Behavioral Revolution Research Articles

Behavioural instruments in environmental law and policy: Potential and challenges

AbstractThe behavioural revolution in law and economics led to the insight that command‐and‐control and market‐based instruments have limitations in bringing about behavioural change. Environmental behavioural instruments use persuasive strategies or techniques rather than direct incentives to encourage environmentally responsible decision‐making. This article investigates the potential and challenges of behavioural instruments in environmental policy based on a survey of theories and examples concerning environmental behavioural instruments. Behavioural instruments can reduce the information costs of environmental regulation while increasing self‐efficacy for environmental compliance. More importantly, behavioural instruments can be cheap and effective by activating various norms in specific contexts. However, the behavioural approach, because of its focus on individual compliance, may not be well suited to address (transboundary) externalities. Behavioural instruments are especially important in generating positive externalities by appealing to social norms. Such mechanisms are, however, less suited to internalising negative externalities. The effects of behavioural instruments may not be easily guaranteed (in the long run), especially when the environmental goal of the behavioural approach clashes with private interests or fails to consider individual differences and contextual factors. We therefore argue that behavioural instruments should be included alongside standard regulatory tools, thus reaching an optimal mix between both.

Agricultural fertilisers contribute substantially to microplastic concentrations in UK soils

Since their invention, plastics have driven a revolution in behavior in all aspects of our lives, including agriculture. In-use and as a waste material, plastics degrade and accumulate in agricultural systems. Accumulation of plastic pollution in agricultural systems has negative impacts on human health and agricultural productivity but little is known about concentrations of microplastics in soils. Here we used a historical time series to examine changes to microplastic concentrations in agricultural soils over time. Microplastics were stained with Nile Red and quantified using fluorescence microscopy. We demonstrate that microplastic concentrations increased at higher rates in soils that are amended with either organic or inorganic fertiliser between 1966 and 2022, suggesting that agricultural fertilisers are an important contributor to microplastic concentrations in agricultural soils over time. This study provides evidence that agricultural soils are receptors and reservoirs of microplastic pollution, a legacy which is growing over time.

Is there a behavioral revolution in policy design? A new agenda and inventory of the behavioral toolbox

Abstract The article argues for a revised research on behavioral public policy focused on the core claim and sine qua non of a behavioral “revolution”: the ability to produce equal or better outcomes with less stringent policy designs than in traditional solutions, at least for certain types of problems. Three contributions to such an agenda are proposed. First, the article argues that the growing focus on the evaluation of real-world behavioral policy programs, as opposed to experimental studies within specialized areas of research, calls for a corresponding theoretical orientation toward existing literature on policy tools and design. Second, a doctrine of policy design is extrapolated from the broader behavioral paradigm and specified in relation to four general areas of application. These provide an essential context for the evaluation of the behavioral claim to improved policy design and highlight that behavioral successes may well, contra this claim, be a result of a de facto increase in stringency vis-à-vis traditional responses. Third, the article proposes a new and substantially revised inventory of the behavioral toolbox, which specifies the stringency, mechanisms, and potential costs of different behavioral tools and techniques, which is both essential to the evaluation of the behavioral claim and necessary to overcome the arbitrariness and mistakes of existing inventories.

Using Process Tracing to Investigate Elite Experience Accrual: Explaining Margaret Thatcher’s Support for US Air Strikes Against Libya

The United States’ invasion of Grenada in 1983 represented the lowest point in Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s relationship, with Thatcher incensed at what she perceived to be her ally’s misuse of military force. However, in April 1986, Thatcher gave permission for the United States to use British-based aircraft for air strikes against the Gaddafi regime in Libya, a mission as tenuously grounded in international law as Grenada. How do we explain Thatcher’s apparent change in approach to foreign policy, now placing strategic interests above her previous deference to international law, and what does this tell us about the role experience plays in a leader’s foreign policy decisions? Drawing on insights from the ongoing behavioural revolution in International Relations, this paper argues that the experience Thatcher gained during the Grenada episode led to her support for US strikes against Libya. A process tracing approach using documents from the UK National Archives, as well as biographies and memoirs, tests this individual-level hypothesis against a rival structuralist explanation. This research shows how experience gained in office can influence a leader’s future foreign policy decision-making and demonstrates the utility of process tracing methods for investigations into the role of experience in international politics.

