Prevent has become a well-covered — and, by extension, notorious — brand. But this celebrity leads people to overestimate its power. Prevent, frequently described as a counter-terrorism program but perhaps better understood as a funding stream covering several programs, is small beans compared to the cost of traditional parts of state infrastructure dedicated to counter-terrorism. Because of how Prevent is structured, it is difficult to find overall figures; but its budget for the whole of London is reported to be somewhere in the low millions — a fraction of the £9 million the Mayor of London spent advertising the Ulez expansion.

So, what does it do? Prevent has three objectives: to tackle the causes of radicalization, to safeguard those at risk of radicalization, and to rehabilitate anyone who has been radicalized. Any risk related to non-ideological threats, such as psychological problems and violence obsessions, should — in theory — be picked up by the likes of the NHS and social services. However, many end up with Prevent, while specific and impending threats are handled by the police and security services.

To meet its remit, Prevent trains public-sector workers — especially teachers — to identify signs of vulnerability to extremism. Any risky parties are then referred to the Channel program, where attempts are made to de-radicalize. To identify, triage and interact with those potential threats requires a high degree of cooperation between agencies, such as police, social workers, prisons, schools, local authorities, the NHS, and Government departments. Yet, as can be the case in complex systems, the lines of accountability can be blurred between agencies, and cases can be missed or closed prematurely.

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This was reportedly a factor which led to Ali Harbi Ali leaving Prevent too quickly. Failures were identified in other recent cases, such as Usman Khan (who killed two people near London Bridge in 2019), Khairi Saadallah (who killed three people in Reading in 2020), Ahmed Hassan (the 2017 Parsons Green tube bomber), and Rudakubana. Having observed the process by which people are referred to Channel, I suspect the number of people identified as potentially risky compared with the resources to assess and triage is also a challenge.

But even if the identification and referral process were to work perfectly, what Prevent is trying to achieve is a tall order. Consider for a moment the probable efficacy of an initiative with no ability to compel people to engage, with limited resources and limited opportunities to intervene, in the face of all the factors that might radicalize someone. Imagine a psychologically troubled outcast, for whom hatred dressed up as a moral crusade provides his very existence with meaning, surrounding himself with affirming narratives and dreams of glory, and then pit those against a voluntary initiative which you might have heard about from one of your teachers at the school you hate. It’s hardly an even match.

As a result, Prevent also operates further upstream, developing counter-radicalization narratives and providing grants to grassroots community groups to strengthen social cohesion. This creates opportunities for early intervention which might help to build resilience against radicalizing forces, but the strategy comes with its own challenges. Firstly, Prevent money has found its way to the wrong groups on more than one occasion, funding those who, rather than countering radicalization, were propagating it. Secondly, governments are most effective in shaping perspectives when their messages are ubiquitous and reinforced across all elements of the social and cultural fabric — as with “follow the science”. In practice, many Prevent initiatives will struggle to cut through the noise.

Given the obvious challenges, persistent threat and limited funding, why are policy officials trying to make an already unenviable task even harder by widening Prevent’s targets?

In 2023, William Shawcross’s “Independent Review into Prevent” recommended it refocus on the most acute threats to national security to maximize impact, along with some other sensible proposals which the Government mainly accepted. But, as a report from Policy Exchange last month notes, a leaked Home Office “Rapid Analytical Sprint” on extremism policy has since suggested taking the opposite approach. It proposed broadening the definition of extremism by conflating it with extreme violence and other forms of harm to society, while diluting the focus on the most pressing ideological threats. The same sprint appeared to equate Islamist extremism with more obscure ideologies that do not pose the same level of risk.

Perhaps officials are happy to broaden their definition of extremism because they overestimate the efficacy of their policies to overcome it. In my experience, many of those involved in social programs — and to a lesser extent in Government — assume that their well-intentioned efforts make a meaningful difference. This, however, is rarely the case. Many social programs concerned with influencing behavior, when evaluated robustly, show weak or no positive effects at all. This is because across the domain, there is little tradition of reliably establishing cause and effect. As a result, incorrect assumptions are made about what influences behavior, especially over the longer term. An often-quoted example is the “Scared Straight” intervention, which sought to deter young offenders from crime by exposing them to life inside prison. For many years, this was assumed to reduce offending — until proper assessment concluded it most likely increased it.

