Kurt Nelson  0:00  
Hey, welcome to behavior grooves, the podcast that explores the underpinnings of our human behavior. I'm Kurt Nelson

Tim Houlihan  0:13  
and I'm Tim Houlihan. We talk with researchers and other interesting people to unlock the mysteries of our behavior by using a behavioral science lens.

Kurt Nelson  0:22  
Okay, now, Tim, I have a question for you, specifically you, because you're really old. All right, so, so do you remember back in the day when you didn't have to wear a seat belt because there wasn't a law against it? Do you remember what it was like when those seat belt laws were first introduced and how controversial they were, or like when you could smoke in restaurants and or bars and different pieces, and when they put the smoking ban on those Do you remember? Do you remember that

Tim Houlihan  0:56  
absolutely i because I'm old you

Kurt Nelson  0:59  
are so almost, almost a few years older than me,

Tim Houlihan  1:04  
I do remember, and I remember not liking the idea of wearing a seat belt, or being forced to wear a seat belt. It felt intrusive. And, you know, government overreach, nanny state stuff, you know, all that that I remember feeling that. But the smoking bans hit me pretty pleasantly, because the health implication seemed to be pretty clear, and I welcomed them, because I played a lot in bars that allowed smoking, and so I came home every night smelling like a pack of Lucky strikes, and I just thought the smoking ban was a really welcome change at that time.

Kurt Nelson  1:39  
Yeah, that's good. What? About some of the more recent examples of some of those nanny state laws, like the congestion pricing in New York City, or the, you know, the consumption tax on high sugary sweet drinks, right?

Tim Houlihan  1:56  
Yeah. Well, you know, regulations like that are put into place, and at least at first, people are going to hate them. Pretty much everybody's not going to like them because they don't like having their behaviors changed, especially by some kind of government legislation when it's forced upon them. Yeah. What's forced? Yeah. So how about you? You know, what are your recollections of the seat belt and smoking bans? What when they first happened? Were you excited about them?

Kurt Nelson  2:20  
Was it like seat belt laws. I'd already been wearing my seat belt because I had worked with my brother in law, who was a race car driver. And they were crazy race car drivers, and it scared the Jesus out of me, but they all wore their seat belt all the time, and so I did some work for them for a few weeks, and became that became a habit. So wasn't a big deal. I do remember that it was very controversial. It's like, this is my life and different things smoking, again, I felt like you I was very welcoming of it. I'm a non smoker, and I think the I think smoking was easier to sell because, you know, smoking actually had negative effects, right? People outside of the people that were smoking. I mean, the your secondhand smoke was caused exhausted, lots of damage. So servers and other patrons in these places, you know, you like, you know, performing seat belts were a little more. It was like this, you're making me do something that only impacts me, and that felt vastly different. So yeah, yeah,

Tim Houlihan  3:30  
I couldn't agree more. Yeah.

Kurt Nelson  3:34  
So how do you think? Okay, so yes, when they were introduced, but six months later, a year, two, five years later, what do you think most people felt?

Tim Houlihan  3:46  
Well, my recollection is that there was still a fair amount of griping, right, but that the behaviors that those laws were intended to change, they changed at a pretty massive level. You know, seat belt usage, according to some studies, has gone from roughly 14% in the 1980s to hovering around 90% in the United States. So while that still kind of blows me away, that one in 10 people are not wearing their seat belts, yeah, oh, it's still, it's still a pretty it's still a pretty good number.

Kurt Nelson  4:16  
It's crazy, right? And I mean, the implementation of seatbelt laws have saved hundreds of 1000s, if not millions of lives worldwide, right? Yeah. I mean, that's fantastic, and that wouldn't have necessarily happened otherwise, right? It's what behavioral scientists sometimes refer to as the Green Eggs and Ham effect, right? It's where they're these policies that they go, Oh, nobody's gonna like Green Eggs and Ham, nobody's gonna like seat belt laws. Nobody's gonna like this. So policy makers, the politicians, don't want to introduce them, because that's a not good for them, right? And that means that the underlying problem. So that could be solved by a policy or regulation. Never get to this. Try it stage the I want to eat green I'm going to try the green eggs and ham. And if then you know I like them, Sam, I am. I like green eggs and ham. I like them in a box. I like them with a box. Only if you try them, though, right? But you need to try them. So, yeah, yeah.

Tim Houlihan  5:26  
And while we don't need to get into all of the reasons for that, the central idea here is that rather than trying to change the system, policymakers have tried to change individuals, and we often try to nudge people to make better decisions about their health and safety, like we try to nudge them to not drive in congested cities, and we try to nudge people to save more for retirement, that sort of thing. Yeah.

Kurt Nelson  5:49  
I mean, think about it. We try to encourage people to eat better by putting nutrition information on packages, and we change the sign up from an opt in to an opt out on savings plans. And that by itself, is not a bad thing. That's not what we're saying. It's, you know, anything that we can help individuals to do easier and better and more likely that's good. I mean, we can all use that help in changing our behavior for the better. But Tim, what if the real leverage for real change, systemic change isn't at that individual level that if you want to significantly impact behavior at scale, you might need something else. Yeah.

Tim Houlihan  6:35  
So today, Nick Chater joins us to discuss his new book, co authored with George Lowenstein, called it's on you. Nick and George argued that behavioral science may have spent too much time perfecting the iframe, and the iframe is the individual lens for behavior change, and behavioral science has not spent enough time working on the S frame, the S frame meaning the system lens to policy changes.

Kurt Nelson  7:01  
Yeah, now Nick and George are two of the premier researchers on this, and have been working on this for over 10 years, kind of in this, this world. So fantastic insights from these really bright, really well renowned researchers on this, and Nick in this interview challenges, challenges us to rethink how we think about nudges, rethink responsibility, rethink bounded rationality, and rethink what real change in this complex, crazy world that we Live in requires. Now this isn't an anti nudge. Episode, pro structure. Episode, how about that? Nice?

Tim Houlihan  7:48  
Very nice. We spoke with Nick about how policy and structural interventions such as seat belt laws and restaurant smoking bans can be a good thing for other global issues such as climate change. I also want to note that Nick is British, and several times he's mentioned the UK social insurance program, and for those grooves who are in the US, just want to say that social insurance is what we call in the United States Social Security.

Kurt Nelson  8:14  
Social Security for the British. Yes, it's insurance. There you go. And Nick asked some really difficult questions, particularly around are we solving the right problems but maybe going about it in the wrong way, or is it possible that we're solving the wrong problems in the most elegant way possible?

Tim Houlihan  8:36  
We invite you to sit back and relax with a strong pour of iframe and S frame, and enjoy our conversation with Nick Chater. Do we

Kurt Nelson  8:45  
care about the S frame when they're drinking? Are we? Are we tired to tell them what to drink? We need. We need the S frame. They get to choose their own drink. Come on, they get the pour whatever they want. We're not telling them what to drink. Do

Tim Houlihan  9:07  
Nick Chater, welcome to behavioral grooves. Well,

Nick Chater  9:10  
it's lovely to be with you. We are

Tim Houlihan  9:12  
so happy to have you here, and we're going to loosen things up with our famous Speed Round four simple questions here, would you prefer to learn a new language or a new instrument?

Nick Chater  9:24  
Oh, definitely a new instrument.

Tim Houlihan  9:26  
Oh, you would.

Nick Chater  9:29  
I've always struggled with languages so,

Tim Houlihan  9:35  
so okay, you play piano, you play guitar. What would you add to it? Well, I don't

Nick Chater  9:39  
play hands with those terribly well. But I think I'd really like magically to be able to play the violin. Oh, I know, not really something to take up in when you're 60, but, but yeah, if I could magic playing the violin, well, that would be fab.

Tim Houlihan  9:56  
Yeah, I have to. That is a hard instrument. Okay? Okay, already Kurt over, yeah,

Kurt Nelson  10:03  
Nick, if you haven't figured this already out, we are definitely not speed speedy in our speed round it. Sometimes we'll go in here as we go, I might actually know the answer to this, because you just took a sip of out of your your cup here. But are you a coffee drinker or a tea drinker?

Nick Chater  10:26  
Well, I did just have some tea. You're absolutely right. And I have tea beside me now, but I am more of a coffee drinker in the morning, but tea in the afternoon.

Kurt Nelson  10:35  
Okay, you have, we have many of our guests who have said that similar thing? So, yeah, yeah, fantastic.

Tim Houlihan  10:44  
Okay, third speed round question, is it possible that there are individual solutions for society's biggest problems?

Nick Chater  10:54  
It's a tricky one. Yes. The answer that I think is not generally no big solutions.

Tim Houlihan  11:02  
I Fair enough. We're gonna spend some more time on that, as you know,

Kurt Nelson  11:06  
we'll come back. We'll come back to that, I think so last of our speed round questions. And again, this is a much bigger question than, I think, a yes, no answer. We'll, we'll get here. But let's, ask this, are nudges enough to make the world a better place?

Nick Chater  11:25  
No, but they some. They can sometimes be useful, but they're not.

Kurt Nelson  11:29  
Yes, is the enough part, right? That I think is the key piece there, and I think that's part of the conversation that you take in the book. And so we'll, we'll get there.

