Neuroscientifically informed public policy

Is neuroscientifically informed public policy part of the behavioural turn or a challenge to it?

It is by now well known the extent to which behavioural economics and social psychology have shaped policy making, with the UK being considered an experimental test bed for the application of behavioural insights to policy across a number of spheres. The UK’s Behavioural Insights Team, initiated in 2010 within government but then ‘spun out’ as a mutual social purpose company has far exceeded the 2 year sunset clause which would have seen it wind down had it not achieved public savings. Its policy areas have ranged from tax compliance to reducing missed hospital appointments, from public health campaigns to adult literacy/numeracy programmes, from charitable giving to improving completion rates for Army reservist applications.  There is a considerable amount of evidence collated for these efforts, as well as research which is responding to the ethical, practical, social, philosophical and legal implications posed by such developments – particularly in light of their spread around the world.

What is less well known is how far specific neuroscientific knowledge has influenced public and social policies in different national contexts.  Only a small number of studies to date have considered this, for instance, Tineke Broer and Martyn Pickersgill’s work on neuroscientific discourse in UK public policy across the lifecourse (early years, adolescents and older adults).  Critical ethnographic, interpretive and historical work relating to children and families has considered whether we have been Blinded by Science or have become hostage to new expert forms of self-knowledge used to govern our conduct towards neoliberal ends (e.g. work by Elizabeth Gagen, David Wastell and Sue White, Ros Edwards, Val Gillies and Nicola Horsley, Mark Whitehead et al).   Much of this work has been carried out in the UK, although a spirited debate has taken place in the USA over the neuroscientific position on ‘critical periods of development’ and its relevance for early years interventions (e.g. John Bruer).

Back in 2011, the UK’s Royal Society published a series of Brain Waves essays which explored the potential benefits and risks associated with neuroscientific developments and their applications in society. They considered implications for education, conflict and security, and the law and criminal responsibility at length, as well as issues around health, neuropsychopharmacology, cognitive enhancers and neural interface systems.  Collectively, the authors raised concerns about the issues surrounding the use and potential misuse of neuroscientific insights in society. These included commercialisation, mental privacy, intellectual property, emerging neurotechnologies and their relationship with the military, the pre-emption of risk (of ill-health, aggressiveness, criminality, poor educational achievement) and even our very sense of what it is to be human beings.

More recently, researchers have begun to identify the potential for combining behavioural and neuroscientific insights for public policy, including asking “Can, and Should, Behavioural Neuroscience Influence Public Policy”, and “What can Neuroscience Contribute to the Debate Over Nudging?. Although they surmise that there is thus far very little evidence of neuroscience directly informing behaviour change policy, Seymour and Vlaev conclude that:

The value of neuroscience in the future would be increased by the ability to identify new aspects of behaviour, inspired by mechanistic models, not previously identified by psychology and behavioural economics. This is unlikely to come from a single neuroimaging study, however, but from several neuroscientific contributions to the general body of research into the understanding of behaviour, which is also informed by all the interdisciplinary decision sciences.

So too, Felsen and Reiner (2015: 470) have added that neuroscience has been up to this point absent from the discussion around “improving individual decision making”, but that it should have a crucial role to play, not only practically but also ethically:

Neuroscience can contribute to both empirical and normative questions about nudging: Specifically, how to make nudges more effective, and how to understand whether they are consistent with our ethical principles.

For them, it is by understanding the biochemical mechanisms of decision-making that we can really know how to design rational nudges and avoid any unwanted side-effects.  Animal models, psychological experiments and identification of causal relationships between neuronal activity and decision variables through neuronal stimulation, they argue, lend considerable weight to the liberal claims of nudging; that they do not restrict free choices (p472).  Somewhat controversially and perhaps in contradistinction to this, they conclude that neuroscientific agreement on our diminished capacity for free will should in fact lead us to re-think the value we place on autonomy.

The far-reaching implications of seeking a neuroscientific rationale for taking a particular ethical position will not be lost of those who are familiar with debates on medical ethics, bioethics, the science-policy nexus and the politics of knowledge production. Ethical issues are paramount, but it is far from clear why a neuroscientific account of decision making should form the basis for our normative frameworks – as Harvard Law School professor, Cass Sunstein (2013) has argued, what is needed is “not a psychology of moral argument, but a moral argument”.

Sonia Kang and colleagues (2010) work through the pros and cons of using neuroscientific evidence in policy – in particular that which relates to stereotype threat, intergroup relations and racism.  Their purposefully balanced appraisal is useful, though there are still some potentially troubling conclusions, including that policy should target “potentially manageable symptoms (e.g., cognitive resource depletion due to stereotype threat) instead of at unwieldy problems (e.g., racism) too large to deal with effectively”. Whilst their reasoning is worthy – directing public resources to policy mechanisms which work – it is potentially giving up on winning the public argument against racism. Such a move should be of concern.

These issues of publicity – of public argumentation, deliberation, transparency, openness and accountability, as well as perception, acceptability and public impact have for some time been ethical concerns discussed in relation the ascendance of behavioural forms of governance.  Yet the idea of publicness rarely intrudes on the oftentimes individualistic comprehensions of neuro and behavioural sciences – often being relegated to the consideration of how a particular or set of insights can be applied or translated into practice, rather than involving sustained discussion of publically derived justifications for policy and practice. Whilst these are often seen as entirely separate considerations, neuroscience is being increasingly called upon to provide blueprints for public policy.  This will likely only increase further as neuroscientists learn more about the influences of social interactions and the environment on the brain, and some have already speculated that studying the effects of genes on economic behaviour, “genoeconomics”, will have far-reaching consequences for the social sciences (Laibson, 2013).

Interestingly, clear lines of distinction are often drawn between the behavioural sciences, which study observable behaviour, and the neurosciences, which are more focussed on the (internal) biochemical and physical mechanisms of the brain (only indirectly ‘observable’ through representations provided by neuroimaging technologies and experimental research techniques). But in reality the boundaries between these approaches are increasingly blurred, and focal points such as the ‘decision-making sciences’ and neuroeconomics muddy the waters further. At heart, these disciplines all circle around a clear notion of the irrationality of human decision-making, our tendencies to make poor, ignorant or overly optimistic, ill-founded choices, and the ways in which policy could ameliorate our choices to combat such global crises as climate change and the obesity epidemic.  A seminar at Harvard University in 2013 organised by Cass Sunstein (Harvard Law School) and Tali Sharot (University College London) on “Public Policy and the Human Brain” took these issues as its starting point. In this respect, existing analysis of the age of behavioural government can be applied to neuroscientifically informed public policies, notwithstanding some potential distinctions.

In the first instance, a systematic study of the impact of neuroscientific language and discourse across several policy sectors and different national contexts would be a useful starting point. Some other avenues of enquiry which might draw on a critical neuro-geography would include an analysis of the way in which spaces are being shaped by policy-related neurotalk – spaces such as schools, healthcare settings, social care institutions, urban infrastructures, prisons and courts, military arenas and landscapes of conflict, amongst others.  These spaces are of course co-constituted by technologies, media, cultural imagery, social, political and economic structures, as well as the materialities, bodies, environments, emotions and affects of those who inhabit them.  And there is also a need to better understand how different and sometimes competing rationales for and processes of public policy making are dealt with in practice, for instance the interface between cost-benefit analysis, design thinking, foresight, consultation and public engagement, specialist evidence and expert requisition, and behavioural and neuroscientific insight.