RSA reports on behaviour change

A new report by the Royal Society of Arts argues that giving people the tools to understand how their brains, behaviours and environments interact helps them make better decisions and tackle habits like smoking, binge-drinking and overeating.

Steer: Mastering our Behaviour through Instinct, Environment and Reason represents the second stage of the RSA's Social Brain project. It argues that helping people learn about how they make judgements and form habits can be a more empowering way of encouraging positive behaviour change than relying on passive "nudging" at one extreme, or rational debate at the the other.

Drawing on a range of research from several disciplines, Steer argues that this model of mindful, self-directed, and holistic behavioural change has been overlooked in much of the recent policy debates on the subject. It enables people to appraise situations, and make judgements about when they should trust, or be wary of, their gut instincts, rational judgements, or environmental influences.

The project involved a small scale practical experiment to test the model with people facing real life-choices.

The first report, called Changing the Subject can be found here.

Details of this one as follows: A nascent agreement is developing in contemporary British politics: that we must reject the consumerist orthodoxy and reinvigorate the social institutions that sustain us as autonomous and responsible citizens. This report argues for this view from a different angle: the fact that human beings possess social brains.

This does not merely imply that our brains are susceptible to subtle social influences (meaning that our behaviour can be guided by changes in the ways choices are presented, which is the remit of "nudge"), but more fundamentally, that the development of autonomy and responsibility requires practical engagement in structured activities with others and strong social support.

Traditional social institutions often provided both of the latter, and this report contends that the focus of social policy in the twenty-first century needs to be on adapting and expanding such institutions, or their analogues.