The Consumer Revolution, 1650–1800 by Michael Kwass

This book presents itself as a critical overview of the historical literature about the emergence of a consumer society in Europe and its colonial appendages during the period from 1650 to 1800. Since the groundbreaking work of McKendrick, who in 1982 identified a “consumer revolution” in this era—albeit one confined to Britain—this theme has attracted the attention of multiple historians in many countries who have both deepened our knowledge of the dynamic material world of this era and proposed explanations for its emergence and interpretations of its meaning.1 Kwass’ synthesis, which introduces readers to what is now a vast literature, seeks to identify the places where earlier interpreters have fallen short, proposing an agenda for a history of consumption that satisfies current requirements.Kwass interweaves two approaches to his topic. He begins and ends by treating the consumer revolution as a product of political and economic forces. He claims that the topic is important today because consumption is at the root of contemporary society’s most pressing problems, most notably global warming, income inequality, and racism. In his view, it is no accident that consumption is the source of so many evils today, given its creation at the intersection of imperialism and slavery. This fatal synergy “increased the influx of low-priced consumer goods into Europe,” which “is now seen as central to the consumer revolution” (73). The consumer society of the modern world has a lot to answer for, both in the circumstances of its birth and in its contemporary consequences. Kwass wants to convince readers that it should be brought to an end and replaced with ethical consumption practices (222).But, to return to Kwass’ historical topic, through which channels and which chains of causation did an influx of low-priced goods produce a revolution in consumer behavior in societies where, as Kwass notes, real wages did not rise and most people struggled to survive? Furthermore, by what standard was this influx “low priced”? Such claims require more rigorous forms of analysis than Kwass provides; his discussion tends to float on the surface of things.Fortunately, most of the book is not actually about external, supply-side shocks to Europe’s Early Modern economy. The bulk of the book is a fairly conventional discussion of selected aspects of the consumer cultures of the long eighteenth century, with particular attention paid to the elite material world of ancien régime France. Four of the book’s seven substantive chapters delve into the novel retail venues of the time, as well as the salons, cafes, and public promenades frequented by elite consumers. They also explore the so-called “reading revolution” of the age of Enlightenment and the uses of consumer goods in furthering the revolutionary movements of the age on both sides of the Atlantic.These chapters are all well referenced and well argued. The high point is chapter 4, in which Kwass discusses the cultural meaning of consumption. He begins with the premise that “there is no innate propensity to consume.” Therefore, “it is important to explore the cultural contexts in which meanings are forged and desires take shape” (99). “Consumption has a history” (4)—a history that accelerated in the long eighteenth century, tightly linked to the Enlightenment project. The consumer revolution of this age, which constituted an important step on the road to modernity, led directly to the creation of today’s universal consumer culture. Kwass might have elaborated more about the interrelationships to which he alludes between consumption, enlightenment, revolution, and the shaping of desires.Consumer behavior as a historical agent is not an easy topic for academic analysis, perhaps because it seems so obvious to us. We are all consumers, and we all have doubts and anxieties about our consumption choices. Indeed, consumption is the locus of everyday politics for most people today. Kwass is correct to claim that a historical analysis of how modern consumer society emerged is essential to understanding the options that now stand before us. Unfortunately, two distinct strands of analysis are essayed in this volume without being brought to satisfactory conclusions.

