of other socially and economically pressing issues all mean changing the behaviors of other people. Our urgent need but frequent inability to achieve lasting behavior change is becoming a national past time.
In our rush to change behaviors (at all costs?) we need to be mindful of the ethics involved. A recent blog post on the New Scientist, Nudge Policies are Another Name for Coercion, makes this point well. Nudges are small changes to our environment that trigger a built in cognitive bias to produce significant behavior change. For example, the status quo bias will keep us enrolled in a 401k plan that we have to opt out of instead of opting into. Or food placement, lighting and length of lines can strongly determine what children “decide” to have for lunch at school. The idea is to play off our automatic patterns of thought to nudge us towards a particular behavior or decision rather than forcing us along a single path.
Leaders, policy makers or innovators that deploy nudges do so under the assumption of paternalism. It is an ethically OK influence strategy because the change has the person’s best interests at heart. Everybody wants to save more and eat healthier, right? One alternative to a nudge or playing off my automatic tendencies is to sit me down, explain the facts and let me consciously make the decision. Some worry that this so-called democratic approach to behavior change is nice in principle but does not work well in practice. The post challenges that by citing recent research at Cornell University:
“Mettler uses experiments to show how ordinary people can understand complicated policy questions and reach considered conclusions, as long as they get enough information. This suggests a far stronger role for democratic decision-making than libertarian paternalism allows.”
Positive influence and manipulation often pull on the same underlying techniques. What differentiates them is intent and what all parties have consciously consented to do. Leaders, policy makers and innovators often don’t ask for permission to make change, they assume they know what is best for others and move forward. That’s their job and it is one that is steeped in the ethics of behavior change.
Interested to hear from readers that have tried to distill or codify the ethics of behaviors change. Under what conditions is it morally appropriate to influence behavior change? Likewise, under what conditions are your morally compelled to try and influence behavior change (e.g. a doctor changing a patient’s health-related behaviors)?
