Changing behaviour: how deep do you want to go?

What do free bananas, pension auto-enrolments, and the deepest bin in the world have in common? They are all examples of behavioural insight. Free bananas have been used by charities to elicit donations, working with our notorious weakness for anything free, while subtly priming our sense of reciprocity. The introduction of pension auto-enrolment simply shifted a default setting from 'off' to 'on', gave the awesome power of inertia the respect it deserves and ensured provision for thousands. And the deepest bin in the world turns out to be a normal bin with in-built sound effects, making throwing rubbish away fun and helping to keep parks tidy.

Such examples are now legion, and the behavioural ideas that underpin them are rightly perceived to be cool. The fact that behavioural insight is a modern form of intellectual entertainment is no bad thing, but it should give us pause, because cool is not the same as profitable or ethical or sustainable, and it doesn't address the core tension between commercial ambitions and ecological constraints.

Behavioural insight has layers, and those concerned with sustainability need to make judgment calls about how deep you want or need the insight to be.

Most modern techniques for behaviour change are grounded in two main shifts in our understanding of evolved human nature; a shift from the primacy of individual rationality to the power of social and cultural influences, and a shift from a veneration of conscious deliberation to the ubiquity of automatic judgments. However, the resulting goody bag of behavioural tools turns out to be full of competing theoretical ideas of what shapes and drives behaviour.

The most popular level of insight, often captured with the catch-all term 'nudge', is the application of experimental results on decision making in behavioural economics. This perspective suits the problem-solving mentality that wants to go with the grain of human nature, rather than change the grain with a more aspirational or transformative approach.

Unilever's five levers for behaviour change, for example, attempt to go with the grain, by seeking to make desired behaviours understood, easy, rewarding and habitual. Its approach is thoughtful and ambitious and it feels churlish to question it – but deeper appreciation for macroeconomic influences and social and cultural context adds complexity to these predominantly cognitive factors, and may invite rebound effects or other unintended consequences.

Sociologists, for instance, refer not to individual behaviours but to 'social practices' based on the materials we live through and their constructed meanings. The practice of showering is now less about removing dirt from the body and more about the pleasure of freshening up, a pervasive meaning that is actively cultivated through marketing that effectively promotes longer showers and sales of 'refreshing' shower gels in plastic bottles.

More challenging for sustainable business is the social psychology underpinning the Common Cause report, a body of research supported by several major NGOs including Oxfam and WWF. This framing sees behaviour as a surface phenomenon that is shaped by the cultural values we unconsciously imbibe every day, much of which comes through marketing.

The contention is that extrinsic values of status and success appear to be in a cognitive zero-sum game with intrinsic values of ethical concern for bigger-than-self sustainability problems. Both clusters of values are always latent within us, but the evidence indicates that as one set of values is reinforced, the other becomes weaker as an influence on our behaviour.

If true, this form of behavioural insight challenges the conventional win-win narrative of sustainable business. Incentivising pro-environmental behaviour with appeals to financial gains may lead to short-term tactical victories, but subsuming the intrinsic concern for nature within an extrinsic goal of commercial interest may be a strategic blunder in the for long term – unless you can permanently decouple economic output from ecological impact in absolute terms, which nobody seems to know how to do.

Deeper still, psycho-social perspectives challenge 'the myth of apathy'. Many sustainable leaders, when pressed, express frustration that colleagues don't really care about the environment, but there is a competing perspective from the relatively theoretical depths of psychoanalysis that says that, if anything, we care too much. Perhaps we don't prioritise environmental concerns with sufficient conviction because we sense ourselves to be complicit in degradation, while also feeling powerless to prevent it. Rather than face up to such discomforting feelings of anxiety or guilt, we deny the seriousness of the problem or the implications of its existence. On this reading, it's not that people don't care about sustainability, but that in many cases they can't care, because doing so would highlight a range of lived contradictions, and represent a threat to our subjective integrity.

Such a claim cannot be empirically tested, but to illustrate why this perspective should be taken seriously, forthcoming findings from an RSA/YouGov national survey earlier this year, supported by the Climate Change Collaboration, indicates that around 64% of the British population may be in 'stealth denial'. This perspective is similar to what Anne Karpf described as being a climate ignorer i.e. accepting the facts, but living as though you don't.

The challenge then is to recognise that the realm of behavioural insight is a contested political terrain where one's idea of what drives behaviour shapes our idea of progress. Those asking which forms of behavioural insight are best suited to create a more sustainable world should ask themselves the following difficult question: what kinds of practices, values and feelings are embedded in the work we do, and is behaviour, as such, ever really the issue?

Dr Jonathan Rowson is director of the Social Brain Centre at the Royal Society of Arts. He tweets at @jonathan_rowson.

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