Tim Houlihan  11:40  
So we are speaking with Nick Chater today about his new book. It's on you. Co authored with George Lowenstein. Is it fair to say that the thesis of the book is that you're just kind of tired of being told that all of the our human errors in decision making can be fixed if as individuals, we just try hard enough.

Nick Chater  12:03  
That's a particular way of putting it, which is not crazy. It's putting it it's putting it a bit sharply, because it's sort of, I think the thought is that psychologists and behavioral economists have thought that people are making blunders on a sort of moment by moment basis, as they go through the world, they're eating all the wrong things, and they're sort of gambling and smoking and they're not saving enough, and they're just generally making a mess. And we all knew, we all do these things to one degree or another, making a mess of our lives. And if we could do better, that would, that would make a make a great deal of difference. And of course, this doesn't just apply to our own well being. It supplies to the health of the society as a whole and the planet. So you obviously should be thinking, we should be all being more environmentally conscious and reducing our carbon footprints and so on and so on. And the the idea of nudging is that, rather than saying, people just pull your socks up, the approach is to say, No, we need to help you pull your socks are by making presenting the world, it will give or changing the world in the way that it gives you problems in a way that where the natural solution is the is the good one, the good one for you and for the planet, rather than the obvious solution being the bad one. So it's trying to re engineer the what they that Dick Thaler and Cass Sunstein, the the originators of pioneers of this approach called the choice architecture, so that your natural pathway through the choice is going to be a good path. And the magic trick here is to say, well, we're not actually stopping you doing anything. We're not infringing your liberty. This is a key part of the strategy with nudging. It's only a nudge. You can go against it if you really want to, but we're just rather than having you endlessly lured to do things which are against your interests or against interests of society at large, we're going to try and lure you into the opposite direction. We're going to nudge and prod you to do the right thing.

Tim Houlihan  13:53  
Yeah, and how does this work? So we think about, you know, major societal issues with, you know, general weight management, health, health crisis around the world, savings and the sort of the savings crisis, climate change. These are, these are pretty big issues,

Nick Chater  14:15  
big issues. And there are, there are nudges which are aiming to make an inroad into these problems. So for example, if you took climate change, one quite high profile recent study looks at and other people look at the same thing, but it's rather looks at it on a large scale, looks at defaulting you into green energy tariffs. So this was done in Switzerland. It's quite a big study. The people are automatically put onto the green tariff, unless they object. I think the green tariff is a little bit more expensive, not all that much. Most people don't really notice. None of us pay much attention to our energy bills, so off we go into the green tariff. So the idea why that's a nudge is that it makes the if you think that the right thing is to be on the green energy tariff, then. And it's sort of that's just going to happen if you pay no attention, and you're not really, not really worried about anything. You just just happens. Whereas before, if you did nothing, you'd stay on the regular, as it were, brown tariff. So the idea is to make the the right thing, easy thing, or another one very well known study going back many years now, it started in California where people were looking at the gas meters on, I think, energy consumption and other people's houses. You compare that to the target person. You say, well, people around you are using a lot less energy than you are. So you think, Oh, wow. I mean, using too much energy. I'm wasting all this money. What am I doing? So you reduce your energy. And so that's and that that mutated into some quite large studies. So the power company, Opower, did some really quite big scale work on this, and other companies around the world have done where you give people feedback on their past bills, their current bills, that Labor's bills. And so you're just generally trying to give people a sense of the usage that's reasonable, and get people to be more cautious. Yet another one, which might or might not qualify as a technical nudge, but is the increasing prevalence of smart meters. I just don't know what the situation is in the US, but in the UK, a lot of people have not just smart meters, but they have a little sort of dial that which you can put on your kitchen counter, and it will just tell you what your energy usage is at this moment. So in theory, you can, you can turn on the kettle and see the dial shooter kettle. So the idea is that this gives you more awareness of where your power is going. And this could lead you, and it does a little bit to reduce, to reduce your your power usage. And obviously the same kind of things apply in all domains. And you take something like the problem of obesity, which obviously many Western nations, is a serious one, then there are vast ranges of possible suggestions. One more informational than just nudging is just calorie labels on everything. Another one is looking at making portion sizes different, making plate sizes different, or cutlery sizes different, just generally, making some small adjustments like that. There's changing the location on menus, changing location in the actual cafe, of the different kinds of good so you want the healthy things to be nice and prominent and easy to see, and you want the less healthy things they're still there because we don't want to infringe on people's liberties. But they're still there, but they're kind of far away and not so prominently advertised, and abortion default portion smaller and so on. And these are terrible ideas, but they're but they're all small scale changes. And the thought was that small scale changes could lead to medium or even big scale effects in aggregate. So if you scale up all these small scale changes across the population, then maybe this could make some sort of really big difference. That's the hope.

Kurt Nelson  17:56  
So you you and George wrote a paper about iframe and S frame 10 years ago. Now it's not

Nick Chater  18:04  
that long. No, it feels, it feels like

Kurt Nelson  18:09  
that's where my head goes. So yeah, and this book kind of builds on that. So for our listeners, can you talk a little bit about iframe versus S frame, and what the, what your hypothesis, what that theory is that you're kind of talking about there?

Nick Chater  18:27  
Yeah, yes, no, I will. And indeed, it's interesting that actually the genesis of the paper was actually post the book, rather oddly. So we were writing the book, oh, kind of thinking, Whoa. This is a lot to get our heads around here. It's very, all very, very complicated, and we're not quite sure what our, you know, what, how to organize ourselves. So we decided we try and distill out one of the key strands, the iframe S frame strand, which I'll explain in a moment. And that that we thought, well, we'll write it up as a paper that'll help us. And then that that paper actually became, it was, strangely, went a bit viral in the behavioral science and policy, there's a lot of discussion of that. So sort of looks a bit now, in retrospect, as if we thought, oh, we'll write the long version of that paper. But it's really not the case. What we were trying to do in the first place, we just couldn't manage it. Fantastic story. Yeah. Anyway, we said that the iframe S frame thing is that the basic idea that starting point is the sort of general concept of frames, which is a very pretty vague concept. But the idea is that we can see, we see the world, what was any kind of problem we're dealing with through some kind of sort of conceptual lens, and we struggle to see anything from one through more than one lens at a time. So so the very broad iframe S frame lens distinction is your is whether you see a problem as fundamentally a problem, as we've been talking about so far of individual behavior. So you see so too much carbon being used, you think, aha, these individuals using too much carbon. But there's one going on. Life, and there's one buying some beef, and there's another person making another another of these, these carbon, carbon blunders. So you you see the problem at an individualistic level, and if you see it at that level, it's also very natural to see the solutions that we've been talking about and so far at that level too. Now, complementary in principle to that, in theory is the zooming out to the system level and saying, Well, why as a whole society, are we burning so much carbon? Why are we eating more and more? Why are we generating more and more plastic waste and so on? And this is something where the issue is, What technologies do we have? What are the incentives that businesses have to propagate those technologies, what legal frameworks, what subsidies, taxes, regulations and so on, all of that structural stuff that basically composes the structure of society. And so you can ask yourself, well, what is it about the structure of society that makes carbon burning so easy and so prevalent, and you might then say, well, one thing would be, we don't seem to have any proper taxation or cap and trade scheme to limit carbon. Say, the externality is that, economists will call it the damage caused to the world at large by me burning some carbon is not really paid directly by anybody, including me. So there's a tendency to over, over, consume things which have widespread but not accounted damages. And that is very well known problem in economics, and the normal solution to it is to put some kind of tax, or possibly a cap and and we just don't have that. We don't have that mechanism. So that's that would be. That's not the whole story at all, but it's a part of the story. So the thought is that, in principle, these are complementary. One can perfectly reasonably say, Well, you can look at the big scale and the system, and you can look at the individual, and they're both worth looking at. That's right. The trouble is that the way humans are constituted, we find it very difficult to think from one more than think about what more than one perspective at a time. So this means that if we focus our attention on the iframe the individual, we tend to focus much less attention on the system. And I think that behavioral scientists such as George and myself have absolutely or not quite en masse, but for a large part, exactly done this. So we've thought, well, we're behavioral scientists, and we, mostly, most of us, study individual behavior. That's good news, because we can help with those iPhone solutions, right? And I've sat in meetings, and I shouldn't think about it now, I've sat in meetings with people like political scientists and lawyers who said this is going to say 15 years, who said things like, Well, surely we have to think about what the legal framework is here. What are the economic incentives? And I have been sitting there thinking, Well, of course, technically right, but you're fucking some kind of old fashioned

Kurt Nelson  22:59  
we can influence our behavior on this scale?

Tim Houlihan  23:03  
Yeah, let's forego all those legal frameworks. Oh my gosh. We can do better than that.