One of the few robust evaluations in this particular domain, conducted seven years ago, suggested that only a small handful of civil-society counter-radicalization programs had a positive effect. Given the average effectiveness of social programs and the complexity of countering radicalization, this is not surprising. Of course, this doesn’t mean that Prevent should give up, when it is still capable of playing an important part of our counter-terrorism strategy. But without good evaluation — something, incidentally, that is lacking across Government — there is no accountability, and overreach becomes a tempting way to inflate roles and egos. To systematically measure cause and effect and then adapt or cut programs that do not work demands certain technical skills which are rare in law enforcement and adjacent fields. But more importantly, and perhaps even rarer, this sort of evaluation requires the willingness of policy officials to disappoint the civil-society groups whose programs are failing.

Rigorous evaluation will tell officials if their programs are having the desired effect, but the government should also consider the effect of rhetoric. The fear is that authorities’ overuse of the label “far-Right” is likely to increase rather than reduce support for the actual far-Right. The broadening of the Overton window, and normalization of a term that should be reserved for genuine extremes, risks amplifying radical sentiments and undermining the credibility of the state at a time when trust in Government and national institutions has fallen to historic lows. In his report, Shawcross noted an imbalance between the narrowness with which Islamist extremism was defined by Prevent, and the breadth of definition applied to far-Right extremism, at times including mainstream Right-wing commentary with no connection to radicalization. Officials have even suggested that watching comedy series such as Yes, Minister or The Thick of It could be red flags for far-Right extremism.

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Since the Shawcross review, these more contentious perspectives may have been reconsidered. But more recently, Home Office officials have proposed that accusations of “two-tier policing” are examples of far-Right narratives. No doubt, malign actors would seek to capitalize on perceived grievances, but two-tier policing is not a myth: a YouGov survey last year showed that large proportions of the public see discrepancy in police treatment of different causes. The details of individual cases make comparisons difficult, but it is legitimate and a necessary component of policing by consent for the public to question inconsistencies in law enforcement decision-making.

This disconnect between officials and the public on two-tier policing is yet another symptom of the groupthink that has permeated much of the arts, academia, media, Government, and social and charitable sectors in recent years. It derives from a culture that has fundamentally degraded some of our most important national institutions.

In Britain, absent any political leadership prioritizing cultural change within the public sector, mandarins may be tempted to wait out the eventual demise of a culture which prioritizes ideological consistency over objective evaluation, intellectual rigor, and the effective function of public service. But the longer it takes, the longer tough policy areas such as counter-terrorism will continue to struggle.

Prevent plays an important role in Britain’s strategy against terrorism. Like in so many other areas of policy, we need to do it better. Understandably, the Government’s focus will be on improving visible outcomes in health, public safety, immigration and the economy. Yet to have any hope of its policies succeeding, it must also focus on that which is less visible: the culture of those institutions tasked with delivering them.

Britain is a country with moderate natural resources and moderate human capital. Where we have excelled is in the strength of our institutions. But the effective delivery of public services depends on the capability, motivation and organisation of public servants, and right now, that can’t consistently be counted on.

So what’s changed? I joined the Civil Service not long before the financial crash when, despite the relatively low salary, good roles attracted smart graduate talent because the work was interesting, often prestigious, and because people had a stake in the ultimate outcome — the successful functioning of the state.

That balance has shifted as years of pay restraint, combined with soaring living expenses, especially in London, have affected the calibre of staff. I know many excellent public servants who have left to triple their wages in the private sector. As a result, the country is getting fewer of our best people and state capability is suffering.

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The emptiness of awareness campaigns

By Simon Ruda

Troublingly, this isn’t just a question of splashing the cash. Even if there were budget to spare (which there won’t be), rebuilding and remotivating the workforce would be tricky. This is partly because the problem isn’t just a numbers one. It’s an attitude one. Even though the overall size and composition of the Civil Service today does not look that different from when I joined, some of the cultural norms — or “expected behaviours” — are unrecognisable. The most noticeable change is how comfortable younger cohorts have become with publicly expressing ideological views.

The politics of identity is by no means unique to the public sector, but it is uniquely problematic within it. To take one example, it is common to see pronouns attached to the email signatures of public servants. This does not concern me because of what it tells us about those public servants’ views of gender, but because it tells us something about their views. Public servants should be aware that exposing their institutions to accusations of ideological capture, by any type of political persuasion, is damaging.

