#67: Three Things that got me thinking

🍴intuitive eating + 🌋sexual awakening + 🤏nudging for good

Bonjour tout le monde,

Here are Three Things that made me think about intrinsic motivation in the past week:

1. Eating mindfully

2. Emma Thompson’s new movie

3. What nudges can do

Let’s go.

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1. Every mouthful

Years ago, a slim, deceptively simple book called On Eating, by Susie Orbach opened my food-loving eyes to five basic ‘keys’:

1. Eat when you are hungry

2. Eat what your body is hungry for

3. Find out why you eat when you aren’t hungry

4. Taste every mouthful

5. Stop eating when you're full

Eating according to our hunger is not as straightforward as it seems. Sometimes, we eat just because it’s time; we eat some tired arugula because everybody else is having a salad lunch; we gobble up the cold macaroni our child left over; we loosen our belt and finish our plate to show appreciation to the person who cooked or paid for a meal.

As this Reddit user explains:

Intuitive eating is the first time I’ve ever sat and thought about what drives me from inside out, not from outside in. I feel like this is why a lot of people hear about [intuitive eating] for the first time they assume they will never crave vegetables. They think without the extrinsic motivators they won’t do anything they’re supposed to.

Photo by Tong Nguyen van on Unsplash

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2. Good Luck to You, Leo Grande

I’m curious about this movie starring Emma Thompson as a widowed, retired teacher who hires a sex worker to explore pleasure after decades of repressed sexuality.

How often do we pause to wonder what we want sexually, how, why? For our own pleasure? Because we feel sad, happy, stressed, inebriated? To make babies? To connect? Because everybody else is doing it? Because someone else wants it a certain way?

I mean, I’ll take any excuse to watch Emma Thompson interviews anyway. (Interviewer Olivia Marks asked some funnier-than-usual questions here!)

Women are traditionally not invited to think about what they might want. And they’re certainly not invited to think about what gives them pleasure.

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3. Nudge nudge

Back in March, I enjoyed this article by Bryony Lau for the online science magazine Undark, laying out some limitations of nudges used by policy-makers in the COVID age.

As research ramped up during Covid-19, the gap between what experts thought they knew about nudges and how they function in practice widened. As Varun Gauri, a senior nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution and former head of the World Bank’s behavioral science unit, said, the pandemic “left behavioral scientists and others kind of scratching our heads saying, what do we do?”

The effects of nudges are often modest, or frankly small; they usually work if people are already inclined to do the thing we want them to do; and they’re hard to extrapolate to varied, changing contexts outside of controlled lab environments—especially during a crisis.

That’s why governments need to test nudges and incentives before investing their limited resources, said [Dena Gromet, executive director of the Behavior Change for Good Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania]: “Different approaches are going to work for different people and at different times.”

In a 20-page overview published by Attuned—the company that funds my time to write this newsletter—behavioural scientist Brandon Routman sums up where nudges come from and what they can do, with some examples of ‘good’ nudging by governments and businesses. (To find out more about how to use nudges in your organisation, you can register here for a free 45-minute webinar with Routman on 30 June.)

He explains:

The approach [of authors Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler in their seminal 2008 book Nudge] is based on a philosophy the authors call libertarian paternalism. The libertarian aspect holds that: people should be free to make their own decisions (even if the decisions are mistakes); they should not be forced to take a certain action if they do not want to; and their set of options given a particular decision should not be restricted.

The paternalistic aspect of the philosophy holds that people should be influenced to make positive decisions. They should be encouraged to reduce their environmental footprint, to lead healthier lives, etc.

The oxymoron makes me shudder—I don’t want some father-like entity defining what he thinks my best interests are and influencing my choices! But I’m not (completely) naïve; I know that outside entities steer my decisions all the freaking time. (And maybe life would be exhausting otherwise?)

As Lau writes, some critics say nudges are too much; others think they’re too little:

Some commentators decry nudges as government overreach or as an infringement on individual autonomy. But there are also people who say the opposite: that nudges result in governments’ not doing enough. […] In theory, behavioral science doesn’t skew left or right, but in the hands of politicians dubious of “big government” nudges can become a way to sidestep more muscular interventions.

Call me a boring moderate, but surely it’s not either/or and there’s a time and place for both gentle nudges and hard-hitting, legally binding regulations? And surely there’s a spectrum, from evil tricks that don’t serve us to thoughtful, transparent nudges that make life better and easier?

As Routman writes, the field is young and nudges are here to stay, so I’d rather we explore and refine nudges so that they truly serve us—people, organisations, societies.

Photo by Simon Hurry on Unsplash