Thread: White House Is Using “Behavioral Insights Scientists” in Over a Dozen Departments to

BREAKING: White House Is Using “Behavioral Insights Scientists” in Over a Dozen Departments to Help ‘Nudge’ Citizen Behavior

Posted by Jim Hoft on Tuesday, July 30, 2013, 10:44 AM


The Obama administration is currently hiring a “Behavioral Insights Team” that will help shape people’s behavior.
FOX News reported:

The federal government is hiring what it calls a “Behavioral Insights Team” that will look for ways to subtly influence people’s behavior, according to a document describing the program obtained by FoxNews.com. Critics warn there could be unintended consequences to such policies, while supporters say the team could make government and society more efficient.
While the program is still in its early stages, the document shows the White House is already working on such projects with almost a dozen federal departments and agencies including the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Agriculture.

“Behavioral sciences can be used to help design public policies that work better, cost less, and help people to achieve their goals,” reads the government document describing the program, which goes on to call for applicants to apply for positions on the team.

The document was emailed by Maya Shankar, a White House senior adviser on social and behavioral sciences, to a university professor with the request that it be distributed to people interested in joining the team. The idea is that the team would “experiment” with various techniques, with the goal of tweaking behavior so people do everything from saving more for retirement to saving more in energy costs.

The Obama Administration already has behavioral teams working with over a dozen federal departments and agencies on newly-designed behavioral insights projects,
Including:

** Department of Labor
** Department of Health and Human Services
** Department of Education, Veterans Administration
** Department of Treasury
** Social Security Administration
** Department of Housing and Urban Development
** United States Department of Agriculture

And, the White House is recruiting more scientists.

Dear Colleagues,
Maya Shankar is a new Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House. Her goal is to help bring more insights from behavioral science research into policy making in America through the executive branch.

Following success of the Behavioral Insights Team in the U.K. (aka the “nudge unit”), Dr. Shankar is helping recruit behavioral scientists to participate in a similar group in the U.S.. She is also looking to help place behavioral researchers within several government agencies.

For more information please see below.
Craig

Here’s the job description.

Research to Results:

Strengthening Federal Capacity for Behavioral Insights
Overview:

A growing body of evidence suggests that insights from the social and behavioral sciences can be used to help design public policies that work better, cost less, and help people to achieve their goals. The practice of using behavioral insights to inform policy has seen success overseas. In 2010, UK Prime Minister David Cameron commissioned the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT,

https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/behavioural-insights-team), which through a process of rapid, iterative experimentation (“Test, Learn, Adapt”), has successfully identified and tested interventions that will further advance priorities of the British government, while saving the government at least £1 billion within the next five years (see previous Annual Reports 2010-11 and 2011-12). The federal government is currently creating a new team that will help build federal capacity to experiment with these approaches, and to scale behavioral interventions that have been rigorously evaluated, using, where possible, randomized controlled trials. The team will be staffed by 4-5 experts in behavioral science and experimental design and evaluation. It is likely that selected individuals will serve on a temporary detail under the Intergovernmental Personnel Act before returning to their home organization, which can be a university, non-profit, or state and local government. Our preference is for individuals who are willing to serve full time but we will also consider people who are only in a position to serve part-time. Moreover, several agencies are looking to recruit expert academics to sit directly within their agencies and to help inspire, design, and execute on specific policy projects, and so it is possible to serve in this capacity as well.

If you are aware of individuals with strong analytic skills, experience designing, testing, and evaluating rigorous randomized control trials, and a strong research background in fields such as social psychology, cognitive psychology, or behavioral economics, please encourage them send a CV and contact information to mshankar2 at ostp.eop.gov, which will be sent to the relevant parties for consideration.

Job Responsibilities for Central Team:

* Build Capacity: Work with a broad range of federal agencies to identify new program areas that could benefit from the application of behavioral insights. Help to design, implement, and test the relevant interventions using rigorous experimental methods.

* Enhance Capacity: Provide conceptual and technical support to agencies with specific behavioral insights efforts already underway.

* Convene: Lead a multi-agency “community of practice” to identify and share promising practices and common challenges.