Nick Chater  23:09  
And of course, it's such a tempting way to think. And of course it's it's very tempting for people like George and I and other behavioral scientists, because that is sort of what we do. So it's very nice to think, oh, suddenly I've turned it turns out that what I do is relevant to solving the world's problems. This is great news because, you know, it always seemed a bit of a niche pastime, but now it turns out to be this incredibly powerful tool that's a very easy, slightly self serving delusion. But the other thing is, I think we I certainly speak for Georgia, that would be unfair, but I think in my case, I I genuinely, you know, I have given talks people propagating this view. I've told them how clever psychological experiments can dramatically change solve all sorts of social problems with massive, massively overclaiming, but sort of secretly thinking. And if you did this properly, he could really, really, really transform things. And the other reason is so attractive, apart from the just to us behavioral scientists, is it's also very politically attractive, and this is why I think it caught on so fast with The Cameron administration in in the UK and the Obama administration in the US around large. Was published in 22,008 and by 2010 it was being institutionalized quite quite, quite fast in in both both sides, on both sides of the Atlantic. And the reason for that, I think, is that it's nudges are cheap and nudges are because of their non liberty in reducing powers. They're just saying, you know, from nudging you, prodding you, encouraging in a particular direction, is much easier from a legislative standpoint, but it's just kind of, it's just kind of easy to roll out. So if you feel that there are nudges that can solve your problem, it's of great relief, because all that tough legislative taxation subsidy stuff is really politically divisive and difficult and expensive and Oh, thank goodness we don't need it. We'll just do these and.

Kurt Nelson  25:00  
Nudges instead? Is there a part of that that comes back to also this, this idea that government is inherently bad or less efficient, and so by placing nudges in, you're you're basically not having you're not enlarging the government. You're not making this big bad government even worse here by putting in laws or regulations or caps, as you said, on all of these things. And so it's an easier sell politically. And so if I can get this through easy, because we have both sides of you know, at least in the US and in the UK, kind of that two party system, we get both sides to agree that this is okay, versus fighting each other. Is that part of the reason that you think some of these came across so quickly and just exploded?

Nick Chater  25:51  
No, I think you're exactly right. Kurt, so the the two big foundation papers in this area, neither of which I was involved with, one of which is the by failure and Sunstein are called two papers, in fact, but one called libertarian paternalism, and the other called libertarian paternalism is not is not an oxymoron. It's a very interesting paper. The The idea is really to say what nudges give you is the ability to keep freedoms, but allow your you to help steer people in paternalistically sort of appropriate direction. So that's the idea of That's the dream. The other page, which was very significant, which Colin Cameron and George, George, my co author, George Lowenstein and others were involved with was called, published in the same year, which I think is 2003 but I may be wrong, was called regulation for conservatives, which exactly hits your point Kurt, because the idea, and this would also be true in the the the libertarian paternalism paper as well. In both those papers, they're saying, if you have a sort of slight suspicion of government and a belief in individual freedom. It's okay. You can go with this. Can go with get on this. Get on this bandwagon.

Kurt Nelson  27:11  
Hey, grooves, we want to take a moment away from our conversation to thank you for listening to behavioral grooves. If you enjoy the conversations we're having and want to help us keep the groove going. Here are a few simple ways that you can support the show.

Tim Houlihan  27:24  
First off, subscribing to our sub stack is a great way to stay connected with us between episodes. The weekly newsletter provides you with cool insights that are beyond the episodes, and they get delivered straight to your inbox, and

Kurt Nelson  27:37  
if you haven't already leaving a review or a rating of the podcast on a platform like Apple or Spotify or YouTube helps other curious minds discover us. And there's two great things about that. One, it gives us a boost, and two, it costs nothing

Tim Houlihan  27:53  
and it only takes a second, but it makes a huge difference for us. Plus, we love hearing from you, so don't be shy. Leave us a review or give us a quick thumbs up.

Kurt Nelson  28:03  
We're coming up on 500 episodes, and we're doing this because we love the conversations we have with our guests.

Tim Houlihan  28:09  
Yeah, we also want to do it because we love bringing you insightful behavior, changing content every week, and we hope that some of those insights will help you find your groove. Well, let's stick with this for just a second here. Nick, what's, what's missing when it comes to nudges? What? What's the shortcoming that nudges don't address?

Nick Chater  28:32  
Well, I think there are a couple of ways of putting that. I mean, the I think the fundamental reason that they don't work very well is that human behavior is much more embedded in the behavior of other people and the systems we're part of than we tend to imagine. So if you're for a psychologist like me, you're quite confident that if you get someone in a lab, you can push their behavior in all sorts of directions by just changing the way the problem stated, the very tiny details of wording and so on. You can, you can get, or indeed, the thing they've just done before they do the do the problem. You can people, people's behavior seems very malleable. So you can think, oh, like, this is great, because we can, we can get people to take more risks, take fewer risks, be more worried about their health, or less worried about their health. We can get them to have larger portions, smaller portions. We can do all kinds of we can just by changing the options in front of people. We can really push, push their behavior around, so that there are studies where you you give people options for different sizes of drink, and you add some crazy, super large drink, choose it, but they kind of think they kind of move up the distribution of it. But actually I'm gonna move, move my move my choice up a bit. Similarly, if you put a tiny little drink in your pull them down. So you can have the feeling that you've got a lot of control over individual behavior just by changing the environment. But the trouble is, when people get out into the real world, first of all, your nudge is. Around by a million other things that are going on, right? So you have your cafeteria where you make your tiny change. But of course, what about all the other cafeterias? What about all the eating at home people are doing? And also, what about all the other people around you who are kind of just going on as they were before, or actively reacting against the quote, and I just say, Ah, they're trying to get us to do something. Well, we're not going to do that because they're tough. And so there's so many, basically, so much stickiness in human behavior. So that's one aspect of it. The other aspect is more systemic aspect, which is so the first thing is that you get the impression, if you isolate people and put them in a cubicle, as it were, you think you think you can push them all over the place, as soon as you put them in the real world, all those other forces start to bear and behavior, their norms. That's, that's, that all starts to kick in. And then I think another thing that's, that's, and of course, another thing I should say there on that is that people's behavior is very governed by the people they're normally with. So trying to change my diet is is really hard if you don't change my family's diet, because we all eat getting everything over. If I work some kind of unilateral bid to change change my eating habits, at least it uphill battle. But alongside those being embedded problems, there's also the fact that the systems themselves are often the big players. So if we take something like carbon emissions, one of the things that was really astonishing about the covid pandemic was it led to behavioral change during lockdowns of a truly spectacular nature, in a terrible way. I mean, it's not the behavioral change you'd ever want. So the Warwick University, my university, had its campus 100% closed for several months. Its energy bill went down 20% that's kind of astonishing thing. Well, how could it be? But the behavioral change has gone to Maxi we're not even there, but actually, you're just keeping all the buildings running at a temperature which doesn't cause damage. And then there's all kinds of big pieces of physics equipment, they can't turn them off, or even they maybe can turn them off, but nobody, nobody, nobody really knows if they can or not. It's just the base load of energy consumption was just incredibly high, and just across the whole economy. Actually, the carbon emissions did drop, but they didn't drop that much, and that was a level of behavioral change. It's almost, you know, it absolutely maxes out what you could possibly get. So, I think often and the same, you say the same with something like go back to food, you could say, well, if we, if we ask ourselves, what's what's different now about our diets than they were, say, fortune 50 years ago? Well, the world, the rise of ultra processed, very cheap, ultra processed food is like a huge difference. It's food environments just change. And these things have been designed completely, not completely openly, but somewhat openly. There's not really a secret that they've been designed to be as as it were, Moorish as possible, to be as addictive. It's probably too, too strong. But if you eat a bit, you want to eat some more. And so we've created this, you know, this, this set of extremely calorie dense, not very healthy, nutrition, light food stuffs which are designed to appeal to us and and they're flooding, you know, they're flooding the supermarkets and flooding fast food outlets. And so it's sort of trying to try to hold back the tide. One individual at a time is a pretty difficult thing to do because they factor. People are having to work with the food options they've got, they've got limited budgets, they've limited time, and so on and so on. So the sort of systems people are working within a very you're often doing, doing most of the work, and the individuals just don't have that much latitude really.

Kurt Nelson  33:42  
There were a number of times in the book that you highlighted how corporations or industries in general have used marketing or other types of communication or different pieces of this to really kind of shift the focus from that more systemic element of, as you just said, we're, we're creating these foods that have, you know, high caloric, very, you know, highly processed, but they're very cheap, but they are there to more of an individual focus of, well, you should just be eating better. And in particular, you talked about BP, and, you know, they're kind of ad campaign that like, Oh, we're shifting, we're we're being green now, but it's the responsibility is basically on you. Is what is it that so a what does that do for the industry and different pieces of it and and, what is the good and bad? Or is there any good from that kind of shift? You know?