Natural Selection, Technological Progress, and the Origin of Human Longevity

AbstractThis paper suggests that feedback effects between technological progress and human longevity lie at the heart of their common emergence in human history. It connects two major research questions. First, the long life span after menopause is a unique but puzzling feature of humans among primates. Second, the shift in human behavior at least 50,000 years ago, which led to an unprecedented pace of technological progress, is still not well understood. The paper develops an evolutionary growth theory that builds on the trade–off between the quantity and the quality of offspring. It suggests that early technological advances gradually increased the importance of intergenerational transfers of knowledge. Eventually, the fertility advantage shifted towards individuals that were characterized by higher parental investment in offspring and a significant post–reproductive life span. Subsequently, the rise in human longevity reinforced the process of development and laid the foundations for sustained technological progress. As a key feature, the theory resolves the debate about a “revolution” in human behavior in an entirely new way. It shows that a gradual emergence of modern behavior is sufficient to trigger a demographic shift that appears as a “behavioral revolution” in the archeological record.

Theoretic and Methodological Approaches Towards the Application of Mixed Methods in the Discipline of International Relations

Discussions regarding the conduct of scientific inquiry have existed throughout history. Questions of how to uncover the truth and achieve reliable and valid scientific conclusions, all under the umbrella of objectivity, have led the sciences to evolve in a systematic manner. Hitherto, the general leniency within this conversation has been directed at the hard sciences; however, the Social Sciences have also recently been on the receiving end of paradigmatic shifts in methodologies. Since the behavioral revolution, the conduct of many disciplines under the Social Sciences has slowly moved towards a more quantitative outlook on the path of uncovering social phenomena. Such an alteration in methodology has its benefits as well as certain handicaps when dealing with abstract social concepts and notions which are difficult to quantify. This is especially the case for the discipline of International Relations (IR), where data are of both a qualitative and quantitative nature. Thus, the aims of this study are threefold: first, the study will present a brief summary of the historical and scientific evolution of methods in the discipline of IR; secondly, it will describe the current situation in which scientific inquiry is conducted, focusing on mixed method approaches; and third, it will deal with the different methodological approaches of MM designs established above by highlighting their strengths and weaknesses, particularly in the discipline of IR. Hence, this study aims to contribute both to the literatures of the disciplines of IR and of methodology in Social Sciences.

Acheulean Diversity in Britain (MIS 15-MIS11): From the Standardization to the Regionalization of Technology

The appearance of the Acheulean and the production of new bifacial tools marked a revolution in human behavior. The use of longer and complex operative chains, with centripetal and recurrent knapping, adapted to different raw materials, created long useful edges, converging in a functional distal end. How and why these handaxes vary has been the subject of intense debates. Britain provides a clearly defined region at the edge of the hominin occupied world for discussing variation in Acheulean assemblages. The environmental changes from MIS 15 to MIS 11 are significant in understanding population change, with probable breaks in evidence during MIS 14 and MIS 12, followed by several sites during the long stable climate of MIS11c. In this latter period, different Acheulean technological expressions appear to coexist in Britain. This paper draws together different studies, combining technology and geometric morphometrics to analyze handaxes from six British sites: Brandon Fields, Boxgrove (Q1B), High Lodge, Hitchin, Swanscombe (UMG), and Elveden. Compared to the earlier Acheulean of MIS 15, the assemblages of MIS 13 show increased standardization and the use of soft hammer percussion for thinning mid-sections and butts of tools, or sharpening tips through tranchet removals. Although there is regional population discontinuity through MIS12 there is no evidence of a marked change in technology after this glacial period. Rather, there is a development towards more intense shaping with the same underlying techniques, but with flexibility in imposed handaxe form. From MIS11 there appear to be distinctive localized traditions of manufacture, which suggest that a recognition of place and territories had developed by this time. These are expressed over medium time-scales of several thousand years and have significance for how we view cultural expression and transmission.

Hawkish Biases and Group Decision Making

AbstractHow do cognitive biases relevant to foreign policy decision making aggregate in groups? Many tendencies identified in the behavioral decision-making literature—such as reactive devaluation, the intentionality bias, and risk seeking in the domain of losses—have been linked to hawkishness in foreign policy choices, potentially increasing the risk of conflict, but how these “hawkish biases” operate in the small-group contexts in which foreign policy decisions are often made is unknown. We field three large-scale group experiments to test how these biases aggregate in groups. We find that groups are just as susceptible as individuals to these canonical biases, with neither hierarchical nor horizontal group decision-making structures significantly attenuating the magnitude of bias. Moreover, diverse groups perform similarly to more homogeneous ones, exhibiting similar degrees of bias and marginally increased risk of dissension. These results suggest that at least with these types of biases, the “aggregation problem” may be less problematic for psychological theories in international relations than some critics have argued. This has important implications for understanding foreign policy decision making, the role of group processes, and the behavioral revolution in international relations.

