Cass Sunstein is busy working for the Obama administration and Richard Thaler is currently consulting to the coalition government in the UK. This post expresses the independent thoughts of the Nudge blog’s applied behavioralist John Balz.

Where behavioral science meets up with public policy, politics is not far behind. That is the implicit takeaway from the recent House of Lords report’s conclusion that effective policies to change behavior need to use a variety of interventions including traditional financial incentives, regulations, and yes, behavioral nudges.

This is an unsurprising conclusion. You would be hard pressed to read Nudge and conclude that the world’s most complex problems like climate change and obesity are to be solved with a single behavioral tool, or even a group of them. Together, preliminarily successfully behavioral interventions like Opower’s utility statement along with preliminarily less successful interventions like calorie count displays in New York City restaurants underscore the importance of social contexts, evidence-based policy, and further research. Applied behavioral science is an emerging field of innovation, which requires experimentation and failure. Policymakers who are looking for guarantees of success should, to use a favorite word from Nudge, opt-out of the arrangement.

Like other catchy phrases, “nudging” has taken on a life of its own in popular discourse, which is always a double-edged sword. This is evident in the differing accounts of the term’s meaning that government officials offered the committee. Ultimately, the committee settled on describing nudges (p.12 of the report ) as interventions that “prompt choices without getting people to consider their options consciously, and therefore do not include openly persuasive interventions such as media campaigns and the straightforward provision of information” ? a description that satisfies the committee, but not necessarily a room full of behavioral scientists.

In the blogosphere, Liam Delaney acutely points out that popularization has led many to focus on the term nudge “rather than the core ideas,” and in the process “obscures the really important set of ideas emerging in behavioral economics, very few of which are spoken about in the document.” To the House of Lords committee, nudging is the raw, narrow application of non-regulatory interventions of which there appear to be four (1. Provision of information – although it somehow can’t be “openly persuasive”; 2. Changes to physical environment; 3. Changes to the default policy; and 4. The use of social norms and salience). To an applied behavioral scientist, nudging is part of a broader application of behavioral science principles, which can be understood as an engagement with how a boundedly rational decision maker with a heterogeneous set of material and non-material preferences interacts with the world around them. At such an abstract level, you can understand a policymaker’s desire to quickly descend to the ground. Great. Now how can I apply this to my program?

Policymakers who work with behavioral scientists to identify particular behavioral problems (e.g. Why don’t people save more in their retirement accounts? Why do people fail to take advantage of a social program they’ve started to apply to?) and understand how and why they form are the ones most likely to benefit from behavioral insights – in combination, of course, with other traditional insights. So are those where considerable thought is given to questions about the scalability of a particular behavioral solution. Skipping ahead to technical solutions in the form of handy lists of nudges may be tempting, but is likely to lead to unsatisfactory results.

There is also a much bigger political debate going on in the background of these conversations. Is behavioral science a challenge to the regulatory state or a supporter of it? Is it ideologically left, right, or center? When is a nudge a shove? What constitutes “voluntary”? Are behavioral policies transformative or cute and tiny? Perhaps you think applied behavioral scientists should grapple with these questions. Or perhaps you think they are largely irrelevant to the particular problems and policymakers who work in partnership with them. Like other political debates, these are philosophical ones that can go in circles without reaching clear resolutions. That’s fine. Individual societies with differing social and cultural values will settle on answers to their own level of satisfaction. Either way, applying behavioral science is not a mandate, it is a choice. The applied behavioral scientists and those who would like to engage with them, in the public and private sectors, should (and hopefully will) continue to do so with an openness to scientific experimentation, a commitment to rigor, and an expectation of realism.

Reader William Bray sends along an interesting example of a congested environment that seems like it could benefit from a nudge (or two). Time Out London explains the problem:

Leicester Square to Covent Garden on the Piccadilly Line. It’s the shortest tube journey in town ? less than 300 yards long. It’s the briefest tube journey in town ? just 45 seconds from platform to platform. And it’s also the most expensive tube journey in town ? four quid to travel a quarter of a kilometre. But does this deter thousands of tourists every year from making the trip? Of course not.

London Underground are worried. Tourists are irresistibly drawn to Covent Garden, teeming as it is with fashionable boutiques, silver-faced mime artists and juggling unicyclists. But Covent Garden station is 100 years old, and struggling to cope. There’s no space to install escalators, so every year 16 million people have to fight their way in and out via the lifts and stairs. A major infrastructure upgrade is long overdue.

London has started a public education campaign–”Please don’t follow the crowd” to encourage people to walk between the two stops. Thanks to the sluggishness of those lifts and stairs, the Time Out writer estimates that the tube ride is 50 percent longer than the above ground walk. Bray thinks tourists are the major problem because they navigate the city using the Underground map. At least on the tube they won’t get lost. Bray thinks some more above ground choice architecture might help.

Why not simply colour code foot print trails from Leicester Square tube to Covent Garden Tube to ease congestion and match sign posts with colours of foot print trails (stickers on the ground) to make it easier to walk than get the tube. This would remove the risk so people would automatically choose to walk. This would be a more pleasant experience for the Tourist so they like London more i.e. spend more money or make a return visit and the commuter has eased congestion.

Richard Thaler was in the U.K. last week meeting with Prime Minster David Cameron and his staff on ways to incorporate the principles of Nudge into public policy .

The group working on the project ? dubbed “the Nudge team” ? will be examining how to prompt people into making the right decisions about their health and lifestyle through financial incentives.

Among its tasks will be to encourage people to quit smoking and eat more healthily without the need for formal rules.