Nick Chater  34:46  
Yeah, I think it is, unfortunately, probably mostly not, not good. The title of the book, it's on you is, really comes from exactly this point that the the rhetorical line from a lot of. Big corporations who don't want to be regulated because, because the regulation, for example, for an oil company, of course you want, you want to keep producing oil. And yeah, if you really didn't want to produce oil, then you'd start putting your major investments into renewables, which they have only done to a very partial degree. And so it's clearly a rather, somewhat tokenistic. But I think the, yeah, the truth is, it's more it's sort of cleverer than that, you know, in not necessarily in a very positive way, because the the aim, because we find it difficult to see the world in more than one frame at a time, that the trick is exactly as you're intimating that we should, these corporations want you to see the problem, to you to own the problem, and they want you to own it, and they also want you to think other people own it too. So the real dream, if you're an oil company, is to get everybody to think, Oh, it's my problem. In fact, the chief executive of Exxon said something rather similar, well, along these lines, a couple of years ago, talk, talking about essentially, with the line was, well, we just produced the gas. If they want to be greener, they can totally use less gas. But, I mean, we're all we're doing is just providing the gas, right? So it's a fantastic sort of iframe perspective. It's saying you might think that we, as a gigantic corporation whose entire business model is is digging this gas and oil out of the ground enormous cost. You might think we're part of the problem here. But no, we're not. It's actually you users of the of the products. And anyway, the fact that the thought, I think, is that the because we find it difficult to see the world in these two ways, and if, if we see the world individualistically, we both blame ourselves, and at least it's importantly, blame each other. So I think it's really quite important that that we start to see the problem as other people. So we say, Ah, if those people left that these people are buying too much or these people are eating too much meat. So and obviously, I'm personally, obviously, personally feeling very guilty, but really, it's all a matter of us sort of beating each other up and pointing fingers at each other, rather than thinking, hang on. Go back to the point about the covid pandemic and the shutdown. Even if we all radically changed our lifestyles tremendously. We still improve the situation a bit, but not that much, because our whole society, in a way that doesn't really, isn't going to work. We've got to, we've got to rejig things more fundamentally.

Tim Houlihan  37:30  
Well, let's, let's talk about that for just a minute. The S frame, what is? What is so dramatically different from from the iframe of blaming ourselves, blaming each other, to the to the S frame. How does that? What is it and how does it help us?

Nick Chater  37:49  
Yeah, so I think I want to contrast the S frame with something that can sometimes sound a bit like it, which is thinking it's those corporations are just blame so I think that's those nasty CEOs. And I think that, in a way, that's still a sort of iframe perspective,

Tim Houlihan  38:03  
because which could kind of have a conspiratorial kind of vibe to it,

Nick Chater  38:07  
yes, absolutely, yes. There's a there are, there are small elites who are profiting at our expense. Now that there may be some truth in that, but I think actually it's wrong to think that the problem is the human nature of those elites. So pointing at specific CEOs, politicians and so on, saying, Ah, they're the problem. They need to do better. Now, maybe if they did better, that would be great, but it's not really the source of the problem,

Tim Houlihan  38:32  
right, right? You're not pointing, you're not pointing the finger at a handful of wealthy elites.

Nick Chater  38:38  
No, you're the problem individuals. The individuals aren't the problem. So I think thinking about something like spectacular growth in inequality, particularly at the top end, where the wealth of the very rich has become extremely great in proportion to the wealth the rest of us. That is that the fact that that's that the system that has allowed that to happen, and that's really, really a mistake, I think, or very dangerous, very dangerous. But it's not surprising that the people are benefiting from that. I think both, why would I? Why would I not go with it? I mean, it seems that the the system is allowing me to pay very little tax on my gigantic amounts of wealth, and why pay more and and, in fact, I have leveraged by funding political parties with unlimited amounts to create a better regulatory environment. Well, yeah, I mean, why wouldn't I do that? In fact, almost be remiss not to. So you, you can totally see why the individual is concerned that it's not to demonize those, those people at all. Really, it's that given, given that's the setup, then that's what people are going to do, yeah, and

Tim Houlihan  39:42  
that, and that's the system, that's the system you're talking about. It's the setup. It's the legal and policy and governmental structures as well as corporate structures.

Nick Chater  39:52  
Yeah, I think, yes, that's right, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think very good analogy, very simple, but I think effective analogy, thinking about how. And sports and games, and thinking that if your sports or game is sort of going haywire, things are the matches are very boring, or people keep engaging cheating, or the sort of mob violence is breaking out, you could think, well, we need to, you know, these players need to sort their ideas out. But we don't generally do that. We tend to think, well, because clearly there's something. We need to have more referees, or we need to change the rules, or we we've got to stop, we've got to get people to wear protective clothing, or we just, we just change the rules of the game. There's no point thinking, well, if it's no point between a situation where, if you, if you engage in some bad behavior in some sports, you tend to win. Well, if that's the case, people are going to do it. There's just no. I mean, everyone's going to do it, but the over time, the the winners are going to be the ones who are doing the bad stuff. And that's on. It's good. There's a race to the bottom of the Kurt. It's just, just, we don't allow that. We realize that we've got to, got to continually think about how the rules working, making sure that properly, probably there's proper oversight, check that they're being fairly enforced and so on. And that's that's true in societies too. And of course, it's not like this isn't happening. We societies, the complex structures we built up of itself which regulate society, have a reason through precisely our our our awareness of the need, and not necessarily all that explicit about awareness for the need to regulate ourselves in a fair and sensible way. But where these things go hopelessly wrong, where things go haywire, it's sort of hopeless, generally, a hopeless cause to think what we need is, as it were, moral education and better better people. They make it will make the right decisions. It like before, before a soccer game trying to stop people from engaging in sort of dangerous fouls which might hurt the opposition, saying, well, we need to morally moral instruction before the game, or not really nasty tackling. But if you still win the game, because you do the nasty stuff, you're gonna do the nasty stuff.

Kurt Nelson  42:04  
Yeah, well, let's, let's dig into some of this. Because in the book, you go into a number of these kind of areas around everything from, as we talked about, you know, obesity, you know, healthcare inequality, as you talk climate change, you know, retirement savings. So do we want to dig into one and kind of show like, what you guys were talking about, this, this difference from All right, so we have an iframe, but it's really a system component that needs to be adapted. I don't know, retirement savings, or let you pick which one you want to kind of dig.

Nick Chater  42:47  
Let's do retirement because we haven't talked about that before. I think, okay, really, excellent. Clear case, really. So once upon a time, maybe 40 or 50 years ago, many large corporations and government departments had defined benefits retirement schemes, which you were just in, whether you like, that was just the default thing, and it's a big benefit. And the point about defined benefit schemes is that it's kind of clear to you what you're going to get out so you some fraction of your salary when you finish based on years of service. Or you could change the rules can be different for different cases, but you know, you know what you're going to get, and those schemes are usually pretty reasonable.

Tim Houlihan  43:28  
Now it's, yes, that's X amount of money every month, exactly,

Kurt Nelson  43:32  
yeah, regardless of if I live five years after I retire or 20 years after I retire, right? That's, that's kind of the big piece on that, yeah, and

Nick Chater  43:42  
that's the thing, you're right, exactly. So it's a big deal from the point of view of social insurance, because it's, you don't know how long you're going to live. About you know you're going to be okay however long you do live. So that sort of spreading of risk is very, very appealing and and also, you're not worried about the very reason of the markets, because you've got this fixed stream of money, right? Huge stream, but it's reliable. And then, I mean, the, I think the broad story is that that the people start to live longer, so that makes those schemes more expensive. And the obvious thing to do would be to say, well, either we've got to, we just got to pay, pay more. We got to pay more of our earnings into those schemes, relatively so I've had less earnings and more pension contributions, and we still take that on the chin. That's that's one strategy. Another strategy is just to have slightly less generous retirements. And yet another point, of course, is working longer, retiring so soon. But there are various things you can you can fiddle with there, and people have different opinions about what the right balance is, but what actually happened was something very different. What actually happened, both in the UK and US, not everywhere in the world, is a move to break away from that kind of system completely and individualize in classic iframe approach, individualize the problem of pensions so roughly saying in extremists. The US has the most extremely individualized system, the extremist essentially saying we're not going to have a defined benefit system at all. You're just going to have a pot of money. You put this aside during a working life, and you just somehow live off the pot of money. If you live longer than expected, you might run out. If you don't live as long as you expected, then you're kind of fine, but it's up to you and how you invest that money. That's up to you too. And indeed, for that matter, if you decide halfway through your career that you'd like to use that money for taking a mortgage, that's also up to you. So there's this, this kind of rather terrifying loss of social insurance, but and also individualization of the of the financial strategy problem, which is incredibly hard problem, which teams, once upon a time, teams of actuaries and economists, would for the pension fund. Of course, it still goes on to the pension fund. Still, they would be poring over this stuff and struggling with it, finding it very difficult to work out what to do. But the idea that that's really hard, let's just throw it over to each individual. They'll just have a go on their own. It's a really, really tough problem. So I think that that has been a disastrous move, and I think it's also there's a sort of disingenuous element to it, because the it's been coincident with the fact that that we're living longer. So rather than thinking, well, that's just inevitable, wherever we pay for this, we're just gonna gonna have to pay more, live, work longer or something, it's just, there's just just no way that living having longer retirements is going to be for free. But instead of saying that, you can mask the whole thing by saying, well, we've just changed the scheme. If we don't have this old scheme, we've got this new kind of scheme where we just take money and put it in a pot, and is it going to be enough? Well, you figure it out right? Confronting this tricky question, you just like say, well, over to you, sort yourself out.

Kurt Nelson  46:56  
It's not our problem anymore. It's your problem. You as an individual. Now you get the look at all the wonderful things that we're giving you of control, and you can take this and and, yeah, but yeah, but it's your problem.