Czechoslovakia’s Discreet Behavioral Revolution in the 1960s

This article deals with the thus far unnoticed “intellectual origin” of the so-called Prague Spring. It summarizes tenets of behavioral revolution in the field of social sciences and documents its considerable influence on Czechoslovak scholars. From the mid-1960s, behavioral reasoning coexisted with other (mutually conflicting) perspectives. Literature on Czechoslovak reform has given evidence of the impact of Marxian revisionism, the Frankfurt school, and theories of industrial societies. This article stresses the significance of behavioral meta-theory not only in academia but also in the political arena. However, the process of normalization after 1968/1969 signified the inevitable end for this paradigm.

A Systemic Perspective

A Systemic Perspective

Understanding Governance in Contemporary Japan: Transformation and the Regulatory State by Masahiro Mogaki

Reviewed by: Understanding Governance in Contemporary Japan: Transformation and the Regulatory State by Masahiro Mogaki Steven K. Vogel (bio) Understanding Governance in Contemporary Japan: Transformation and the Regulatory State. By Masahiro Mogaki. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2019. xiii, 184 pages. £80.00, cloth. Masahiro Mogaki wants to bring the state back in to the study of Japanese politics. His book refreshingly runs counter to the dominant trends in the subfield that favor the study of electoral politics and civil society. Mogaki turns the debate back to governing elites, state structures, and the rich minutiae of the policymaking process. In 1985, Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol published a volume entitled Bringing the State Back In to coax their fellow social scientists back from the behavioral revolution toward a sustained reexamination of the state. They argued that scholars should study states as both "actors" and "structures." By this they meant that state officials and agencies are autonomous actors in the political system in their own right, with preferences that cannot be reduced to those of the citizens and interest groups in the society around them. And state institutions define arenas that powerfully shape the ways in which societal interests are aggregated and policies are formulated and implemented, and thereby influence the quality and the substance of policy outputs. Mogaki derives his primary inspiration not from Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol but rather from scholarship on the "core executive" in Britain, where he completed his doctoral studies. The core executive refers to the major organs of the central government, including the prime minister, the cabinet, government departments, and the civil service. The British core executive extends beyond what we would call the executive branch in the United States because most cabinet ministers in parliamentary systems are also members of the legislature, hence the executive and legislative branches are partially fused. But Mogaki expands the definition of the core executive further to include Diet members not serving in the cabinet, because they play such a central role in governance in Japan (pp. 15, 23–24). Mogaki's primary thesis is that the core executive exercises "asymmetric dominance" in the Japanese political system. It did so in the heyday of the postwar era, and it continues to do so today. But if the core executive includes all of the main actors in the political system, then what does this really mean? At points the thesis almost seems to border on tautology, simply affirming that those who are in charge in Japan are in charge. Yet Mogaki has something different in mind. He contends that state actors are structurally advantaged relative to societal actors. They have the ability to control [End Page 150] other actors' access to the policy process and to manage policy implementation. They have unique resources such as legitimacy, administrative capacity, and enforcement powers (pp. 13–14, 132, 145). They are the ones in the room at the moments of decision and enactment. Mogaki makes an important point in the Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol sense. The state does not simply execute the will of society; it plays a leading role in the political arena both as actor and as structure. Yet Mogaki asserts the dominance of the core executive almost by fiat. That is, government officials certainly make the key decisions and implement those decisions in the literal sense. But are they doing so as obedient servants of societal interests, or are they acting on their own interests and beliefs? To get at this, Mogaki would have to identify state interests and societal interests, examine policy processes, and evaluate policy outcomes to discern whose preferences actually prevailed. Mogaki focuses so much on the core executive that he does not really grapple with societal interests and their political influence, so he cannot possibly show that the core executive dominates over society. To be fair, Mogaki's primary goal is not to explain policy outcomes so much as to describe the transformation of the Japanese state, and here he provides a valuable service to the field. The book's greatest strength is not the thesis about the dominance of the core executive but rather the nuanced portrait of bargaining and power shifts within that...

