Stephanie
Diamond Member
- Jul 11, 2004
- 70,230
- 10,864
Well if Politico says it. and hey it's only your money being used to find ways Government can Nudge you. is this what you put a President in office for?
snip
For the past year, the Obama administration has been running an experiment: Is it possible to make policy more effective by using psychology on citizens?
The nickname is “nudging”—the idea that policymakers can change people’s behavior just by presenting choices or information differently. The classic example is requiring people to opt out of being an organ donor, instead of opting in, when they sign up for a driver’s license. Without any change in rules, the small tweak has boosted the number of registered organ donors in many states.
Nudging has gained a lot of high-profile advocates, including behavioral-law guru Cass Sunstein and former budget czar Peter Orszag. Not everyone likes the idea—“the behaviorists are saying that you, consumer, are stupid,” said Bill Shughart, a professor of public choice at Utah State University—but President Obama was intrigued enough that he actually hired Sunstein, a law professor at Harvard who co-wrote the best-known book about the topic, “Nudge.”
The president officially adopted the idea last year when he launched the White House’s Social and Behavioral Science Team (SBST), a cross-agency effort to bring behavioral science research into the policymaking process. Now the team has published its first annual report on this experiment.
How did it go? Mostly, the efforts appear to have worked, though it’s hard to know how much impact they’ll have. In part this is because the SBST’s efforts are small—just 15 proof-of-concept projects in its first year—and limited by agencies and laws in how bold they could be.Nevertheless, the findings produce a few key insights:
1. Young people clearly respond to texts
One problem the team tried to address is an education issue called “summer melt”—the fact that each year, 20 to 30 percent of high school graduates who’ve been accepted to college just don’t matriculate for their freshman year. Most of them are poor, the kind of students who would really benefit from a college degree.The Department of Education and the SBST partnered with a nonprofit organization to send text messages to selectedstudents, reminding them to complete certain required tasks before showing up on campus, like filling out forms. The results: about 9 percent more poor students matriculated.
2. You can make federal vendors more honest with a simple reminder
all of it here:
Obama’s effort to 'nudge' America
snip
For the past year, the Obama administration has been running an experiment: Is it possible to make policy more effective by using psychology on citizens?
The nickname is “nudging”—the idea that policymakers can change people’s behavior just by presenting choices or information differently. The classic example is requiring people to opt out of being an organ donor, instead of opting in, when they sign up for a driver’s license. Without any change in rules, the small tweak has boosted the number of registered organ donors in many states.
Nudging has gained a lot of high-profile advocates, including behavioral-law guru Cass Sunstein and former budget czar Peter Orszag. Not everyone likes the idea—“the behaviorists are saying that you, consumer, are stupid,” said Bill Shughart, a professor of public choice at Utah State University—but President Obama was intrigued enough that he actually hired Sunstein, a law professor at Harvard who co-wrote the best-known book about the topic, “Nudge.”
The president officially adopted the idea last year when he launched the White House’s Social and Behavioral Science Team (SBST), a cross-agency effort to bring behavioral science research into the policymaking process. Now the team has published its first annual report on this experiment.
How did it go? Mostly, the efforts appear to have worked, though it’s hard to know how much impact they’ll have. In part this is because the SBST’s efforts are small—just 15 proof-of-concept projects in its first year—and limited by agencies and laws in how bold they could be.Nevertheless, the findings produce a few key insights:
1. Young people clearly respond to texts
One problem the team tried to address is an education issue called “summer melt”—the fact that each year, 20 to 30 percent of high school graduates who’ve been accepted to college just don’t matriculate for their freshman year. Most of them are poor, the kind of students who would really benefit from a college degree.The Department of Education and the SBST partnered with a nonprofit organization to send text messages to selectedstudents, reminding them to complete certain required tasks before showing up on campus, like filling out forms. The results: about 9 percent more poor students matriculated.
2. You can make federal vendors more honest with a simple reminder
all of it here:
Obama’s effort to 'nudge' America
