Behaviour Change: Science and Technology Committee Report

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Wednesday 11th July 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Giddens]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Neuberger, and her colleagues on the production of this report. It is excellent work and right up there in the top echelon of reports produced in your Lordships’ House. It is a shame that it has not drawn in more noble Lords to discuss it. However, the saving grace is that the ones who are here are notably distinguished and therefore we can anticipate a high-level debate.

The topic is manifestly extremely important as there are so many areas in which Governments want to promote behaviour change. Public health, as mentioned in the report with the case study of obesity, is a good example, but there are dozens of other fields. Today one might want to include bankers, for example, as all parties now want to produce a new culture of responsibility in the City. If that is not a massive behaviour change, I do not know what it is.

The work of Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein is quite rightly given central place in the report because of the impact that their work has had, especially the book Nudge, which has been mentioned, which was a bestseller in the United States—it was right at the top of the New York Times list. Since then, Cass Sunstein has been working in the Obama Administration trying to debureaucratise American business, among other things. As noted in the report, the book has had a strong influence on the coalition Government here.

I find Sunstein’s work, in particular, interesting and I have followed it for many years. As most people here will know, he is a distinguished legal theorist. For example, he wrote a devastating critique of the precautionary principle in environmental politics which, for anyone who is interested in that, shows why there is no such thing as a precautionary principle.

I think everyone here will agree that the book Nudge is packed with provocative ideas and vignettes. For example, there is one about estate agents. If you are buying a house you should watch out because one of the things that estate agents do is first of all show you two rather crummy properties before they show you the one they want you to buy. This establishes a frame of tolerance, in Sunstein’s language. It demonstrates what they are writing about because it implies some degree of covert behaviour influence. In other words, if you knew what the estate agent was doing you would be in a position to block off that influence. The covert element of their work has received a great deal of critical attention in philosophical literature, as has the notion of their philosophy, which they describe as libertarian paternalism. Many people think that that is an oxymoron but they vehemently deny that it is. I do not share that political philosophy, even though I recognise the wealth of examples that have developed in their writings. I agree with the fairly heavy objections to it, which are developed in the report. They are more consequential for the Government than the noble Baroness implied, for reasons that I will come back to.

The report took a lot of evidence and concluded that the Committee,

“were given no examples of significant change … having been achieved by non-regulatory measures alone”.

The report also rightly questions whether non-regulatory measures are more respectful of the freedom of the individual than ones involving regulation.

The Government have often taken an activist and interventionist role to secure beneficial behaviour change. The one thing that we can all agree on is that purely informational approaches—this is documented in the report and many other sources—do not really work. For example, ads or literature spelling out the dangers of unhealthy diets do not work by and large, or they have only a marginal impact on those whom they are supposed to help. The report is lacking in a kind of analytical pattern, so I offer my own on why it is so difficult to change lifestyle habits, as it is almost always difficult to do so.

I have three points to make. First, most lifestyle patterns are not individual traits; they are embedded in wider cultural settings. We cannot persuade people to change their behaviour without altering the cultural traits that drive it. This is often extremely hard to do and almost always takes time. To my mind it universally involves regulation. If we go back to the case of corporate culture in the City when talking about a big deal, it is obvious that you will not do much nudging there; you need systematic restructuring of what happens in the City and it has to be pretty penetrating. It is true that in lifestyle patterns such as alcohol consumption or smoking there are ordinarily strong cultural factors involved in the groups in which the individual is a member. Not many individual traits of behaviour are individual at all.

Secondly, some forms of behaviour that Governments may wish to change are deeply addictive. As someone who has a long–standing interest in addictive and compulsive behaviour, I know that these elements apply to many lifestyle traits in contemporary culture. It is true, for example, of most harmful eating habits. Some are involved in obesity, or in its opposite, anorexia in which I have had a lot of interest through all the phases of my career. People starve to death in the middle of a society in which there is too much food to go round. The compulsive element of that habit system is very apparent. It means that the underlying emotional sources of such lifestyle forms of behaviour have to be grappled with. For that reason nudging might be useful in certain specific contexts, but it will not allow someone to change such behaviour. In my view, obesity has a strong addictive as well as a cultural component to it. It is true of many traits of behaviour that a Government might want to try to change.

Thirdly, in trying to change behaviour we often have to confront systems of power and established interests. By and large only Governments can do that. Smoking is an interesting example as it is one area in which we have made a difference. There has been a substantial reduction in the proportion of people smoking—not in the world, where it still goes on, but in several of the industrial countries. However, it took 30 years to achieve that and about 24% of the people in this country still smoke, nevertheless. One reason for this is the resistance of the tobacco industry and the long-standing battle that it fought, and that is very true of a whole range of areas where we need to secure behaviour. If we do not confront established interests and do not recognise that there is a power system involved, we are not going to get very far.

The report calls for more effective connections between policies in the social sciences. As a social scientist, I very strongly support that and this leads me to a couple of questions for the Minister. First, I repeat the question that was asked: what happened to the famous chief social scientist? It seems to be an important position to reinstate, as I understood it would be. Secondly, in spite of what the noble Baroness, Lady Neuberger, says, this report demolishes a good deal of the Government’s ideological position in that the reason why Nudge was so attractive to the Government was that it seems to indicate that you can downplay the roles of government and legislation and yet achieve significant change by other means. The report shows that, by and large, this is not the case and I do not therefore see how the Government can really endorse it with equanimity.

Finally, on obesity and other dietary concerns, I return to the issue of power. We live in a society where there is highly developed corporate power, which takes the form of corporations influencing people through advertising, especially children. Corporations do not pick up the social and medical costs of what they do. It is the NHS that picks up the costs of the obesity epidemic, which is staggering in its consequences for type 2 diabetes and a whole range of other disorders. Should not the food industry be taxed more substantially, in order that it makes a bigger contribution to the very harmful forms of behaviour over which it has so much influence?