«Молящиеся были весьма огорчены…». К итогам культурной революции в сельском Прикамье

By means of the case study method the problem of revealing the results of the 1930’s Cultural Revolution in the leisure-time behavior of the rural youth has been posed in the article. The Cultural Revolution is understood by the author as a large Soviet project which was started in the 1920s and finished in the post-war decade with the formation of the Soviet man, who mastered the Bolshevik journalese and the necessary public ritual practices along with the symbols of the Soviet system. Antireligious agitation was an integral component of the Cultural Revolution; in fact it was its core. As the subject of the historical reconstruction it was chosen an incident in the Cathedral of the Transfiguration of the Savior in Gamovo village during the Easter holiday 1953. A document with the description of the incident compiled by P.S. Gorbunov, plenipotentiary for the Russian Orthodox Church in Molotov Region has been analyzed in detail. For the solution of this problem the author applied the resources which hadn’t been introduced for the scientific use earlier: materials from Party conferences and meetings; information from the Administration of the MGB in the Molotov region, letters and written requests to the Regional Committee of the CPSU. The original thesis of the article is stated as follows. As a result of the Cultural Revolution it was formed a new type of the Soviet person who according to the basic characteristics was divided into two types: the urban inhabitant living by his on private interests, and the hooligan from the workers' suburb, a violent and disruptive troublemaker. In the article it is reconstructed the events which took place in the village church on the night from the third to the fourth of April, 1953: intrusion of the drunken young men, their outrage on the porch and in the church fence, a knife-fight and, finally, a murder. The author has offered a hypothesis making possible to explain their licentious behavior by the fact that in the culture of working (rural) youth the boundaries between different kinds of space were erased. The Orthodox Church and the village club were identical for them in their leisure value. The norms of street and courtyard culture were applied to them equally. The status of the temple was lower than that of the club. Young people equated the church with something backward, boring, and old. The party and punitive agencies did all they could to alienate the new generation from any form of religious life. As a result, young people either stood aside the Orthodox Church or treated it with contempt, or, in exceptional cases, outraged within its bounds.

Elite Decision-making and International Law: Promises and Perils of the Behavioral Revolution

A growing body of research applies behavioral approaches to the study of international law, mainly by studying convenience samples of students or other segments of the general public. Alongside the promises of this agenda are concerns about applying findings from non-elite populations to the people, and groups of people, charged with most real-world decision-making in the domain of law and governance. This concern is compounded by the fact that it is extremely difficult to recruit these actual decision-makers in a way that allows for direct study.

Clinical pointers from developing self-awareness.

Seven typical developmental steps are described as cardinal changes leading children from implicit embodied self-awareness at birth, self-consciousness by 2 years, and the adoption of an ethical stance toward others by the preschool years (3-5y). This development may be a useful benchmark for clinicians. In this review, some clinical pointers are outlined in relation to each developmental step, but with a particular focus on the testing of self-awareness in children with developmental disorders, including autism spectrum disorder, cerebral palsy, and intellectual disability. WHAT THIS PAPER ADDS: There are seven major steps in early self and social awareness. Clinical pointers related to each of the seven steps are provided.

The Social Side of Early Human Capital Formation: Using a Field Experiment to Estimate the Causal Impact of Neighborhoods

The behavioral revolution within economics has been largely driven by psychological insights, with the sister sciences playing a lesser role. This study leverages insights from sociology to explore the role of neighborhoods on human capital formation at an early age. We do so by estimating the spillover effects from a large-scale early childhood intervention on the educational attainment of over 2,000 disadvantaged children in the United States. We document large spillover effects on both treatment and control children who live near treated children. Interestingly, the spillover effects are localized, decreasing with the spatial distance to treated neighbors. Perhaps our most novel insight is the underlying mechanisms at work: the spillover effect on non-cognitive scores operate through the child's social network while parental investment is an important channel through which cognitive spillover effects operate. Overall, our results reveal the importance of public programs and neighborhoods on human capital formation at an early age, highlighting that human capital accumulation is fundamentally a social activity.