Stephen Webb, a former Cabinet Office Director, points out that ambiguity around employers’ legal position makes the hierarchy hesitant to challenge any exhibitionist public-sector behaviours, such as displaying pronouns (sometimes incongruously overlapping with the wearing of Palestinian flags and other signalling devices). Or maybe the leadership feels it’s nothing more than passive social compliance and, therefore, not worth the fight. But the effect should not be dismissed. While it’s hard to imagine this kind of signalling leading to any of the outcomes proponents want to see, normalising this sort of ideological signalling has given licence to a growth in cause based, non-work activities in the workplace, which draws focus from core business. Inevitably it also affects productivity.

Such behaviour also blurs the distinction between passive exhibitionism and more overt acts of ideological capture. This could be seen when some civil servants in the Department for Business and Trade decided that, of all the countries to whom we export military equipment, they should threaten to refuse to process export licences to Israel. There is a balance to be struck between engaging sincerely with employees to get the best out of them, and pandering to the latest TikTok cause and its pseudo intellectual underpinnings.

And while the majority of public servants are passionate and professional, their jobs become increasingly difficult when the behaviour of their colleagues degrades their institution’s legitimacy. The Met Police, for example, were already struggling to defend themselves against accusations of permitting antisemitic and intimidating behaviour during the Palestine marches; something which has been made all the harder now one of their most senior advisors has been shown chanting “from the river to the sea”. Either these public servants do not understand that the role of public service is to serve the whole public, or they believe that ideological actions are more worthwhile than their jobs’ substance.

Or perhaps there is another motivating factor. Professor Daniel Kahneman, the father of behavioural science, argued that there is a difference between the “experiencing self” and the “remembering self” (that is how the process of retrieving memories is prone to bias, meaning the impression we have of our past experiences can be different from how they really happened). Since, for many, the experience of real life now comes second to the way life can be presented online, I would argue that we are witnessing the emergence of a third “self” — the “representing self” — who experiences life in anticipation of how the experience can be represented on social media.

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The decisions people make have long been influenced by what they think those decisions say about them, but social media has magnified this human frailty to such an extent it has changed the way consumer markets function: people participate in activities, choose their holidays and even adjust their worldview very conscious of how this will make them appear to their chosen identity grouping. Studies have shown a link between narcissistic traits and modern Western activism and — sadly — professionalism is no longer a barrier to this type of vanity: it motivates the choices some make in the workplace (as anyone who has had the misfortune to use LinkedIn will know). This, though, should not be the case in public service. If ideological distractions are permitted, it allows employees to show they feel more connected to ideology-based identity groups than to the communities and national community they are employed to serve.

Shifting behaviours and organisational culture is hard, though, particularly when the barriers to sacking employees is high. But the stakes for the country are even higher. We have many exceptional public servants, who feel increasingly let down by the overall effectiveness of their institutions and we risk losing them to better paying work. So we need leaders who will reclaim responsibility for institutional culture from HR departments and will lead by example. Who will promote the talented and be empowered to sack those who are failing. Our public institutions have been allowed to crumble and if an incoming government fails to retain and reward those who can rebuild the legitimacy of these services, those electoral promises won’t be worth the paper they were written on.

Though the intention of campaigns is often to inform, persuade or convey particular values of those behind them, their most powerful function can in fact be to shape the expectations we have of each other. Since spotting the staring poster, I’ve come across a raft of messages on the transport network warning against upskirting, revealing intimate body parts, touching, cyber flashing and catcalling. This messaging ignores a wealth of evidence suggesting it risks not only failing but having a counterproductive effect. There are benefits to surfacing underreported crimes (which sexual harassment tends to be), such as reducing a feeling of isolation in victims. But there are risks too. Simply making a noise about something is not the same thing as understanding it, let alone fixing it.

Take the case of Drinkaware, which in 2012 launched a multi-year, multimillion-pound responsible drinking campaign (Why Let Good Times Go Bad?) designed to reduce binge drinking by warning of its consequences and giving tips on how to drink responsibly. Despite initially seeming to resonate with its target audience, when robustly evaluated the campaign was found to have likely increased alcohol consumption. To their credit, Drinkaware terminated the campaign a year early.

Why did this happen? Most of the time, we do not actively think about the multitude of messages that dominate our daily environments. But they do leave an impression on us. And this impression is often different to the one we get when actively engaging with their messages: when not executed carefully, campaigns highlighting a problem can make that problem seem more common than we previously thought it to be: they have a normalising effect. This affects behaviour, but in precisely the wrong way. For example, those inclined to sexually harass another passenger may give themselves more licence to do so if they get the impression that plenty of other people do it too, especially where the chance of being caught is perceived to be slim. Research from Princeton identified a similar risk in publicity campaigns to prevent sexual violence.

