Nudging back: Is the increasing ease of activism creating a more inaccessible and intolerant society?
We know that when an idea has buzz we will look to it to save us from ills of our collective making way beyond what could reasonably be expected of a single idea. Those ideas range from the eyebrow arching like blockchain to the “there’s really something in that” like deep practice. But just about the most all-pervasive of all right now is the notion of the nudge, helped along by Richard Thaler’s 2009 bestselling book and subsequent (2017) Nobel Prize for Economics.
The idea behind the nudge is really very simple, and one that has found its moment in a world that brings us challenges of an unprecedented global scale and urgency (climate change, food security, transhumanism, AI safety and so on) alongside unparalleled big data and at the same time a push back against technological progress and a desire to live more of our lives, more meaningfully, in the offline world. It is the idea that small changes in the way our choices are contextualised can have a massive impact on what we choose.
Classic examples that show how this fits so well in the world of big data are simplifying the pensions choices people are faced with to increase savings rates (solving the problem of too much information through curation), rearranging what foods are closest the checkout to make us eat more healthily (using what we are learning about people’s biases to make them more likely to choose what they would like to choose if temptation didn’t get in the way), and using specifics about people’s make of car to make them more likely to pay their car tax (using personalisation that big data has made affordable to increase engagement).
Obviously businesses and politicians love this (as current events show!), but many of us with a progressive agenda who simply want the world to be better have reason to love it to. We love it because it works (the 5p plastic bag tax reduced plastic bag usage by over 80%). And we love it because, let’s face it, as a species our behaviour to each other, to our selves, to our future, and to our environment, is pretty shocking. And that means there is a lot of low hanging fruit, a lot of relatively large and highly achievable wins, which nudges like the bag tax, like putting fruit by the counter, like banning plastic straws can help us make.
Those in traditionally underheard communities have already begun to express concerns. Recent campaigns to nudge people away from single use plastic such as plastic straws, packaged fruit, and takeout coffee cups have drawn criticism from the disabled community who point out that for many people the items that are being nudged out of reach are things they rely on in order to live complete lives.
The problem boils down to this — activism has always had an accessibility problem (unrealistic demands on people’s time, their executive function, their resilience, and their physical ability to march/protest, for example). What nudging, in conjunction with media coverage such as Blue Planet 2, has done is bring activism into the everyday realm. With it comes the potential for picking many of the low hanging fruit of changing our appalling species level behaviour, but we have brought with that positive all of the inaccessible negatives of activism, and as a result risk pushing those most in need of a world that adapts to their needs even further into isolation and marginalisation.
If we hold to any form of the social model of disability (which states that people with impairments are disabled not by their impairments but by the world’s refusal to adapt to those impairments) then the nudge is one of the most disabling things to happen for decades. The problem is that the numbers affected are low enough, and the low-hanging fruit plentiful enough, that a society that is taught by neoliberalism on the one hand to see only the balance of outcomes and environmentalism (and the umbrella of which it is a part, effective altruism) on the other to prioritise only the resolution of the globally urgent.
This is a problem that needs addressing in research into the impact of these “real world” nudges onto the behaviour and health of those with disabilities, and by being woven into the discourse of those deciding on the outcomes they wish to see nudged.
But it is not necessarily insoluble, because a key part of the rise of the nudge is the possibility of personalisation that technology offers, specifically machine learning from big data. While we cannot personalise canteens and coffee shops, we can personalise much of what happens online, and we are living in a more and more online world. So is that the answer? To use personalisation to tailor our nudges to the low hanging fruit while maintaining, even expanding, the adaptions we provide for those who need them?
Well, leaving aside the questionableness of using data in this way, no.
And that is because the nudge hasn’t just created a problem of access. It has also created a problem of tolerance. And it’s going to be a far harder nut to crack.
Here’s the issue. Nudges work with our biases and preferences to remove the friction that so often stops us making good choices. But that mechanism comes with a cost. It’s a cost that people aren’t talking about, and it comes from the fact the biases and preferences that ease us into action aren’t the only ones at play. In simple terms, the easier I find it to do a certain thing, the harder it is for me to empathise with someone who cannot do that thing.
What our successful nudges have done is to make it so easy for most of the population to take actions that have a positive impact on, say, their health or the environment, that we have created an empathy gap they can no longer bridge when they are faced with people unable to do these things. The result can be seen in the comments on the articles linked in the references. People who can’t peel fruit “shouldn’t be allowed out”. Anyone who struggles with the executive function needed to remember their reusable cups “should just try harder” and if they don’t “shouldn’t get rewarded for laziness”. By making us believe that we can all do our (very narrowly defined) bit, the well-meaning nudgers are creating a society lacking both compassion and patience towards those who cannot.
So what should we do about this? The first answer has to be more research. Or, rather, given what I have (not) found, just “research”. We need to study the effects of beneficial nudges on those whose necessary adaptions are made harder to access — effects on their mental health, effects on their engagement with all aspects of life. But we also need research that seeks to understand how making world-altering activities easier for many impacts those people’s empathy for, and attitudes towards, those who cannot engage in them. Because, in a world increasingly needing empathy to overcome ingrained biases that work against outcomes like the introduction of a universal basic income, the empowering of fully diverse workforces, and the valuing of life for what it is and not what it does, we could be storing up a ticking time bomb of intolerance that will devastate the future not just of the most marginalised but of us all.
And then we must have some very difficult conversations as a society.
References and further reading
http://enablemagazine.co.uk/pre-packaged-food-important-disabled/
https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/knee-jerk-responses-to-plastic-straw-campaigns-risk-isolating-disabled-customers/
https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/
Nudge, Thaler, R & Sunstein, C
Us & Them, Hutton, W
Peak, Ericsson, A & Pool, R
