Dr. Norah Campbell:

Two years ago, a large study was done in global brain science on the idea of nudge messaging and this type of small, incremental educative changes. This idea has bee really embraced by many governments and health departments, in particular, across the world. Two people involved in nudge messaging wrote the study, which is really interesting. It shows across area after area that nudge messaging has had very low, negligible or null effects. One of the authors ended up coming to Trinity College to talk about the study. One of the things I found really interesting was that they said that not only had they spent a decade on nudge marketing, it had been a message that is very consonant with the goals of commerce. A person can be made into a very busy fool when they are focusing on downstream individual issues while in our heart of hearts we know that it is much more about structural changes. That is where the research is around the those small behavioural changes at the moment.

One of the things that is even worse and links to the Senator's question, is that when individuals hear nudge messaging, they become resistant to subsequent structural messaging. If, for example, a farmer is messaged on doing certain individual biodiversity arrangements on his farm, he will subsequently become more resistant to structural changes because he is in the nudge paradigm. This is where it is really interesting that nudge messaging has not just been inefficacious in bringing change but it can actually contribute to resistance to structural change because people are embracing ideas such as individual willpower or going on an effective diet. Those are really problematic messages.