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Will nudge theory survive the pandemic?

By Simon Ruda

Preventing bad behaviour is generally harder than promoting good behaviour and there are plenty of examples where well-intentioned policies have backfired. Warning campaigns can increase fear and anxiety about being victimised. Mandatory sexual harassment training can make those inclined to sexually harass more accepting of such behaviour. The Scared Straight programme, for instance, an intervention that took young offenders into a prison to deter them from future offending by showing them the potential consequences of their actions, turned out to increase offending. The reason for this, though subject to a degree of speculation, is that the experience encouraged the participants to think of themselves as career offenders: it increased their sense of criminal identity.

But all is not lost. There is sufficient evidence from high quality research to make better programmes and effective campaigns, but there needs to be the right incentives for decision-makers to understand what constitutes accurate evidence, and to pay attention to it. This means focussing on the effects that campaigns have on their audience, rather than what they might say about the organisations behind them.

In the corporate world, there is a growing convention for companies to demonstrate their principles by highlighting their opposition to social ills. When companies are perceived to be sincerely committed to doing good, they can benefit from improved employee engagement and reputation. For companies selling directly to consumers, it may be an effective way of encouraging us to part with our money: there is evidence to suggest that we are more accepting of materialistic values after we believe we have made a virtuous choice.

And these companies are often well-placed to address social challenges, by minimising the negative externalities associated with producing and selling their goods, adapting the design of what they sell, or by using the influence they have with consumers to affect behaviour. The latter is more likely to seem legitimate when the behaviour is directly relevant to the interaction they already have with the consumer. For example, though large supermarkets must accept much responsibility for food waste, Tesco’s campaign to encourage families to habitualise picking  a weekly “Use Up Day” is well thought through and likely to have a positive impact.

What is worrying, however, is the tendency of organisations merely to spotlight a broadly defined social ill in order to demonstrate their opposition to it. If to define who we are, we must generate outrage about who we’re not, we will end up creating bigger problems than we had to begin with. Some may find it ironic that many organisations have calculated that portraying their social credentials brings them competitive advantage. But if in doing so they also make the problem worse, irony may turn to ridicule.

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Fretting about collective threats and amplifying moral panics is not new by any means, though it has traditionally been the domain of divisive politicians. Why has it gained broader appeal? The answer is partly to do with a lack of accountability, which in turn is to do with outdated ways to assess the impact of communication in the real world. But it’s also to do with incentives. In the modern attention economy, campaigns that generate engagement — clicks and articles — are highly valued (even when the link between engagement and tangible or commercial outcomes is unclear).

There is evidence in psychology that negative stories and experiences are more powerful at capturing our attention than positive ones, which is an attractive proposition for those trying to keep our eyes on screens or conjuring ‘likes’ from people searching for ways to attach themselves to a cause. This is most obviously seen in the content of news media, where it can cause its greatest damage.

Returning to the theme of crime, in recent years almost every news outlet in the UK has been talking about the “violence epidemic” sweeping across the country, particularly focussing on knife crime. It is always shocking when a life is lost to violence, but both the level and tone of this reporting seems overstated and ignores important context. Overall patterns of violence have been on a sustained downward trajectory for over 20 years. Police recorded crime shows small increases since the middle of the last decade from an all-time low. But this is partly explained by changes to police practices for recording crime and changes in the definition of violent crime (such as the inclusion of death by dangerous driving). Oxford University’s Dr David Humphreys and colleagues analysed hospital data for injuries relating to violence, a reliable and consistent data source, and clearly show the incongruity of the problem to the way it has been presented:

In addition to the overall prevalence of knife violence being overblown by media reporting, the risk of victimisation is highly localised, with just 1% of London neighbourhoods accounting for 69% of all knife homicides. So public perception is being skewed — the media is making us all frightened, and this has its own consequences. Being scared of knife crime (and any risk of violence) is likely to undermine “collective efficacy” — when high levels of trust and cooperation among residents in a neighbourhood lead to achieving collective benefits, such as lower rates of crime and antisocial behaviour, particularly in poorer communities. It is also likely to encourage imitation crimes and have an effect on people carrying weapons — an important predictor of knife violence. This is made worse by the police’s insistence on sharing images of knives seized, which for many years has been suspected to be counterproductive. Meanwhile, measures that might prevent violence — such as restorative justice, one of the most well-evidenced and cost-effective tools for addressing serious violence — are underutilised.