* Create and Provide Resources: Generate tutorials and other “how to” documents to help accelerate these efforts within agencies. Manage online library of relevant documents and media.

* Help inspire new ideas: Work with external partners to identify research findings that can inform policy and practice.

We are already working with over a dozen federal departments and agencies on newly-designed behavioral insights projects, including the Department of Labor, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Education, Veterans Administration, Department of Treasury, Social Security Administration, Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the United States Department of Agriculture.
Below are some examples of U.S. and international policy initiatives that have benefited from the implementation of behavioral insights:

* Increasing college enrollment and retention: Providing streamlined personal assistance on the FAFSA form (e.g., pre-populating forms using tax return data and following up with a personal call) to low or moderate income individuals resulted in a 29% greater likelihood of their attending college for two consecutive years.

* Getting people back to work: Asking unemployed individuals to create a concrete plan for immediate implementation regarding how, when, and where they would pursue reemployment efforts led to a15-20% decrease in their likelihood of claiming unemployment benefits just 13 weeks later.

* Improving academic performance: Students taught to view their intelligence as a “muscle” that can grow with hard work and perseverance (as compared to a “fixed trait”, such as eye-color) experienced academic boosts of ó a letter grade, with the largest effects often seen for low-performing students, students of color, or females in STEM-related courses.

* Increasing retirement savings: The Save More Tomorrow program 1) invites employees to pledge now to increase their savings rate later, since self-control is easier to exert for future events; 2) links planned increases in the savings rate to pay raises, in order to diminish loss aversion; and 3) leverages the power of inertia by keeping members enrolled until they reach a preset limit or elect to opt. Adoption of these auto-escalation plans has boosted annual savings by an estimated $7.4 billion.

* Increasing adoption of energy efficient measures: Offering an attic-clearance service (at full cost) to people led to a five-fold increase in their subsequent adoption of attic-insulation. Interestingly, providing additional government subsidies on attic insulation services had no such effect.

* Increasing tax compliance: Sending letters to late taxpayers that indicated a social norm –i.e., that “9 out of 10 people in Britain paid their taxes on time” – resulted in a 15 percent increase in response rates over a three-month period, rolling out to £30 million of extra annual revenue.
——————————————————————————
Craig R. Fox
Ho-Su Wu Term Chair in Management
Professor of Strategy, Psychology, and Medicine
Co-director, Behavioral Decision Making Research Group
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2013...hape-behavior/

Now that the subject has come up, there is a book that every political activists must read: The Political Brain by Drew Westen. It was written for Democrats. Mr.Westen is a big shot psychologist who has spent a lot of time analyzing human behavior that influences political decisions. Throughout the book he interjects his opinions that are pure Obama, and that makes it a hard read, but the science is excellent. He boast that in recent elections staff people from every important Democrat candidate were calling his office asking for advice.

The book cover has endorsement from Bill Clinton, Howard Dean and other Democrat big shots, so you can be sure it is part of current Democrat election strategy.

We are all controlled by our emotions. Emotion destroys logic. Mr. Westen has developed ways to use personal emotions to influence the political decisions people make. It is obvious that Democrats have put Mr. Westen's ideas to use while Republicans and conservative have no clue about the emotion/decision relationship.

Get the book people; don't just read it memorize it, or repeatedly loose elections we should have won.

Psyops, these people are conducting the military equivalent of Psychological Warfare Operations (PsyOps) with the people of the United States!

W

Yes this is scary stuff. But psychology has become increasingly better. Conservatives had better go beyond the Rush Limbaugh naïve ideas about logical persuasion. EMOTION OBLITERATES LOGIC. Logic is subordinate to emotion. It is used to validate emotional behavior not to guide, or enlighten our behavior. We must understand this or be prepared to constantly loose elections and battles we should have won. See my post below.

So.........Their pretty much admiting there intentions are to use Psychological Warfare on the American Populace. This should get interesting as to the response to this. Anything to cover up failed Liberal Socialist policies. Need i mention Detroit and Chicago next.? Thing about Psychological Warfare, you don't inform the populace your going to use it on them, man what dumb ass's.

WELCOME TO 1984