Table of contents
The empire strikes back
A comprehensive account of the psychological approaches deployed by the BIT is provided in the document, MINDSPACE: Influencing behaviour through public policy (Dolan et al., 2010) (4). The authors of MINDSPACE describe how their behavioural strategies provide ‘low cost, low pain ways of “nudging” citizens … … into new ways of acting by going with the grain of how we think and act’ (p7) (Our emphasis). By expressing the process of change in this way, this statement reveals a key difference between the BIT interventions and traditional government efforts to shape our behaviour: their reliance on tools that often impact on us subconsciously, below our awareness.