Why Climate Change and the Obesity Epidemic Are Not Your Fault
A Q&A with behavioral economist George Loewenstein, co-author of a new book that reveals how corporations have tricked everyday people into believing they’re personally to blame for society’s deepest problems.
By Jason Bittel
From the title to the pointing finger on the cover — can you explain the basic premise for “It’s On You: How Corporations and Behavioral Scientists Have Convinced Us That We’re to Blame for Society's Deepest Problems?” How did you and coauthor Nick Chater come to write this book?
In the early 2000s, Nick and I were very involved in formulating, then doing research on, an approach to public policy called “nudge.” The premise of nudge is that you can mitigate policy problems such as obesity, inadequate financial provision for retirement and even climate change, by nudging people’s behavior — altering their decision-making environment to steer them toward better choices.
Nick and I were both members of the academic advisory board of the first Behavioral Insights Team — colloquially known as the UK Nudge Unit – and first met in December 2013 at a daylong “retreat” in Westminster, London. During the lunch break, and then at a nearby pub, we discovered that, while impressed with the Nudge Unit Team and its work, we shared increasing misgivings about nudge as an approach to public policy. Our main concerns were that nudges were not actually very effective and were being promoted by industry as a substitute for more substantive policies that might threaten their bottom line. The book’s title, “It’s On You,” reflects the further concern that nudges implicitly blame individuals for societal problems that are actually the product of bad systems and policies. Sociologists refer to this tendency to blame individuals for problems that are beyond their control as “responsibilization.”
What is an example of a seemingly well-meaning nudge that has been co-opted?
A lot of these nudges were not so much “coopted” as invented, and promoted, by industry right from the start. The “carbon footprint” is a perfect example. Who can object to the worthy goal of shrinking our carbon footprint? Footprint calculators are all over the web, along with media pieces telling us how to shrink ours, or that we are doing it the wrong way. But who came up with the carbon footprint? It was British Petroleum!
As documented in a superb book by Michael Mann, the oil industry first attempted to combat efforts to regulate it or to diminish fossil fuel use, by attempting to discredit climate science, often with the aid of academics, who were richly rewarded for doing so. At some point, however, the evidence for global warming became so glaring, that they switched strategies, from attempting to deny the existence of climate change to advancing the perspective that it’s the fault of consumers — our fault — and our responsibility to solve by shrinking our individual carbon footprints.
Another example is the Keep America Beautiful campaign, which was the brainchild of the beverage and packaging industry, which was anxious to avoid bottle-return bills. The famous “Crying Indian” ad that so many of us grew up with () ends with the telling line: “People start pollution; people can stop it.” It’s not that we are being submerged in a sea of inexpensive and disposable packaging; the real problem is that we are all litterbugs — or so goes the industry logic. These two examples are just the tip of the iceberg; in the book, we illustrate the idea with myriad examples.
Do you think nudges can still be used for good?
Nudges are great when they actually work, and if they don’t crowd out or reduce support for more substantive policies. My coauthors and I, however, provided evidence that they exactly do this, in a 2019 Nature Climate Change paper titled The same paper shows, however, that nudges don’t crowd out substantive policies if people are clearly informed about their relatively small impacts.
What did you and your coauthor learn while researching this book that surprised you?
We went into researching and writing the book knowing of a few examples of the central phenomenon — firms blaming individuals for problems, then rigging the “rules of the game” in their favor. But the more we wrote and researched, the more ubiquitous we started to realize that the phenomenon is.
Writing and researching the book also helped us to get a historical perspective on the problem. My field, behavioral economics, started in opposition to the Chicago School of Economics, with its assumption that people are perfectly, and infinitely, rational. Our aim was, and continues to be, to build economics on a more solid psychological foundation. The Chicago School has historically been opposed to big government, regulation, taxes and subsidies. For example, the Chicago economists Milton and Rose Friedman, who wrote the bestseller “Free to Choose,” advocated for laissez-faire policies and shrinking government, and against public aid to the poor, public housing, Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. So, it would have been natural for behavioral economics to take the opposite stance.
For example, given that people aren’t infinitely intelligent, does it make sense to ask them to decide between health insurance plans they don’t understand? In , I’ve found that a majority of employees of a Fortune 25 health company — people who should arguably know more about health insurance than the rest of the population — chose insurance policies that were “dominated” — i.e., cost them more regardless of their healthcare spending.
In another example, most people know very little about investing (and many face crushing personal financial burdens). How then does it make sense to ask them to save for their own retirement (which is what defined-contribution retirement plans really mean) and to decide how to invest their own retirement “nest egg”? Again and again, we came to see that nudges, which steer clear of substantive policies such as bans and taxes, were playing into the Chicago School’s antipathy toward government intervention.
It sounds like this book has the potential to be controversial in the behavioral science community. What would you like to say to other experts in your field?
Before publishing the book, we published articulating many of the same ideas. We expected it to be controversial, and it was. But what really surprised us was the outpouring of support we received from the vast majority of people we heard from. The paper has also been highly cited by academics. It was published in 2023, and already has well over 800 citations from academics — the conventional marker of a paper’s influence. And, perhaps it’s wishful thinking, but we feel like we can already see the paper’s influence emerge in the policies now being advocated even by people who have historically been staunch nudge advocates.
is now available as a hardcover, ebook or audio download. George Loewenstein is the Herbert A. Simon University Professor of Economics and Psychology at 麻豆村’s Department of Social and Decision Sciences. is a professor of behavioral science at Warwick Business School in the United Kingdom.
