Public Policy Without Behavioral Science is Dangerous

Unfortunately, such boomerang effects happen all too often. Consider another safety campaign, the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign between 1998 and 2004, which the US Congress funded to the tune of $1 billion. Using professional advertising and public relations firms, the campaign created comprehensive marketing efforts that targeted youths aged 9 to 18 with anti-drug messaging, focusing on marijuana. The messages were spread by television, radio, websites, magazines, movie theaters, and other venues, and through partnerships with civic, professional, and community groups, with the intention for youths to see two to three ads per week.

A 2008 National Institutes of Health-funded study⁷ found that indeed, youths did get exposure to two to three ads per week. However, on the whole, the campaign didn’t reduce marijuana use. Not only that, but the researchers found that for some survey participants, exposure to these ads predicted an increase in the likelihood that youth would use marijuana.

Why? The authors find evidence that youths who saw the ads got the impression that their peers used marijuana widely. As a result, the youths became more likely to use marijuana themselves. Indeed, the study found that those youths who saw more ads had a stronger belief that other youths used marijuana, and this belief made starting to use marijuana more likely. Talk about a boomerang effect!

We know that message campaigns — whether on electric signs or through advertisements — can have a substantial effect. That fits broader extensive research from cognitive science on how people can be impacted by nudges, meaning non-coercive efforts to shape the environment so as to influence people’s behavior in a predictable manner.

Those with authority — whether in government or business⁸ — frequently attempt to nudge other people based on their mental model of how others should behave. Unfortunately, their mental models are often fundamentally flawed, due to dangerous judgment errors called cognitive biases.⁹ These mental blindspots¹⁰ impact decision-making in all life areas, from business⁵ to relationships.¹¹ Fortunately, recent research has shown effective strategies to defeat these dangerous judgment errors, such as by constraining our choices to best practices and measuring the impact of our interventions.

Unfortunately, such reliance on best practices and measurements of interventions of such techniques is done too rarely. Fatality signage campaigns have been in place for many years without assessment. The federal government ran the anti-drug campaign from 1998 to 2004, until finally the measurement study came out in 2008. 

Instead, what the authorities need to do is consult with cognitive and behavioral science experts on nudges before they start their interventions. And what the experts will tell you is that it’s critical to evaluate in small-scale experiments the impact of proposed nudges. That’s because, while extensive research shows nudges do work,¹² only 62% have¹³ a statistically significant impact, and up to 15%¹⁴ of desired interventions may backfire.

Fortunately, it’s very doable to run a small-scale study in most cases. Returning to the road sign example, authorities may want to pilot, say, 100 electric signs in a diversity of settings and evaluate their impact over three months. You can run ads for a few months in a variety of nationally representative markets for a few months and assess their effectiveness. 

Behavioral science is critical here: when road signs are tested by those without expertise in how our minds work, the results are often counterproductive. For example, a group of engineers at Virginia Tech did a study⁴ of road signs that used humor, popular culture, sports, and other nontraditional themes with the goal of provoking an emotional response. They measured the neuro-cognitive response of participants who read the signs and found that messages “messages with humor, and messages that use wordplay and rhyme elicit significantly higher levels of cognitive activation in the brain… an increase in cognitive activation is a proxy for increased attention.” The researchers decided that because the drivers paid more attention, therefore the signs worked. 

Guess what? By that definition, the fatality signs worked, too! They worked in that they drew drivers’ attention to the fatality numbers, and therefore distracted them from the road. That’s an example of how NOT to do a study. The goal of testing road signs should be the consequent number of crashes, not whether someone is emotionally aroused and cognitively loaded by the sign.

Yet that’s not what the authorities chose to do. And based on past experiences, the future has many more boomerang effects in store that have the potential to harm our society and organizations, unless those with power make a commitment to following the science.¹⁵