Episode 103, 'Nudges' with Thomas Schramme (Part II - Further Analysis and Discussion)
The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast
Jack Symes | Andrew Horton, Oliver Marley, and Rose de Castellane
4.8 • 612 Ratings
🗓️ 16 January 2022
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Introduction
Given the choice, who wouldn't increase the balance in their bank account, switch into a fit and healthy body, find themselves in a meaningful career, and cultivate happiness and love in their relationships? These are preferences we all share, but few of us achieve them. Perhaps we could, if only we made better choices. We all want to make better decisions – the salad over the burger, the restful night's sleep over 'one more episode' – yet we continue to succumb to our desires. Perhaps we need some help: maybe we need something to nudge us in the right direction?
In this episode, we'll be discussing the philosophy of nudges with Professor Thomas Schramme. Chair of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool, Thomas's research focuses on moral and political philosophy and the philosophy of health and medicine. With over one hundred publications and heading several innovative projects – including 'How Does it Feel? Interpersonal Understanding and Affective Empathy' – Professor Schramme is not only an expert in his field but always communicates his ideas through accessible and engaging prose.
As we'll find in this interview, Schramme challenges some of the most prominent ideas in contemporary politics and psychology. According to Daniel Kehneman, nudges 'have changed the world'… but, asks Schramme, do they always change it for the better?
This episode is produced in partnership with the Philosophy and the Future project at the University of Liverpool. For more information about philosophy at Liverpool, head over to www.liverpool.ac.uk/philosophy.
Contents
Part I. Public Health
Part II. Further Analysis and Discussion
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan |
| 0:06.8 | Scicast |
| 0:07.7 | Part 2, further analyses and discussion. |
| 0:26.7 | So in our last instalment, Thomas, we're talking about the philosophy of nudges, |
| 0:31.2 | and we were discussing in particular health nudges. |
| 0:35.0 | And just before we start engaging in some further analysis, I was wondering, |
| 0:38.6 | we've got Richard Thaler, who's this Nobel Prize winning economist and Kastenstein as well, |
| 0:44.0 | this Harvard Law professor, two huge, prominent public and academic figures. They're working in |
| 0:50.2 | a different field to philosophy, though, aren't they? They're like these economists. Is that the |
| 0:55.1 | best way to describe them? Is there a difficult here in applying that type of discipline to the |
| 1:00.7 | population more generally? Just seeing human beings through this homo-economic lens. Yes, I think there |
| 1:08.1 | is a problem here. I mean, Thaler is what we call a behavioral economist. So it's a particular idea about using economic theory that has been introduced in the 60s, mainly starting in the 60s. So there was a traditional model in economics that people as a model of a person, the homo-economics, a person who is in a |
| 1:31.2 | position to make the best possible choice in order to increase their self-interest. And that was a |
| 1:37.1 | model, like a model, an idealized person, to make certain assumptions about how people will |
| 1:43.2 | choose to make certain predictions about what will happen, say, if we introduce certain incentives. |
| 1:49.1 | Now, behavioral economists used a social science literature that basically did research on how people actually make choices, real people. |
| 1:58.9 | And they found out there are certain biases involved. There's so-called hyperbolic |
| 2:03.7 | discounting. We choose certain benefits that are closer to us than the ones further down the road, |
| 2:09.9 | even though they might be bigger. We don't want to forego and wait and so on. So there are certain |
| 2:14.7 | mechanisms in real life that affect us. And they are basically not in line with what the homo-economicals model assumed. |
| 2:22.3 | So then that was the starting point of introducing a more realistic model. |
| 2:26.3 | Now, one of the issues that I have here is that the model itself was always an ideal, an idealized model. |
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