The Social Side of Early Human Capital Formation: Using a Field Experiment to Estimate the Causal Impact of Neighborhoods

The behavioral revolution within economics has been largely driven by psychological insights, with the sister sciences playing a lesser role. This study leverages insights from sociology to explore the role of neighborhoods on human capital formation at an early age. We do so by estimating the spillover effects from a large-scale early childhood intervention on the educational attainment of over 2,000 disadvantaged children in the United States. We document large spillover effects on both treatment and control children who live near treated children. Interestingly, the spillover effects are localized, decreasing with the spatial distance to treated neighbors. Perhaps our most novel insight is the underlying mechanisms at work: the spillover effect on non-cognitive scores operate through the child's social network while parental investment is an important channel through which cognitive spillover effects operate. Overall, our results reveal the importance of public programs and neighborhoods on human capital formation at an early age, highlighting that human capital accumulation is fundamentally a social activity.

THE EARLY MODERN ORIGINS OF BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS

AbstractFor all the recent discoveries of behavioral psychology and experimental economics, the spirit of homo economicus still dominates the contemporary disciplines of economics, political science, and sociology. Turning back to the earliest chapters of political economy, however, reveals that pioneering figures such as Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and Adam Smith were hardly apostles of economic rationality as they are often portrayed in influential narratives of the development of the social sciences. As we will see, while all three of these thinkers can plausibly be read as endorsing “rationality,” they were also well aware of the systematic irrationality of human conduct, including a remarkable number of the cognitive biases later “discovered” by contemporary behavioral economists. Building on these insights I offer modest suggestions for how these thinkers, properly understood, might carry the behavioral revolution in different directions than those heretofore suggested.

« Une révolution s’approche, qui fait écho à celle du prolétariat ». La Russie avant et après 1917 et la construction d’une nouvelle culture sexuelle

Social reform projects often provide for a review of gender relations. Were the changes in the sexual behavior of the Russians in 1917 and later the result of a conscious, persistent and targeted policy of the Bolcheviks? Or were they the result of a spontaneous development of the public consciousness in a country, “pregnant of the revolution”? Was there a single “theory of the Soviet sexual revolution”, and if so, who were its ideologues and adherents?Changes in sexual culture, conceived as a matter of society, appear in the early 1910 years. Comparison of the rhetoric of ideologists of change, reflected in documents and literature before 1917 is the way to reconstruct an important part of cultural and behavioral revolution in the country. A positive consequence of the development of free unions in revolutionary Russia has been the opportunity to speak publicly about sexual and intimate issues. Otherwise, the intrusion of the party and of the government in this private domain allows to study the question from the viewpoint of liberal values, of feminism in particular.

“Post-Soviet sexual revolution”: history and modernity. Group Discussion

The group discussion at March 30, 2018 covers a wide range of problems related to modern sexuality, social norms that regulate it, and the historical circumstances that influenced these norms. In the speeches of the participants, three generations of the sexual revolution in Russia are designated: the generation of the behavioral revolution, the generation of the discursive revolution and the generation of the gender revolution. It considers the Bolshevik gender reforms, expressed in the adoption of laws aimed at changing the role of women in the family and society and changing the basis of relations between men and women due to legislative consolidation of gender equality. The authors point out fundamental differences in the pace and nature of gender modernization in Western countries and in Russia, expressed in the fact that in the West, the consequences of the “sexual revolution” of 1968 significantly changed the behavior of both men and women, in the countries of the Soviet bloc only female roles have changed. It is noted, however, that although men show a growing interest in active fatherhood, women in the majority reserve the right to make all reproductive decisions on their own.