Nick Chater  47:14  
You can't come complaining to us, because we can say, well, you could have invested differently. You could, I mean, and you've no idea whether you've got enough money. You just the whole thing is you're throwing someone a problem they can't possibly solve, and then blaming them for all goes wrong. Yeah. So I think that that move is it's kind of funny, because the funny and dispiriting in the the pension industry, in some sense, everybody in the pension industry kind of knows that individuals are not in a position to make these choices because there's no risk sharing and the financial challenges are really complicated. Yeah, I mean, I don't know how to do this. In fact, I remember I talked to various economists who'd be looking at their own pensions, and think I don't know what to do. I've been baffled by this. I don't understand the system. It's so complicated. So it's like it's even, even with lots and lots of technical expertise, as an individual who's who's not spending your entire life doing this, it's kind of hopeless. So everybody in that industry knows this is a disaster, really, or at least they have information which would imply it's a disaster, but it's by some sort of heroic, collective, sort of obliviousness. They can go along saying it's careers greatness. We're providing this valuable service. And used to be so inflexible, whereas now it's super flexible, collective kind of blinkers, which have somehow kept the industry I think it's allowed people to feel that the industry is on track, rather than I think it's just kind of hopelessly off the rails.

Tim Houlihan  48:44  
Well, typically, when we think about really big, complex problems that are not solved, we think, well, either we don't really have an answer or we just aren't trying hard enough. Do you feel like either of those are

Nick Chater  49:01  
play in this? Yeah, I do. I think the thing that I think George and I have come away with in a lot of these areas is that often the systemic actions required are kind of fairly obvious, or at least widely agreed. And sometimes there are people have different nuances, different flavors, and some academics will say we should do more of x, and some will say no more of y. But the general direction of travel is often kind of clear, but we're not going in that direction, no at all. So it's not the problem isn't fake. It's not like we've got I suppose I used to think that policy errors would occur because we don't understand social science very well, which we absolutely don't, society is very complicated. It's changing all the time in unpredictable ways. It's being pushed around by technology, and it's just really hard to predict what's going to happen. So clearly, there will be errors which occur because we didn't understand the system very well and we did the wrong thing. But I think the really big social. Persistent social problems, things like the growth of inequality or the the increases in laundry, not rapid decreases in carbon emissions, and the increases in obesity across the world, and the complexities and expense of the US healthcare system, which I'm no expert on. That's George's domain, not mine, but but all of these things, these are, these are problems where it's kind of really clear what the solutions are, because in different times or in different places, those solutions have actually been implemented or are being implemented. So I think the reason these things are not being solved is usually, and this has a sort of slightly conspiratorial feeling to it, but I think once you're thinking about it from an S frame point of view, it's usually because there's some powerful player in the system who benefits from things not changing. And again, it's not to say those, the people involved are evil people. It's just that the game set up so that if, if we shift, for example, away from carbon, then then the fossil fuel industry is in real trouble. And if you're in the fossil fuel industry, this is not a very appealing, appealing scenario.

Kurt Nelson  51:06  
So, so how can we, and this is probably much bigger question than we can answer here, but if you talk about the way, the way that you're talking about that this game, that the way it's set up is such that the players who are winning want to keep the rules the same, and they have influence to be able to do that. So how do we shift the the game so that we can answer some of these big questions and challenges that we have in a way, as you said, we we see that it works in these instances. So why can't we? How can we change the game wherever we are? Have you, have you guys, looked at that? Or is that?

Nick Chater  51:53  
No, we have and we don't. We clearly don't have all the answers on this, but, but I think the examples that we think of historically as inspiring ones, are cases where campaigns which have come to some extent from the bottom up, organized by small groups of people initially, but taken up by many things like the abolition of slavery or civil rights movement or the women's movement, or the general push to increase, widen the franchise and so on. All of these cases where there's been relatively small groups of people who've benefited from a status quo which has not been for the common good, or at least for the good of a large population, it does turn out to be possible. And historically has happened that hearts and minds campaigns, usually, some degree from the bottom up, can, can actually oppose this. And I think the thing that is very important is realizing that what we need to be opposing is not. It's not, sort of, it's not, sort of trying to deal with each tiny issue one by one. It's the things like widening the franchise. These are things that really make a difference. So going back to the current political situation, something that's very concerning for many is the fact that because of the way party funding works, particularly in the US, but it just has many similar problems across the world, it gives disproportionate power to the very wealthy, and that we should all be assistant thinking, well, this is terrible. I mean, it's like, it's like giving the wealthy gigantic numbers of votes, and we don't want that. And so that's if we, if we, if we think of it that way, we should realize that that's something we should be trying to fix sort of immediately, really. And if we, if we don't fix that, we're not going to fix much else, because if the political, political power depends on the the acquiescence of the very wealthy, then the world very wealthy, you're going to do the things that are written their benefit, whether or not they're in benefit of the rest of us. So so then industries which have a great deal of money to spend on political campaigns, such as big tech and crypto, and so they're going to, they're going to be doing pretty well. But what about the rest of us? We don't have the money to put into these campaigns, so I think changing the rules, and of course, those those interests, will be very, very hostile to changing those rules, because those rules give them a great deal of power. And again, that's not to demonize them. It's not to say those, they're all bad people, that they're playing the game and they're trying to win in their own terms. But we need to realize not that they're bad people. But if a game is set up such that a tiny number of people are disproportionately controlling the rules, we better, we better take control back, and we can do that because we have demonstrably changed the rules of society really drastically in the past. But it's, it's it's a rare thing, and it doesn't happen. It just happens every day. It's on the other hand, when there's real sense of dissatisfaction and despair. We don't want to go there, but we are possibly going there anyway, and that may maybe this is a better opportunity than some to to get some of those grassroots movements going.

Kurt Nelson  55:00  
Yeah, it. I don't mean to go dystopian, but I'm probably going to go there with you're going there because I think what you just said was very interesting. It's that small number of people who are now in control of the rules and make the rules to, you know, and again, it's not necessarily conspiracy, but we are self interested, self preserving people and so and the way that we view our world is often, you know, framed in that perspective, and we don't even understand it at on that basic level. But when you have a small minority of organizations who get as we look at social media and the way that people are getting information these days, and the impact of AI and algorithms and so that they can send you, they can be manipulated to a certain degree into you know, you're seeing what, what we want you to see. And I guess this has always been there, so maybe I'm overreacting here. But is there a is that power structure even unduly higher than what it was in the past, when these groundswell movements were able to maybe come up from below, and, you know, overtake some of these pieces. And again, I I have no idea. I'm not sure if you guys have thoughts on that.

Nick Chater  56:27  
I think, I think we would also say we genuinely don't know. I think it's easy to feel that the current situation, in terms of sort of media hegemony, is, is worse, but historically, I think it has been, notably, been pretty bad. There's former newspaper owners who control all the press, yeah, so it's not, it's not obvious, and that's good, right? I mean, if it turns out that our situation is no is not actually actively worse, that maybe gives us more, more hope, but the but I think that we should be very concerned about the media landscape and the degree to which small numbers of players are able to eat, sort of eat up large media organizations and and change their political direction. That's that's very concerning. And the the fact that the algorithms that shape our social media diets are essentially undemocratically operating outside of democratic control that's or any, any oversight at all. I mean, that's, that's pretty alarm. So I do think this is, you know, this is a very, this is a very, very live issue, and something that any democracy should be working extremely hard to preserve. Essentially, democracies work when equality is hardly a staggering insight. They work when the quality of the rational debate and discussion in the society is is good. So people have good understanding of the world, they have a good ability to talk to each other, they have a common basis of facts. And that is being is being eroded. Yeah?

Tim Houlihan  58:05  
Well, to follow through on that, I'm wondering, and by the way, I'm stealing this from a letter part of the book. I love it when authors ask questions, because I'm like, oh, yeah, that's, that's great. That's gold. I'm just gonna throw that right back at Dick when I read this, but, but what is the role of behavioral science in this policy definition?

Nick Chater  58:27  
This is, this has been a sort of, in some ways, a torment to us, because we started off with this very strong sense that our role was to make these individual interventions which would circumvent all that, that heavy handed lead and old fashioned policy making, and I think now we see it very differently. So we I think we do think behavioral science is important, but it's important primarily for understanding the sort of political psychology of democracies. So what is it that allows us to work together to create a groundswell of opposition. For example, what is it that create? What is it that in a, in a campaign or a an objection to a particular status quo? What is it that catches fire that that people think, yes, that is unjust, and we need to oppose that. Versus, oh, it's hopeless and I can't do anything about it anyway. What gives us that sense of efficacy and effectiveness, that the lab that will actually encourage us to work together collectively, to overturn or overturn unjust or unhelpful rules and that, I think that's the question. So I think that the power we have in a democracy is this huge power of citizens as as voters, that we do potentially have the ability to shift the rules, use that in a in an effective way to understanding how that process works and and helping that process of you. And making democracies function better, because that's, that's where ultimately I see the role of well,

Tim Houlihan  1:00:06  
and do you think more people would like Green Eggs and Ham if they just tried it?

