MINDSPACE

What it is

The nine elements, in the report's own terms, are these. Messenger: we are heavily influenced by who communicates information. Incentives: our responses to incentives are shaped by predictable mental shortcuts such as strongly avoiding losses. Norms: we are strongly influenced by what others do. Defaults: we go with the flow of pre-set options. Salience: our attention is drawn to what is novel and seems relevant to us. Priming: our acts are often influenced by sub-conscious cues. Affect: our emotional associations can powerfully shape our actions. Commitments: we seek to be consistent with our public promises, and reciprocate acts. Ego: we act in ways that make us feel better about ourselves.

Four of the nine have their own entries here, because they carry research claims of their own with their own evidence records. The checklist itself does not, and grading the elements individually is the only honest way to use it.

The report is candid about its own limits, and that candour is part of what the document is. It records uncertainty about how lasting the effects are, about whether an effect in one setting transfers to another, and about whether it works across population segments. Of one element it says that priming is perhaps the least understood of the MINDSPACE effects.

In effect

The document is regularly produced as the exhibit in an argument about covert government nudging, and read at source it argues against that reading on three counts.

First, every page is stamped as a discussion document and not a statement of government policy. That status line is printed on the page.

Second, it argues at length that the public need to give permission. Its own sentence is that the use of MINDSPACE or other nudge-type tools may require careful handling, and that in essence the public need to give permission and help shape how such tools are used. A margin callout repeats it and the whole of chapter five is given over to the democratic and political implications.

Third, its section on affect warns against creating fear without agency. The report records that many interviewees suggested it was unhelpful to create fear without agency, in other words to create an emotional reaction without obviously connecting it to a change in behaviour. That is the countervailing primary document on the central charge usually brought against it, and it sits inside the exhibit itself.

Laura Dodsworth's Free Your Mind lists the nine elements accurately. The discussion-document status, the public-permission argument and the fear-without-agency warning do not appear.

What it does not say

It is not a research claim and it does not have a replication record. It is a checklist assembled from several literatures of differing quality.

It is not a statement of government policy. The document says so on every page.

It does not recommend covert influence. It argues that the public need to give permission and devotes a chapter to the democratic implications.

It does not endorse fear messaging. It records the opposite warning in the section where such messaging would sit.

It does not vouch for its own elements equally. The report itself singles out priming as the least understood, and each element has to be graded separately.

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