President Obama's latest executive order, announced Tuesday, authorizes and encourages government agencies to begin conducting behavioral psychology experiments on U.S. citizens in order to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of government programs.
"A growing body of evidence demonstrates that behavioral science insights - research findings from fields such as behavioral economics and psychology about how people make decisions and act on them - can be used to design government policies to better serve the American people," the executive order says.
Obama's executive order encourages federal agencies to "identify policies, programs, and operations where applying behavioral science insights may yield substantial improvements in public welfare, program outcomes, and program cost effectiveness," as well as to "develop strategies for applying behavioral science insights to programs and, where possible, rigorously test and evaluate the impact of these insights."
The idea is to use these insights to push citizens to make better decisions by simplifying forms, sending reminders and re-framing their choices by tinkering with the content, format, timing and medium by which information is conveyed, USA Today noted.
In programs that offer choices for consumers, agencies are asked to "consider how the presentation and structure of those choices, including the order, number, and arrangement of options, can most effectively promote public welfare."
The psychological manipulation of American citizens will, however, supposedly save taxpayer dollars, John Holdren, director of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, said on Tuesday at a presentation in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, reported Politico.
The program seems to be modeled after one implemented in the U.K. in 2010, which created Behavioral Insights Teams who used "iterative experimentation" to test "inventions that will further advance priorities of the British government," according to The Daily Caller.
The White House also borrowed some of the ideas from recent research from Harvard law school professor Cass Sunstein and University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler. The two behavioral scientists wrote in their 2008 book "Nudge" that government policies can be crafted in a way that "nudges" citizens to behave in a certain way.
Sunstein proposed one idea Tuesday which would automatically enroll utility customers in green energy plans unless they opt out, citing a similar experiment conducted in Germany which led to a tenfold increase in people choosing clean energy.
President Obama's health care law also appears to contain plenty of language and experimentation designed to "nudge" citizens' perception and actions. For example, perhaps the most controversial re-framing was the way the Obama administration labeled the individual mandate as a penalty rather than a "tax," as Republicans claimed it was.
Another Obamacare nudge involved the government sending "reminder letters to individuals who had started to apply for health insurance," which "led to 13 percent more completed applications," according to a White House fact sheet released Tuesday. To help identify which presentation was more effective, the Department of Health and Human Services "sent one of eight behaviorally designed letter variants to each of more than 700,000 individuals who had already begun the health insurance enrollment process but had not yet completed an application. Those sent the most effective version of the letter were 13.2 percent more likely to enroll in health insurance than those sent no letter, with enrollment rates of 4.56 and 4.03 percent, respectively. "
"The desired choices almost always advance the goals of the federal government, though they are often couched as ways to cut overall program spending," according to The Daily Caller.
In the U.K.'s similar program, one experiment found that sending a letter to late taxpayers which read "9 out of 10 people in Britain pay their taxes on time" resulted in a 15 percent increase in timely payment compliance.
To kick-start the program, federal agencies are encouraged to recruit behavioral scientists and develop relationships with researchers in order to better implement "empirical findings from the behavioral sciences."
Researchers from MIT, Harvard and the Brookings Institute, among others, have signed on to the program, according to the White House.