Nick Chater  1:00:11  
Yes, very, very nice. So, so we have an analogy at the at the end of the book, that for so many policies that that move away from the status quo, which seem, well, novel and therefore weird and generally a bit objectionable. Quite often, once they're inactive, they seem kind of fine. And my favorite example of this is seatbelt legislation. Because I I can remember, in my own family, when I was a smallish child, just came in there. I remember one of my uncles saying, this is the total outrage and and, what? What if you were, if you were in an accident, you might well be thrown clear of the car and seat belt.

Tim Houlihan  1:00:52  
It would be safer to not wear a seat belt.

Nick Chater  1:00:56  
Yes, so many ways, just bizarre, but a tremendous sense of, sort of the nanny state and the infringement of civil liberties. And after sort of six months of this, I mean, everyone's thinking, Well, what is the verse? I mean, what possible issue could there be? I don't get in the car as you are here, we are sort of being commanded by some evil power, and it makes no difference to your driving experience. It's a lot safer and a lot fewer people died. And so that's a kind of classic green eggs and ham case, because, as in Dr Seuss's book, you can start off thinking, no, no seat belts. Absolutely terrible point. You try seat belt, you think, Oh, this is fine, really. This is great. There are so many. So smoking bans are like that too. So as you'll know, your listeners, and listeners will know, most smoking bans around the world in public places and cars and all sorts of things where they're gradually extended are usually quite popular even among smokers. So it's curiously even people who are smoking thinking, actually, it's kind of it's kind of bad to be smoking in the house. If everyone else is smoking the house, I can smoke in the house, but I don't really want to do that, and I don't want to expose my kids to the smoking. So actually, having this rule is good. Now, not everybody thinks that way, but, but it's another green eggs and ham thing. It's the kind of thing that seems objectionable, but actually, we get used to it and quite like it. And yet, yet another one, a very live one for New York City, is the congestion charge. Where almost every congestion charge has ever been introduced, there's enormous opposition, and the natural instinct is to think, well, it won't make any difference anyway. It'll just be just as busy, and we have to pay this charge. But it isn't, in fact, just as busy. The truth is that people do moderate their driving and traffic works better. And people don't necessarily love the charge, because it's very hard to find a tax or a charge for anything that people love, but they kind of think, yeah, it's fair enough. Okay, we don't really want to go back. And actually, you know the charge, my understanding, is the charge in New York City has worked pretty well. So I think just but people may have different, different opinions about different policies, but the general story is that even if a policy actually really makes sense and is proven to work elsewhere, it will get opposition when it's introduced, and then we just need to keep the green eggs on hand. Thought in mind, it's kind of okay, just give it a go and just give it a go to like it. And actually there, I think there is actually a policy, sort of psychology suggestion, which is that you can introduce things on temporary basis, and then, you know, okay, if it doesn't work, people really hate it after the temporary basis, temporary period has stopped, then okay, just genuinely will stop it, but maybe people will tend to like it, in which case, let's continue. And so I think sometimes that that kind of strategy, and it's not just a devious strategy, if thing doesn't work, we should stop, right? We should go ahead, just doing things in a more flexible way, can get us to make a change, which will probably turn out for the good.

Kurt Nelson  1:04:01  
Well, I think that you bring up a really good point. That's this flexibility. It's the temporal part. It's the it's almost scientific. It's like, we're going to test this for a while, see how it works, and then move forward from that, in this green eggs and ham kind of scenario, is this a good place for behavioral scientists to play to get people to even try those green eggs and hams, because we there is good research on helping how you frame something, how you you talk to that change in the game or the system?

Nick Chater  1:04:37  
Yeah, no, absolutely. It's exactly the kind of thing that some people are doing, but I think we should be all doing much more of so I think for looking at my own fields, very narrow perspective to be looking at, but for looking at my own field, we've been very much focusing on, how can we make individuals directly do as it were better things, whereas I think we really can do a lot in thinking, how can we get coalitions to support. High carbon taxes, say, congestion charges, etc. So that's really where the action is. And similarly, I think with things like electoral reform. So in the UK, I don't know how it is in the US, but in the UK, one thing that is almost politically toxic, bizarrely, is the idea that we would have paid political campaigns, we just have a fixed budget, and you get a chunk of money based on something like your support of the last election, or some mixture of that and recent opinion polls, whatever. And the general thought is, this is just outrage. Public money being frittered away on election campaigns. Rather than thinking this is very hard sell, I think. But the sell what ought to be making is yes, but the alternative is putting the power in the control of the people with the money. So yeah, they're gonna control this, right? You the electrical control it, but you can't, you can't avoid and this is such a small amount of money compared to the because these budgets could be pretty low. And obviously us budgets have gone absolutely skyrocketing, but it would be totally fine to have quite modest spot budgets. But that thinking how to frame that in a way that it becomes politically a real option is a very live issue. I think

Tim Houlihan  1:06:12  
I'm thinking about how to frame this next question. Nick and I really don't have a have a good nothing is coming to mind, honestly. So I'm really struggling with this. But I am curious about, what would you do if you had a year on a desert island and you had a listening device? Oh, and that listening device only had space for two artists. Two you get the whole catalog. But which two artists would you did you choose? Oh, gosh, that wasn't very elegant.

Kurt Nelson  1:06:45  
Was structured. The whole like, I have to frame this and I'm going, where are you going with I was worried you were bringing in some really, like, oh, debatable. You know, this person said, X, how are you responding to this? But no, we're going to the

Nick Chater  1:07:02  
really hard. So I'm thinking, Yeah, I think I might go for a slightly, slightly left field combination here. So I think I might go for, I might go for Bach, because lots of bark. And I really like bark, tons of it, right? I could go on for ages with that, and then the other one would be John McLaughlin, who's my guitar hero. When I used to play the jazz guitar, I used to think one day I'd like John McLaughlin, and that was never going to happen, because he's phenomenal guitarist, but he's played in this huge range of styles with fantastic bunch of people, and I always just think he's great. So if people don't know John McLaughlin, he's sort of super cool, super cool Jessica. So I was from Britain, in fact,

Tim Houlihan  1:07:49  
very much. So his work with the MA Vishnu orchestra is what got me turned on.

Nick Chater  1:07:55  
I think that's fantastic. Yeah, yeah. No, I was when I was at first at university, I came across New orchestra. I thought this is just amazing stuff. And seen him a few times, and he's Yeah. So I think that's, yeah, that's a big catalog there. There's a big catalog of Bach. Might be fine.

Tim Houlihan  1:08:10  
Well, in Bach, where would you, where would you start? Would you do you lean towards the piano pieces, yeah.

Nick Chater  1:08:16  
So I suppose, I mean, yeah, you've got the sort of Glenn Gould, assuming have anyone playing them, right? So, so I think, I think that's, that's great. Well, temperature is great stuff, and, but on the organ, these things are good as well. And then there's Brandenburg chess, Israel, favorite from childhood for me, which is just fantastic. And, of course, the Mass in B minor. I mean, there's just lots of great stuff.

Tim Houlihan  1:08:39  
Yeah, Brandenburg is what caught my attention first. I think it's the first Bach piece I can I can remember, you know, just really, just falling in love with and going, Oh, my God, that's just gorgeous. Like, yes, great, yeah, elevated about that. Okay, okay, fantastic. Thank you for being willing to walk that weird, oddly thin line with me there for just a minute. Nick, we want to express our gratitude. Thank you so much for being a guest on behavioral grooves today.

Nick Chater  1:09:11  
Well, thank you, Tim. Thank you Kurt. It's been a real pleasure.

Kurt Nelson  1:09:20  
Welcome to our grooving session where Tim and I share ideas on what we learned from our discussion with Nick. Have a free flowing conversation and groove on whatever else comes into our individually choice wanting brains.

Tim Houlihan  1:09:34  
Yeah, yeah. We like that, that that centrist, that centrist view of I can make my own decisions. I mean, this is, this is how toddlers get along in the world. Let me make the decision. I'm ready to make that decision I can walk so, damn it. Let me choose which candy I want off the shelf. Yeah.

Kurt Nelson  1:09:54  
I mean, there's, there's the big component of this that we do not like being told. World, what we can and can't do, that's freedom. It's the, you know, it's, it's, it's our individual liberty. It is that whole element of self determination, of what I get to choose for myself, and yet, as Nick so wonderfully talked about in this episode, sometimes that doesn't work. Sometimes that even even when we have paternal libertarianism, isn't that I just say that wrong libertarian paternalism. Libertarian paternalism, yeah, right, that we still have the choice. We're just nudging you in the right way. Those nudges don't make a systemic change in when there are so many other factors that are pushing against it. And I think that is a really interesting piece as we think about this.

Tim Houlihan  1:11:03  
Yeah, and I think the first thing that came out of the discussion, for me is that, especially along the lines of what you've just been talking about, is that we tend to underestimate the impact that moral appeals can have, and consequently, we underestimate the role of incentives, and the kind of impact that incentives can have, or structure or framework

Kurt Nelson  1:11:26  
explain that. Like, what do you mean by over you overestimate the moral appeals?