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By Bari Weiss

The commercial incentives driving news broadcasters to keep our attention with sensationalised content are harming our communities for commercial gain. But in addition to commercial incentives, I wonder if there isn’t a deeper issue at play too: uninspiring politics. When leaders can’t see and articulate a compelling and uniting future, they fixate on who’s to blame for what’s wrong with the present. This is true across the political spectrum, and it has a trickledown effect on the rest of society.

Shouting about problems, priming mistrust and offering people the ecstasy of sanctimony is not leadership. Leadership is providing a vision, working hard to understand what it takes to get there, and being accountable for your role on that journey. I hope those politicians, public bodies and companies who can do that will be heard through the noise.

I remain a supporter of the use of behavioural science in public policy, and of the Behavioural Insights Team, more commonly known as the Nudge Unit. However, witnessing how the UK and other governments have responded to the pandemic, I can now appreciate the vulnerabilities of well-intentioned, democratic regimes, and the potential for behavioural science to be used inappropriately.

I was a co-founder and leading figure within the Nudge Unit. Since its inception, in 2010, the unit has been a success story for the Government. When I joined we were a team of seven within what was called the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit. In 2014, we were able to “spin out” of government. We became an independent, profit-making social purpose company, a third owned by the Cabinet Office. We could sell our services to the whole of the UK public sector and any other government or organisation seeking to improve people’s lives.

A big part of my role was to introduce behavioural science thinking to public policy challenges in other countries. In doing so, we won new contracts and opened new markets, but also helped to spread the application of behavioural science. In 2010, the Nudge Unit was the first and only government unit dedicated to behavioural science in public policy. By 2021, there were over 400 globally. Post spin-out, we grew organically to 250+ people, with offices in nine major cities across the globe, working on projects in more than 35 countries. As civil servants, we were providing policy advice to the Cabinet Office; as a company we also provided dividends, international influence and, since the company was sold in December 2021, a healthy capital gain.

In the early days, we felt as if we had discovered a secret sauce and our mission was to share it as widely as possible. We had a time-limited licence to roam around government, seeking out areas of policy to improve. A two-year sunset cause stipulated we needed to deliver a 10-fold return on the cost of the team, one of the reasons for our early focus on tax — in a now famous example, we used “social norms” to boost tax compliance by telling debtors the true proportion of other people who have paid their taxes.

It felt very different from other parts of the civil service. We cared a lot more about academic research, and seeing the world through the eyes of the citizen. We would bring over famous academics such as Daniel Kahneman, Richard Thaler and Robert Cialdini for seminars in No. 10. We had strong sponsorship from the PM and reported through a high-level steering board, chaired by the Cabinet Secretary, Gus O’Donnell. We were passionate and hard-working but also informal, personable and fun. We sought to free useful information from the over-intellectualising of academia: our policy papers drew on complex concepts and research but described findings in simple and engaging language.

Most strikingly, in the broader context of recession and austerity, we were a can-do, technically competent team — the opposite of the stereotypically politically astute but risk-averse official. Like a lean start-up, we had high motivation but few resources. If there was no budget to make an app, we would learn how to do it and build it ourselves. We would never say “we can’t do it” but “‘how else can we do it?”. Expertise brought into the civil service from outside often fails as it can’t navigate the bureaucracy. But we were home-grown: we knew how to work with the system.

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There has, though, always been media scepticism about us. When science journalist Ben Goldacre called for us to be sacked, I remember David Halpern, my boss, telling us that the best compliment comes from a former critic. So we invited Dr Goldacre in to see that we were, in fact, doing exactly what empiricists like him advocate — systematically running large-scale randomised controlled trials (RCTs). Dr Goldacre apologised for his article and co-published a paper with us on policy evaluation, which at one point was the most downloaded Cabinet Office paper after the Coalition Agreement.

The more successful our results, the more the media supported us. In one piece of work, my colleagues Prof Elizabeth Linos, Joanne Reinhard and I managed to eliminate the substantial and historic underperformance of ethnic minority applicants to a police force with a cost-neutral and non-discriminatory intervention: adding a line to an email that prompted candidates to reflect on their values and what success would mean to them. The impact of this incredibly simple idea astounded me, but the data was checked, rechecked and published in a peer reviewed journal, and the result still stands.

