Abstract
AbstractBehavioural science has been effectively used by policy makers in various domains, from health to savings. However, interventions that behavioural scientists typically employ to change behaviour have been at the centre of an ethical debate, given that they include elements of paternalism that have implications for people's freedom of choice. In the present article, we argue that this ethical debate could be resolved in the future through implementation and advancement of new technologies. We propose that several technologies which are currently available and are rapidly evolving (i.e., virtual and augmented reality, social robotics, gamification, self-quantification, and behavioural informatics) have a potential to be integrated with various behavioural interventions in a non-paternalistic way. More specifically, people would decide themselves which behaviours they want to change and select the technologies they want to use for this purpose, and the role of policy makers would be to develop transparent behavioural interventions for these technologies. In that sense, behavioural science would move from libertarian paternalism to liberalism, given that people would freely choose how they want to change, and policy makers would create technological interventions that make this change possible.
Highlights
Behavioural science interventions have been implemented in various policy areas, from health and education to justice and sustainability, and used to influence behaviours such as pension savings, tax compliance, or healthy food consumption, to name but a few (e.g., Oliver, 2013, 2019; Halpern, 2015; Sunstein, 2015, 2020; Sanders et al, 2018)
We first overview the technological domains we find compatible with behavioural interventions and examine both the interventions that have already been implemented within these domains and the potential they have for future integration with behavioural change techniques
The tools would help individuals to understand their own behaviour and empower them to change in line with their values and preferences. This implies that the person should be free to choose whether they want to use any of the data visualization tools on offer or not, and that policy makers should provide information about the behavioural change strategies implemented in these tools to allow the person to make an informed choice
Summary
Behavioural science interventions have been implemented in various policy areas, from health and education to justice and sustainability, and used to influence behaviours such as pension savings, tax compliance, or healthy food consumption, to name but a few (e.g., Oliver, 2013, 2019; Halpern, 2015; Sunstein, 2015, 2020; Sanders et al, 2018) These interventions are highly diverse and can be based on different theoretical assumptions, an underlying characteristic they share is that they influence behaviour by changing the ‘architecture’ of the context in which people act (Dolan et al, 2012; Vlaev et al, 2016; Mongin & Cozic, 2018).
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