Tim Houlihan  1:11:32  
Is that we overestimate the moral appeals because we have this, this desire to to self direct everything, like, just let me make the choice. I'm good at making decisions. I make decisions every damn day. Just give me the opportunity to make the choice, and I'll make the best choice. So don't get in

Kurt Nelson  1:11:47  
my way. And we can appeal to the better self in you. We appeal to your own self interests. We can appeal to a whole number of different factors. And therefore I should, if you give me the information. You give me those ability, then I should be able to make that choice.

Tim Houlihan  1:12:06  
That's right. All you need to do is just give me the information, and then I love the way you said that. And at the same time, I think we're underestimating the role of incentives and structures and policies and things like that, even even at the very largest structure of capitalism itself, like we underestimate the influence that that markets have in in these kinds of decisions, and so, so I just think about, I really, like a lot of what Nick has to say, because, because we're coming at this, maybe we're not, we're not coming At every problem from the wrong way, but we're coming at some of these really large scale problems. We're trying to answer it with the with the shaming that came along with the crying Indian story in the 1970s you know, if we shame consumers enough, they'll stop polluting

Kurt Nelson  1:12:58  
well, and that was funded by the oil companies,

Tim Houlihan  1:13:04  
or was it or the plastic companies, container companies, the container manufacturers, yeah,

Kurt Nelson  1:13:09  
the plastic companies, right. So this idea that that you know, environmental concern needs to be placed at the individual level and different things. I think it's really interesting. It goes back again to my favorite, one of my favorite researchers, Kurt Lewin, this idea, absolutely, that behavior is a result of the person, that individual choice, but also the environment, and there's an aspect of the environment, as you talked about, with the the incentives that are sometimes stacked against us for I'll just think about this for an instance, right? That exact piece that you said there's a lot of money to be made by the plastic industries if they don't have to shift up how they make their plastics and what they do in order to market them, because there's, you know, littering and environmental issue with that right, right that they they make more money by placing the the impetus on the individual, not on them as an industry, they're

Tim Houlihan  1:14:36  
not evil people. I this is not a finger pointing exercise at Sure, tin cans and plastic manufacturers because but this is what the market this is what capitalism helps design. This is part of the systemic side of this. This S frame that just says, If you can make your. Your product cheaper. If you can make it easier to consume, it will sell more. And so think about, why not? Why not do that?

Kurt Nelson  1:15:08  
I mean taking into just, let's take a look at the way that we get, get kind of our, our, our natural tendencies, the biological evolved wiring that we have get taken advantage of and advantage. I'm actually using very specifically here, because we've been we've evolved to want and like high sugar, high fat foods, right when we lived out on the planes, if we could find those, if we were more motivated to go after those types of foods, they gave us more calorie intake, and that could prevent us from dying when the next time that we could get food for the next few days. So we were designed to like those foods, to eat those foods more, to just over indulge on them. And that in today's world means that McDonald's, coke, you know, all of the cookie manufacturers, Nabisco, all the candy manufacturers, they're tapping into that. They may not fully understand the evolutionary component of that, but they're tapping into that, yeah, which is how they make money. This is and so they're going to make their foods sweeter, more more component. And that is a like a sledgehammer against our our biological impulses, that Sledgehammer against our decision making. Well, that's what I Yeah, that's what I meant, yeah, yeah, because it's really

Tim Houlihan  1:16:51  
it's hard to resist. You know, you also brought up the tragedy of the commons, which is, I think, an important aspect of this. And I was in for those listeners who are not familiar with tragedy the commons, would you just give a quick little explanation of it?

Kurt Nelson  1:17:07  
Tragedy of the Commons is that when there is they talked about it like with sheep in a communal pasture. And if you know the idea is that if everybody just has one sheep, then there's enough grass for everybody in the pasture. But if I'm an individual, and it's a free pasture that everybody in the community shares, why don't I put two or three or four sheep out there? Because it's not costing me anymore, because the pasture is free. But then if I do that, I get more. But then everybody else starts thinking about the same thing, and everybody else does that. And pretty soon the pasture is done right, and it won't right. It won't support it won't support any sheep. And so you get a short term gain, but a long term deficit from everybody individually, trying to maximize this good that doesn't have any real costs associated with it. And that's what happens a lot with like the pollution various different things. There's a lot of things that we can't that we like. It doesn't cost the company that's polluting anything to pollute. And actually, if it makes it cheaper. I can pollute more and make more money in the short term, but in the long term, it leads to a negative environment for

Tim Houlihan  1:18:29  
everyone exactly, exactly. And I want to get to thank you for that. That's a great explanation. I also want to get to this idea that incentives are built into our systems, and policymakers use incentives all the time, and you and I have done a lot of work in incentives, and I just want to remind people that an incentive is not just a reward, but it's also the rule which you earn the reward in right? It's both sides of the coin, and if you've got a well designed incentive, if you've got the right sort of effort to reward ratio, and so if you got the rules tuned right, it's very possible to have good incentives to get good behaviors, and people will do them gladly because the incentives are there. Yeah. So there's a part of me that just feels like maybe we're just not putting enough effort into the right incentives for for some of these things,

Kurt Nelson  1:19:21  
I think that's 100% right. I think you have nailed it. I mean, the incentives that we have are, if we design those incentives, well, then we're there, which goes to some of the designs on these taxation things, around carbon taxing, around consumption taxes, various different components, those are basically negative incentives, so they're increasing the cost in order to decrease consumption. And again, are they designed right? That makes a big impact on how good they are and various different people. Pieces of that. But that comes into play, I think, when you know you can't game the system, when there are other factors that like you understand the impact, and are you willing to pay the tax or willing to go the extra mile to earn the incentive, and it's driving the right behaviors, right? And sometimes it's the unintended consequences that that happen that we don't account for. Because, I mean, take this to heart, right? We're not good at predicting future behaviors, future impacts of things we're just not,

Tim Houlihan  1:20:45  
because the future is really challenging to predict.

Kurt Nelson  1:20:49  
Period, I mean, and the other thing too, again, if we just go back to our natural tendencies that we were talking about, I mean the hyperbolic discounting component, this idea that we want, you know, short term rewards that are smaller than, like, waiting for something that's bigger and better, long term this idea of the status quo bias. I mean, we there are so, I mean, that's what behavioral science has really done a good job of, is identifying, you know, all of these factors that get in the way and incentives need to understand those and utilize, and not necessarily utilize, but understand the impact that those different biases have, because otherwise the incentives themselves won't work, so

Tim Houlihan  1:21:37  
which is really A great reason to have nudge units in local authority areas like mayor's offices and city councils, and to have behavioral science in a very specific region. Rather than trying to deal with the hyperbolic discounting of a nation, how about just try to deal with it for a very specific amount of people. We've talked to David Yoakum about that, you know, a lot over the years. And so I think that there's benefits.

Kurt Nelson  1:22:07  
And I think there's, again, there are definite benefits for nudging, and they are low, oftentimes they're low cost. And so there's no harm in actually doing many of them. That's right. The difficulty is when that is the only tool in our tool belt, and that's the only way that we're trying to drive positive, systemic at scale change, then we run into issues, and that's been, I think that's where Nick and George were going. A lot of this is that there are systemic issues. And again, you know, capitalism is a fantastic, fantastic market mechanism. It is helped us go from, you know, horse and buggies to the world that we're living in, and the all the technology and the great conveniences and the wonderful lives that we live, our extended life and our health and a number of really positive things. But sometimes it can lead to industries that are just focused in on their own power and wealth, at the negative consequences for everybody else, and you're not going to necessarily change that. It's the crying Indian it's the other factors that they're trying to push the blame away because it's in their best interest,

Tim Houlihan  1:23:42  
and did it effectively for a long time, yeah, and they still are. They are doing it, yeah, yeah. The second thing that I wanted to talk about was how we're in a constant state of change, like our world is changing constantly. We are changing constantly, but and we're normalizing it as we go right? So I'm thinking back now to the kornsteeite effect. So there's this researcher named, I think it was, name was Richard kornsweet. What a weird name. But is like, if you want to call attention to things that are only a little bit different, bring them right up next to each other. And if you've got two things that are sort of relatively different, and you don't want to highlight the difference, just pull them apart, just make them farther away. And and in when we have these changes in our lives, we're kind of going along normally, and we're not seeing these dramatic differences. But when a new policy comes into place, or a new law or or the seat belt law. That's like, that's like the Kurt sweet effect, bringing these two things right up next to each other, really highlighted, really dramatic, right? And so when I, when we think about designing for, you know, for, for change situations, do you want to highlight the difference? Or do you. Not want to highlight the difference. Yes, that's part of it. And I think one things that a policy does is it's going to highlight the difference. It's going to draw attention to the fact that these two could be pretty similar. Things are dramatically different in the moment,

Kurt Nelson  1:25:15  
there's a demarcation line that happens before policy to after policy, right? And again, there's some good work, like, how do you, can you? Can you bring in a policy and step wise, it like small, incremental changes over time, and how does that work? Or, you know, the but that is a really, I think, important piece that you bring up is this, we are changing all the time. I mean, if you think about the world we live in in 2026 relative to a world we lived in in 2016 relative to the world we lived in in in 2006 going back to 1996 the world. I mean, having a phone computer in my hand is a vastly different world than what it was 20 years ago, with the interconnectedness of of everything, the algorithms that drive things, you know, and I'm gonna just that. That brought it back up to me. We are not good at predicting the future. And because we're not good at predicting the future, those small, incremental changes that in the moment are, you know, it's not bad that I get to have a phone in my hand and I have a social media account where I can look and say, Oh, here's what my friends are doing. Look, they're going on vacation, or they just got a new puppy, or whatever. The wonderful thing about that is, but we don't understand the long term consequences, and we don't predict those very well. To understand how addictive that can be, and then how the companies are working, because they want to keep you on this, so they're going to start showing you things that drive political wedges between us, because that is shown to be sticky, and we like those antagonistic, or we get angry, and we therefore respond. And so there are negative, long term consequences to some of these things, because they're small, incremental pieces that we don't see the day to day change, right?

