Hello, my name's David Rundsman and this is past-present future, the History of Ideas podcast.

Today, in our series on the History of Bad Ideas, I'm talking to the political philosopher Alan Finlayson about what is both a very broad idea and also a very specific recent application.

The big idea is behaviourism. The specific application is what's come to be known as Nudge.

The view that our politics would go better if you just tweak the

background conditions of the choices that we all make. Alan and I will explore where that

idea came from and why some of the problems with it go right back to the beginning.

Alan, we're talking about a subject today, behaviourism, which both refers to a very broad

field of the human sciences, psychology, psychotherapy and other things too, within which there

is some thinking about politics, but politics is probably a subset of that broader idea

of behaviourism. And then we're going to talk about a version of that broader idea of behaviourism.

And then we're going to talk about a version of it, which has become fashionable more recently

and has a much less sciencey sounding name, which is nudge, and the ways in which it's

believed that people can be nudged into behaviours that are either good for them or good for society, and we'll come on to that.

But it's probably best to start with the broader category of behaviourism and get a sense of what it is that we're talking about.

And people may not be that familiar with the history of behaviourism. I'm not, but like me, they probably heard of at least one famous behavioural experiment.

If not the man himself,

then his dog, or both, Pavlov's dog, which is right at the end of the 19th century, I think.

I think the results were published in 1897, the famous experiment that Pavlov conducted when

he fed his dog or put food in front of his dog and the dog salivated as dogs do,

and at the same time he rang a bell.

And he progressively put less and less food in front of his dog and eventually no food in front of his dog,

but carried on ringing the bell.

...