There are many examples of our successes – some of which are celebrated on the Nudge Unit’s 10th anniversary website. But to my mind, it is the legacy of our approach which will deliver the greatest impact. We advocated two new dimensions to policy making: behaviour-focused models describing what drives human decision making; and the priority of empirical research over all other sources of information. I believe this contribution has — and can — continue to serve governments well. But it must be used appropriately. For me, it means seeing the bigger picture: recognising what you can and can’t measure, and seeing the potential for unintended consequences. For example, testing ways to make it easier for parents to engage with their children’s homework, and measuring improved education and parental engagement as a result, is a great idea. But invoking different emotions to convince people to stay at home during the pandemic is less appropriate. It could have negative consequences that are missed in the typical RCT evaluation. This is because metrics will focus on proxies for behaviour, but they probably can’t capture the potential longer-term effects of these campaigns beyond what is immediately measurable — such as worse inter-societal relations and reduced trust in institutions, the consequences of which could be significant.

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Because behavioural science can be so broadly applied, it is equally broadly defined. Of these two examples, the first sticks closely to Richard Thaler’s mantra – making it easier to overcome a clearly defined barrier to achieve an uncontroversial gain; the second, however, feels more propagandistic. In my mind, the most egregious and far-reaching mistake made in responding to the pandemic has been the level of fear willingly conveyed on the public. Initially encouraged to boost public compliance, that fear seems to have subsequently driven policy decisions in a worrying feedback loop. Though I don’t think it’s fair to blame behavioural scientists for propagating fear (I suspect that this was more to do with Government communicators and the incentives of news broadcasters), it may be worth reflecting on where we need to draw the line between the choice-maximising nudges of libertarian paternalism, and the creeping acceptance among policy makers that the state should use its heft to influence our lives without the accountability of legislative and parliamentary scrutiny. Nudging made subtle state influence palatable, but mixed with a state of emergency, have we inadvertently sanctioned state propaganda?

The second principle, empiricism, can also be misused. It is an admirable intention (I have often argued for public services to draw on empirical methods to assess impact and improve outcomes), but not when pursued at the expense of other fundamental principles of good policy-making designed to help us see the bigger picture. Placing all value on data risks de-prioritising reflection, reason and debate — and obscuring the limitations of that data as a depiction of reality. The more we measure something, like Covid infections, the more prominent it becomes and so the more it matters. But what’s most feasible to measure now is not necessarily what’s most important overall. Behavioural science was conceived as a means of recognising and correcting the biases that lead humans to make non-rational decisions. But it’s not obvious to me that the trade-offs many governments are making in their responses to the pandemic are grounded in utilitarian rationality.

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Perhaps the most important attribute of empiricism is objectivity. So it has been surprising that the most ardent proponents of empiricism in policy have not been inoculated from identity politics and their own echo-chambers. In fact, it is the proponents of evidence and empiricism, our best and most educated elites, who are now often the least willing to hear information that challenges their worldview or runs contrary to their identity. Many have written about this trend on university campuses. Even at the Nudge Unit, an organisation designed to make others aware of biases, where Jonathan Haidt has lectured staff about his work unpicking the routes of cancel culture, an academic speaker was cancelled for an innocuous, historic tweet.

So where does that leave nudging?

Behavioural science in policy can help us improve people’s lives, but we shouldn’t become complacent – as I was in 2015 in Lucerne – to the potential for unintended harm. We must always look beyond the immediate policy objective and be alive to the critical roles that institutional trust, accountability and legitimacy play in successful societies. Those who commission behavioural experts to provide policy advice must themselves understand how best to use it. The former Cabinet Secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, knew how to use the Nudge Unit effectively, to challenge departments to think more expansively, or assess existing programmes with greater scientific rigour. But he also knew when to temper this thinking, when to nudge was less appropriate.

As we’ve learned over the past two years, focusing on “the science” is blinkered, which is why we need multidisciplinary teams, a strong culture of intellectual humility and designed-in cognitive diversity to tackle problems, especially in times of uncertainty. And this commitment to cognitive diversity needs to be deep and effective: at the Nudge Unit, we created a product to de-bias recruitment in order that we would find successful candidates from a diverse range of backgrounds. Despite this, fewer than 1% of staff supported Brexit.

Finally, accepting Kahneman’s doctrine that we are all susceptible to automatic thinking, rather than accommodating it by bending the choice architecture to lead us down the desired path perhaps there are occasions where we can try to jolt people out of their automatic stance into active consideration. I have often argued – like Richard Thaler did here on UnHerd – that there is no neutral way to present a choice. But this doesn’t mean that, in certain circumstances, we shouldn’t try.