Giving the Nordic countries a nudge

16.09.14 | News
Dr.David Halpern, the Chief Executive of the Behavioural Insights Team in Britain, is a key note speaker at the Nordic Council of Ministers conference “The pursuit of sustainable Nordic welfare” September 17th 2014 in Copenhagen. He will be giving the Nordic Countries a nudge towards nudging- which he describes as “encouraging public policy objectives, such as healthier choices, energy conservation, or saving for retirement but without mandating”.

The Behavioural Insights Team was started inside No.10 Downing Street as the world’s first government institution dedicated to the application of behavioural sciences.  Prior to that, Dr. Halpern was the founding Director of the Institute for Government and between 2001 and 2007 was the Chief Analyst at the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit.

- We coined the term ‘behavioural insights’ in 2010 to help bring together ideas from a range of inter-related academic disciplines (behavioural economics, psychology, and social anthropology).  These fields seek to understand how individuals take decisions in practice and how they are likely to respond to options. Their insights enable us to design policies or interventions that can encourage, support and enable people to make better choices for themselves and society.

Read more about the Behavioural Insights Team

What is nudging?

Nudging can be described as applying behavioral science knowledge to implementing public policy.

- Encouraging public policy objectives, such as healthier choices, energy conservation, or saving for retirement but without mandating. In essence, our approach is about designing policy and public service around a more realistic understanding of human behaviour to make services easier to use and more cost effective.

In Britain, the response to nudging was sceptical at first at the launch in 2010, but is now generally very supportive.

- Because of the level of demand from departments and public agencies – not just in the UK, but increasingly internationally – the Behavioural Insight Team was turned into a social purpose company by the Cabinet Office earlier this year. There have been many success stories. From getting people back to work faster, to bringing forward £100s millions of tax revenues, to reducing missed medical appointments, to increase charitable giving.

Are the Nordic countries are capable of being nudged?

Dr.Halpern has found inspiration in the Nordic welfare model, and believes the Nordic countries are capable of being nudged.

- In fact, our own ‘active welfare’ model drew heavily on the Nordic model. It is very likely that the nudging approach can add value in the Nordic context too. For example, our interventions to get people back to work faster have now been replicated not only in the UK but also in Australia and Singapore. But we remain great advocates of empirical testing and replication – the approach should be tested in a specific context before jumping to the conclusion that it will work the same in a Nordic context.

Video with Dr.David Halpern: