Your government is experimenting on you.
In ways you don't detect it is subtly influencing your decisions, pushing you towards what it believes are your (or its) best interests, exploiting the biases and tics of the human brain uncovered by research into behavioural psychology.
And it is trying this in many different ways on many different people, running constant trials of different unconscious pokes and prods, to work out which is the most effective, which improves the most lives, or saves the most money. Preferably, both.
This is not a paranoid delusion or Orwellian dystopia. In some senses it's not even new. But what is new is that the science of "government by nudges" has been systematised, formalised, and is now being taken seriously at the very highest level.
It's partly down to this man: David Halpern. He's the head of the Britain's "nudge unit'" which started as a six-person "skunk works" backed by Prime Minister David Cameron, battled cynicism and entrenched civil service (and political) opposition, and is rapidly becoming one of the biggest innovations in modern public service.
And now it's being exported – including to Australia. The Victorian and NSW governments have been nudging for the last two years, and they're planning to expand. Canberra has taken an interest, too.
There may be behavioural nudges on your tax forms, on informational websites, in speeding fine notices or hospital leaflets, even on the public staircases you climb.
I meet Halpern in his London office, 10 minutes west of Westminster, where Behavioural Insights (the nudge unit's official name) has relocated as it expands.
All the signs of a successful, busting-at-the-seams start-up are here – a bar fridge sits awkwardly on the meeting room floor among half-opened cardboard boxes. There's a lonely pot plant. Everyone's too busy to make the room look formal.
Halpern is friendly, chatty. His twitching legs betray a restless energy. And he sets his watch three minutes fast.
"We're busy nudging ourselves often in life," he says. "Humans are complicated. One of the models of mind is that it's a democracy in your own head, it's not just 'you' up there. We develop these strategies ourselves, to nudge ourselves.
"Periodically I think 'this is really stupid' and set [my watch] to normal time, the right time, and then I miss my train."
In his new book Inside the Nudge Unit, published this week in Britain, Halpern explains his fascination with behavioural psychology: "For those who follow the literature, it has felt at times like that period when Victorian explorers were discovering the uncharted regions of the world."
The human brain makes endless decisions, constantly, so many that we often barely register them, he says. Occasionally we get them wrong.
"Our brains weren't made for the day-to-day financial judgments that are the foundation of modern economies: from mortgages, to pensions, to the best buy in a supermarket. Our thinking and decisions are fused with emotion."
There's a window of opportunity for governments, Halpern believes: to exploit the gaps between perception, reason, emotion and reality, and push us the "right" way.
He gives me a recent example of BI's work – they were looking at police recruitment, and how to get a wider ethnic mix.
Just before applicants did an online recruitment test, in an email sending the link, BI added a line saying "before you do this, take a moment to think about why joining the police is important to you and your community".
There was no effect on white applicants. But the pass rate for black and minority ethnic applicants moved from 40 to 60 per cent.
"It entirely closes the gap," Halpern says. "Absolutely amazing. We thought we had good grounds in the [scientific research] literature that such a prompt might make a difference, but the scale of the difference was extraordinary.
"Often in life you think 'Jeez! I bet there's the right thing to say but I don't know what it is'. Sometimes you get a glimpse into just how important that is. A subtle nudge at one point can set someone off down a different trajectory."
Halpern taught social psychology at Cambridge but spent six years in the Blair government's strategy unit. An early think piece on behavioural policy-making was leaked to the media and caused a small storm – Blair publicly disowned it and that was that. Halpern returned to academia, but was lured back after similar ideas started propagating through the Obama administration, and Cameron was persuaded to give it a go.
The nudge unit was set up with a sunset clause – after two years, if it couldn't show clear results that saved 10 times its own budget, it would shut down. Clearly, it survived.
The "experimental government" part of nudging is vital, Halpern says.
"Human beings are very, very complicated. Predicting how they will respond to a given cue or nudge is really hard work. You really want to run trials.
"We use the scientific literature to make an informed judgment about what will shape behaviour one way or the other, but also then you test it and you keep testing."
Ministers tend not to like it – once, one snapped, "I didn't spend a decade in opposition to come into government to run a pilot", but the technique is rife in the digital commercial world, where companies like Amazon or Google try 20 different versions of a web page.
Governments and public services should do it too, Halpern says. His favourite example is Britain's organ donor register. They tested eight alternative online messages prompting people to join, including a simple request, different pictures, statistics or conscience-tweaking statements like "if you needed an organ transplant would you have one? If so please help others".
It's not obvious which messages work best, even to an expert. The only way to find out is to test them. They were surprised to find that the picture (of a group of people) actually put people off, Halpern says.
In future they want to use demographic data to personalise nudges, Halpern says. On tax reminder notices, they had great success putting the phrase "most people pay their tax on time" at the top. But a stubborn top 5 per cent, with the biggest tax debts, saw this reminder and thought, "Well, I'm not most people".
"That generally powerful message backfired amongst the biggest tax debtors, a really important population," Halpern says. "So the question was, what should we say to them? It turned out that a really effective message was to remind them that without taxes we can't pay for schools, hospitals and other public services.
"Especially if it was phrased in a negative way, this dramatically boosted the repayment rate in the top 1 per cent of debtors, though it didn't do much for most of the rest of the population.
"It's a glimpse into a possible future, the ability to offer truly personalised services."
This whole approach raises ethical issues. Often you can't tell people they're being experimented on – it's impractical, or ruins the experiment, or both.
"If we're trying to find the best way of saying 'don't drop your litter' with a sign saying 'most people don't drop litter', are you supposed to have a sign before it saying 'caution you are about to participate in a trial'?
"The alternative is great leaps into the unknown. That's the hard reality of most public policy in practice. We have been doing things, often for decades, which we vaguely think might be doing some good but we really don't know."
There's another ethical problem, or potential problem.
Halpern wrote that he encountered "deep-seated public concerns about the use of behavioural insights by government. It makes a lot of people uneasy. And maybe it should.
"If behavioural insights are powerful they can be misused – not just by business, but also by unscrupulous governments and bureaucrats.
"Where should we draw the line between effective communication and unacceptable 'PsyOps' or propaganda?"
Or as one government minister once said to him: "It's not quite cricket, is it?"
His team were careful to draw "lines in the sand", he says – being scrupulously honest in communications messages, monitoring public concerns, and employing an external advisory panel.
It also seems to work better in a centre-right government, he says.
"A [left-of-centre] government seen as expanding the role of the welfare state … that wants to do this other [nudge] stuff as well, it feels very different than if you've got a government whose general instinct is that the state should be a bit smaller and should not be telling you what to do."
Halpern says Cameron was clear the nudge unit should "support better choices" rather than restrict choice, and aim to improve people's wellbeing.
However, the libertarian right has not embraced it, especially in the United States, where one talk show host called Obama's "nudge tsar" Cass Sunstein "the most dangerous man in America".
"Being a pragmatist, my own view is that we should do whatever works, particularly if it has minimal costs," Halpern says. "The great challenge is, can you move that from being just an art into a science?"
Halpern will be in Melbourne in a few weeks, running a VicHealth public forum on obesity as part of his role as their "thinker in residence".
In Victoria, BI and VicHealth are trying ideas such as painted footsteps to encourage the use of stairs over escalators – based on an experiment in Copenhagen where painted footsteps led potential litterbugs to rubbish bins.
Halpern says Australia is a world leader in public health – a lot of public health policy in Britain is "let's see what the Australians do and if it doesn't blow up too badly we'll do the same".
But there are many opportunities outside preventive health. BI now has a permanent presence in Sydney, and has helped the NSW government put "nudges" into tax and fine-enforcement orders and hospital forms (a big success was a red "pay now" stamp at the top of overdue traffic fine notices, another encouraged people to use their private health insurance at public hospital emergency departments).
Rory Gallagher is managing director of BI's Australian operation. It started working primarily with the NSW department of premier and cabinet, but recently brought on more staff and are working with other state agencies, the Commonwealth and regionally in New Zealand and Singapore.
So far, Gallagher says, they've been mostly applying the strategies and ideas developed in Britain: most worked with surprisingly similar effect despite cultural differences.
The next step is to move from the "quick wins" into harder areas: "things like domestic violence, childhood obesity, long-term injured workers", he says. "We'll be looking to work across the complete set of policy issues, [such as] education, reoffending, transport. We might look at how to ease traffic congestion."
"We're starting to do work with a local council [and] a major charity looking to increase donations, as well as one of the major federal agencies."
Look out for a nudge near you, coming soon.