Tim Houlihan  1:27:31  
That's, that's a great that's a great point Kurt, because I go back to Otto Bismarck, I think we talked about this a little bit, right? That he designed this system that said, you get to 65 Dude, you are set for the rest of your life. We got you covered, but, but most people didn't live past 50. And so as as things changed incrementally, you don't kind of unnoticeably, over time, we're now living into our

Kurt Nelson  1:27:59  
80s, 90s, and in Japan, right? I mean, the average lifespan in Japan is, is, for women, is over 90. That's, that's a, that's a big change in the last 100 years. And so the financial right, the consequences of that is that 65 as that retirement age hasn't changed, right? Yet we live productive, healthier lives, much longer. Yes, and that means that we're being, that those social insurance, the social securities of the world are are being, they have more to pay out over a longer time frame, and we haven't changed those, right? There's a we've we've instilled this social norm that hasn't shifted, because that's a Green Eggs and Ham thing, like, we can't change the retirement age to 70. Maybe we'd get, you know, and they've seen this. I mean, France tried to do some of the stuff, and they had huge protests out in their in their streets, yeah.

Tim Houlihan  1:29:05  
So that's a great example of this, this corn sweet issue of you want to make something that could be a relatively small change, it will appear like a massive change when you bring it right up against in the policy which I like your idea. I'm looping back to your idea of saying, What if change were implemented slowly over time, like from Otto Bismarck's time today? What if, if they had the data and they say, okay, every year we're going to increase the retirement age by six months, or every five years we're going to increase it by six months. Yeah, that's, that's a relatively modest change, yeah, and over time it kind of, it might have kept pace.

Kurt Nelson  1:29:44  
It might have kept pace. And today I will, I will say that there have been, I mean, if you look at the way that your Social Security is designed, they've, they've done a little bit of trickery, right? You can get. Get X amount. If you take it at 62 you get more if you take it at 65 and you get even more if you take it at 67 right? So they're 70 or step wise, however that is. And you know, by changing those number, they can change those numbers a lot easier than they can change like that, that demarcation point of when it was and I think, you know, they were able to do that because they said, Look, you can actually take it. We're allowing you to take it earlier, you know, because you get less Right, right, but we're going to decrease, you know, these other amounts and make it more lucrative for you to take it when you're older. And they can play with those numbers. They don't get the headlines like if they were to say, we're changing the retirement age to 70,

Tim Houlihan  1:30:52  
exactly a last comment that I wanted to make. And this is something that you have been an advocate of for a long time, and that is personal agency. So you know this, this regulatory agency of having control in our lives, because it is real. I don't, I want to. I'm contrasting this with our part of our conversation with Nick about how we're not so great at making our our all always our best decisions, and maybe we shouldn't be trusted. Shouldn't be given the autonomy to make all of our decisions. That's, I don't want to go there, but I do want to to just note that I certainly do respect the fact that we have agency, we have the ability to make our own decisions, and to a large degree that should be respected, right? And this is, again, this is a topic that's been tied and true for you for you for a long time, especially in the world of incentives.

Kurt Nelson  1:31:43  
Yeah, and I think there's an aspect of this that we don't want to live in an auto, auto crack, courtesy. But why can't I pronounce autocracy? Autocracy? Thank you. Yeah, you know where, where our decisions are decided for us by the government and over regulation is, is a thing, yeah, I mean, if anybody's you've had a bathroom, you know, remodel. And granted, there are rules in place for a reason, right? But there's a, we have a I'm not gonna go there, but, like, There's a bathroom remodel that we want to do, but we know that there is a a code that says, you know you have to have a certain height above your your toilet. Otherwise you have to, you know that to whatever reason, right? There's a reason for that. We've lived with this for 25 years, that this height isn't there, and we don't want to change where the the toilet is, so we can't redo our bathroom without having to move that toilet and do a whole bunch of other structural changes. 1000s of people live with this, and we'll continue to live with a non remodeled bathroom because of that, because the cost that it's going to make to move that is just not, you know, it's not feasible for us at this time. So, exactly,

Tim Houlihan  1:33:05  
exactly, okay. Shall we wrap up? Anything else? Any other issues on your your agenda? Let's wrap up. Okay, okay. So here's another way of looking at the definition of insanity, trying to coach better players while the rules reward the wrong outcomes. Right Nick was using the sports analogy. Okay, if, if we're if we just try to coach the players better, but the rules are acting against us, then we shouldn't surprise. Be surprised that the scoreboard won't change. We shouldn't be surprised that we're not really moving the needle. So that is, that's a new definition of insanity

Kurt Nelson  1:33:43  
from mine. Yeah, I think the the interesting piece, and I think there's a huge debate going on right now out in the behavioral science researcher world, right? And we know this from the pushback that Nick and George got on their original paper, is this idea of, where does behavioral science role play, right, and should behavioral science maybe a better understanding of some of these systemic components and what it will take in order to make s frame, you know, changes, maybe we need to push some of that, our research, into those fields, as opposed to the iframe and the individual nudges. So absolutely, that's a big piece of maybe where the world is going in the next 10 years. And could be we'll see these small change, gradual changes, and we'll be going, hey, whatever happened to that iframe research? It all disappeared. If only I still want the iframe right.

Tim Houlihan  1:34:51  
I like nudges. Lots of good lots of good work there. Absolutely love it. If you have not gone out and. Checked out our Facebook community. If you're one of those six or seven people, the tiny fraction of of people who have not gone out there to check out, it okay, that's that's not

Kurt Nelson  1:35:09  
that's not true. There's more than six or seven of our listeners. We do have. We have been growing pretty every month, all of the time. We started off and we had like 50 people, and then it was we celebrated when we got to 100 we're well over 200 now. So the community is growing and thriving. So yeah, and

Tim Houlihan  1:35:32  
it's interactive. It's a really great place to hang out. Kurt post the most amazing, thought provoking groove questions every time he's out there, it just absolutely blows me away. But it's always good for discussion, and it's good to exchange ideas. So check it out, folks,

Kurt Nelson  1:35:51  
and then also get our sub stack, because there's great stories focusing in on our interviews. But also we'll, we'll, we do some extra special editions out there. So subscribe to that. You don't have to pay. There's a free version if you want to pay. Fantastic. We would love you to pay. But you know what? That's an i decision for you. You have the choice to choose to pay or not pay, right? There you go.

Tim Houlihan  1:36:18  
So, so, so then my question becomes, how are we going to do with this little moral appeal?

Kurt Nelson  1:36:26  
Oh, we have, is it enough? We have been doing this and been paying out of pocket to produce this podcast

Tim Houlihan  1:36:37  
only for the last eight years. For eight

Kurt Nelson  1:36:39  
years, we've had a few people who have supported us, and we love them. Love them dearly. We're grateful that still, we have a producer to pay. We have production costs. We have the all of the subscriptions that we have for the pod bean to the boom caster to otter all the stuff that was required to make this podcast for you guys, and

Tim Houlihan  1:37:12  
we're creating a legacy of of content that can be repurposed for The rest of everybody's life, right?

Kurt Nelson  1:37:20  
We're millennials, going forward for 1000s of years.

Tim Houlihan  1:37:25  
Yeah, exactly that. It at some point somebody's gonna say, Well, what was it like when that that fresh out of of grad school PhD said, you know, what did they What did they think when they first got out of grad school? What was that like? Well, we talked to them, and we've documented our conversation with him, and we have an archive of more than 500 episodes of of the stuff that is fantastic for going back and reviewing what was it like three weeks into the pandemic. We've got we broadcast 45 episodes in 90 days. We have a lot of data. We have a lot of impact. We have a lot of content that you can go back and refer to

Kurt Nelson  1:38:10  
and that that if that's not worth supporting, well, you know, I don't know what is. So we appreciate any contribution, whether it be through our patreon. It's getting our sub stack. Whether it's just a gift that you send us in the mail, you know, we'll take that. There you go. If you want to be, if you want to be a sponsor of any of our episodes, we will sing your name and praise to the yes, we will. And teamth of the world, here we go. So, all right, enough of our moral thing. Everybody's signed off, except for those six or seven people who are going, Wait, am I the one who's not part of the groove community page? I hope they're asking that question, don't be, don't be someone who's not a part of it. And if these ideas help you, if the conversation with Nick

Tim Houlihan  1:38:58  
is helpful for you, get out and use those Ideas this week to help you find your groove. You boom.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai