Government Policy is Solvable (with behavioral science)

absolutely do. Effective government policies are tricky things to get right. To begin with, there's lobbying and then rigorous debate around whether a policy or program should exist at all. That's followed by, as we've seen recently, a lot of argument about how much money to spend. But once the budget has been settled and the money allocated to federal programs, there's the important step of designing programs that truly serve the people and reach them, and that's where studying human

behavior can help. Small changes can be the difference between successful engagement or a low participation rate. So the government ended up leveraging an insight known as the power of defaults, and basically it changed the school Lunch program from an opt in program to an opt out program. The National School Lunch Program reaches nearly thirty million children each year.

Thanks to smart, sometimes seemingly subtle changes like these, millions more Americans may be making the most of government programs, from farmers to veterans to college age students. Behavioral science is the study of how and why we make decisions, as well as how we develop our attitudes and beliefs

about the world. Maya Shankar is the host of the podcast A Slight Change of Plans, and she founded the White House's Behavioral Science Team, serving as an advisor during the Obama administration to help develop strategy and implement government policies by studying behavioral factors that influence decision making. Better implementation of government policy is solvable but the help of behavioral science. I think if you'd asked me as a little kid, what do you want to be when you

grow up? I would have definitely not said cognitive scientists because I had no idea what it was. I was actually a violinist growing up. That was my passion. I started playing when I was six years old, and I really got on the speed train when I was nine and started studying at the Juilliard School of Music in

New York. And then when I was a teenager, It's a pearlman asked me to be his private violence student, and so at that point I thought, Wow, I've gotten a vote of confidence from the person I think is the best violinist in the world. I might actually have what it takes. Very Unfortunately, I had a sudden injury in my left hand that basically ended my career overnight when I was fifteen. So how did you make the

pivot from violinists to behavioral scientists. I was forced to explore other avenues and other paths In that summer before college, when I was supposed to be touring in China with my friends Ronald and instead I was helping my parents clean their basement. So equally cool summer situation, but I ended up discovering a book on how the mind works.

I remember thinking, oh, my gosh, I had no idea just how complicated our mental systems are and what goes behind our ability to make decisions and learn language and you know, interact with the world and the way that we do. And I was just a light bulb moment for me where I realized, I think this is what I want to do. I think this is what I want to study, because I felt completely in all of the human mind. And you did it. You went through a lot of schooling to immerse yourself in this stuff.

You studied with esteemed cognitive psychologist Lori Santo said, Yeo, also a Pushkin co worker. Went on to get a PhD and do a post doc and join the ranks in academia. But after a number of years involved with the research side of things, you realize that you didn't love it. You know. It was like an o explotive moment.

What do I do next? And I actually ended up calling up my underground advisor and I called her and I said, Laurie, so, I know I've been doing this whole you know, want to be a professor thing for some time because I really admire you. But I actually don't want to do that anymore. I'm thinking of becoming a general management consultant. And Laurie, you could hear a light gasp on the other phone, namely, oh no, I did not invest all this time into my student for

her to leave my field. And so she said okay, before she was very gentle before you explore that path, Maya, I just want to let you know that there's incredible work happening in the Obama White House right now that is helping low income kids get access to free lunch. But there's no actual job that hiring for. There's no They're not like, yeah, we want to hire a behavioral scientist.

So I end up sending a cold email to a former Obama advisor, Cass Sunstein, and I say, hey, Cass, like, I'm Maya, I'm a post doc, i have no public policy experience, and I've published nothing of significance, but I'd really love to work at the intersection of behavioral science and policy. Thankfully, he ignored all the insecurities seeping out of my email and immediately got back to me and said, let me connect you with Obama's science advisor and let

him know that I sent you along. And so within days, Ronald like this was a crazy life change for me. I was interviewing with Obama officials, pitching them on the idea of creating a new position for me in which I could translate insights about human behavior into the design of public policy. So I packed up my bags and I moved to DC, and you know, I started my job at the White House at the beginning of Obama's

second term. Can you talk a little bit about what behavioral factors are, what that looks like, and give a few examples on how that played into the work that you actually did. Behavioral science is the study of how and why we make decisions, as well as how we

develop our attitudes and beliefs about the world. And the reason why this field is so important in the context of public policy making is that it reveals that we are influenced by some very surprising factors that ought to not influence our decisions, but absolutely do, sometimes outside of our conscious awareness. So let me give you a concrete example. I think we'd all like to believe that when we go into a voting booth, we'll end up voting for

the person we'd most like to see elected into office. Right, That's pretty common sense. But research shows that the order in which the candidate's names appear on a ballot can exert a significant influence on our voting behavior, and so when public policymakers become aware of this bias, they can in turn design a solution, namely to randomize the order in which the candidate's names appear across ballot. When you don't appreciate that these factors are actually informing decisions, then

you might be engaging in suboptimal policy design. So my intention joining the White House was to make sure that we were designing public policies with our best understanding of human behavior in mind. So, talk a little bit about the work you did in those early days of the second Obama administration. How did you figure out which policies needed the help of behavioral science. I was knocking on every single door saying, you know what problems are you

already trying to solve? Now, let me brainstorm how the tools in my toolbox can help you achieve those goals. So a good example of this is in an early meeting I met with the Department of Veterans Affairs, and they had built up this program that was trying to help veterans reacclimate to civilian life after their time overseas, and that transition, as you might know, can be very

challenging and fraught with lots of struggles. We ended up changing just one word in an email marketing message about the program, instead of telling veterans that they were eligible for the program, we simply reminded them that they had earned it through their years of service, and that one word change led to a nine percent increase in access

to the veterans program. And it was based on a behavioral science insight called the endowment effect, which basically says that we value things more when we feel that we own them or have earned them, and that again led to a groundswell of activity and excitement for this work. May do you think that your work is a result of suboptimal policy making or suboptimal policy enacting. So the policies themselves were fantastic, but there was a there was

an implementation gap, right. We weren't thinking about accessibility, availability of the program, what it means in real life to engage with the government in this way. Another name that they had for your team was the Nudge Unit, And when I read that, I was like, I don't want to be nudged. I'm not trying to be nudged in any direction, especially when it comes to the government. But you talking about it being about policy implementation kind of

makes me understand it a little bit more. But what would you say to detractors that say, I don't like this policy. I don't want to be nudged into doing it, and now they're using government science trickery in order to get me to do it. I don't feel good about that. How would you respond to those folks? Yeah, well, first I would say there's no default less state of the world. And what I mean by that is every program and policy has a default design that will influence people one

way or the other. If you're a veteran and you're asked to fill out a burdens and application form that requires referencing fifteen different resources, well that's a default too. That's a nudge too, right, And chances are those requirements are nudging veterans away from accessing a program that can actually be in their benefit. But nudges will not work

for people who don't want to take the action. An example of this is, you know, sending an email reminder about in rolling in a retirement savings plan will make a difference for a military service member who wants to enroll but just needs a reminder. It will not make a difference for someone who doesn't want to enroll because, for example, they want to use the money to make a down payment on a home or they just want

the disposable income. So I think it's really important for listeners to understand behavioral science is not a silver bullet, right. It helps to enable people to reach their long term goals who are seeking that long term goal, but it will not make a difference for those who don't want in So, how do you decide that your approach is helping enough people to bother doing it? Leadership and government and in the White House put in a lot of effort to figure out, you know, what are our goals

for this year. Then we wanted to make sure that we were responding to those goals and we were leveraging what we knew from behavioral science to help them achieve those goals more effectively. So this might involve helping student loan borrowers repay their loans in a more effective way or understand what their options are, or helping farmers get access to loans with the US Department of Agriculture. And

then we would also look at other factors. How many people are we going to be able to help through this project? Right, are we operating in the millions? Because if so, yes, that makes a lot of sense for us to work on. And then we also wanted to make sure that the outcome that we are trying to change was significant from a policy perspective. So things like helping workers find jobs, getting more people to sign up for clean energy plans, or health insurance, these are all

outcomes that are of huge significance. Some of the policy solutions I've read about, which come from studying human behavior, kind of sound like common sense. Talking to students telling them to sign them for class by text message, having

the opt in program or the opt out program. Do you think that it's necessary to have a government team dedicated to behavioral science for these policy tweaks to actually be implemented, Like I'm imagining if I'm a member of Congress, Yeah, and I'm looking at this line item for this team, I'm wondering, do we need a whole team to carry

out little tweaks like this? Yeah? So I think one is, you know, some of these insights can absolutely seem like common sense after the fact, but the reality is that they weren't being implemented in our absence. And it's also important to note that behavioral science is a very context specific space to work in. Not all insights will work

in all areas. And you need trained behavioral scientists in order to make the right prescriptions, right to design meaningful experiments to teach us what is working in what context in the ideal world some decades from now. It would be amazing if our team was rendered obsolete because agencies were just hiring the relevant people with the relevant skill sets to do this work. As a matter of course, just good government, that is the goal to drive yourself

out of existence. But at the time, and it continues to be the case today because the team is very much still around and the Biden administration and was around during the Trump administration doing great work to help you on topics like the opioid epidemic and wildfires and whatnot. It's important to sometimes have these dedicated teams that are exclusively focused on the particular goal of translating human behavioral insights into public policy improvements, because otherwise it's too easy

for it to get ignored. How do we apply these ideas when there's not a dedicated office, Like, how would state and localities apply some of these principles. Well, the nice thing is actually there's been a flurry of activity in state and local government in which nudge units are sprouting. So lots of state and local governments now have their own nudge units or they are using insights from behavioral science. But there's no one size fits all approach with behavioral science.

You can't just say, oh, here are my favorite ten insights, let me just apply them to all the policies and programs there. There is a rigorous science behind it, and you need to make sure that you do have experts who are looking at those optimal translations. Is there anything our listeners can do if they want to, If they they're listening to this and they're like, man, I want more science in government, I want to inject more What do you, well, what can they do to help if

they want to be a part of this now? So I would say, like, the bible of behavioral science and policy is this book called Nudge. And actually Richard Taylor and Cass Sunstein, the authors of this book, came out with a final edition version just recently. It actually references the work that's happened in the UK and the United States to try to increase the translation of behavioral science

into policy. So I would send listeners to that book first and foremost on my podcast, A slight change of Plans. I had a chance to interview some science experts where we talk about the science behind changing people's minds with folks like Adam Grant, the science of behavior change with doctor Katie Milkman, and I would point folks to those specific episodes because I think it's a really nice primer for where the science is at right now when it

comes to human behavior. Maya, thank you so much for being with us today. Thanks so much for having me Ronald. It was so much fun to chat with you. Doctor Maya Shankar is the founder of the White House's Behavioral Science Team. She served as a senior advisor in the Obama White House. In twenty sixteen, Shanker served as the first Behavioral Science Advisor to the United Nations under Bond Ki Moon. She's also the host of A Slight Change

of Plans, another great Pushkin podcast. You should check it out. It's available everywhere you listen. Solvable is produced by Jocelyn Frank, research by David Jack, booking by Lisa Dunn. Special thanks to Keishell Williams. Our managing producer is Sasha Matthias, and our executive producer is Mia LaBelle. I'm Ronald Young Jr. Thanks for listening,