Policymakers around the world are embracing behavioural science
economist.com
economist.com
In my view, advertising and manipulation (call them "behavioral science" if you want a euphemism) will always imply a power hierarchy. We might be told: "Let's manipulate the workers into being happy without paying them more," but never "let's manipulate the CEO into being happy with no revenue growth." There will always be an implied hierarchy based on who deserves to be manipulated, and who deserves to be given objective information.
I will never voluntarily join the lower caste of that hierarchy, and I can't see why anybody else would either.
Well, advertising and manipulation can help!
Related, while very critical of the statu quo in education reform these days, I can't help being a bit uncomfortable when I see the higher castes of that hierarchy propose to replace classic education by something "more adapted to our times"
And I can think of an endless number of schemes that are actively used to influence them: asking them to sign pledges, protests, charity dinners, awarding prices and other honours for certain behaviours–these are just for political goals. For marketing, they obviously get bombarded with advertisement as much as anyone else. Airline miles are an example that comes to mind as top-heavy targeting.
As to "have a sense of when someone is trying to manipulate me" I am only reminded of all those surveys that fail to find anyone who says "advertisement works on me". In fact, the "nudging" the article talks about isn't really about advertisement. The classic example is the small image of a housefly in a urinal, which vastly improved peoples' aim. Are you sure you can, and want, to escape that sort of messaging?
Especially on-line, where I had the opportunity to see how the sausage is made. The axiom of on-line advertising is that you have metrics that tell you whether or not what you're doing works. Except what I've seen is marketers who lack even most basic understanding of maths convincing customers that this number going up means advertisements are working, and since customers have even less clue, everyone is happy and money changes hands, regardless of actual outcome. Even software made by marketers for marketers is optimized for taking wrong conclusions from the data[0]. But as long as the fiction works, money flows and participants are happy.
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This is trivially true between any 2 people, but it doesn't satisfy the axioms of partial ordering.
Coworkers of mine may use some of these to get other teams to do some thing. And those teams do the same to my coworkers.
If you're talking to someone, you are manipulating them. This is just a bit further down that scale.
That kind of manipulation exists. People lie to their superiors and overlords to evade punishment for mistakes or fiddle their expenses or whatever.
It's just that they generally can't afford to have behavioural scientsts tell them how to manipulate people better, and need to resort to old-fashioned lying instead. I remember a power principle in the Illuminatus trilogy which states that the guys on top in hierarchical power relations never get an accurate picture of the world because their underlings always have incentives to lie to them...
Maybe it would be better if we collectively decided not to manipulate each other, even if we think that we know best.
The best we can do is to be aware that it is taking place. From the article: As long as that choice is made in a transparent manner, and is subject to democratically elected politicians, nudging offers policymakers an alternative to both the nanny state and the unintelligent one; a middle way that he [Sunstein] describes as “libertarian paternalism”.
Yes it would but it's not going to happen. I don't like manipulating people and thus my default is to be as unintrusive as possible at first but this seldom leads to success.
For instance, if your friend agreed with you to have a phone call soon and you write an e-mail asking what date would suit him/her then it happens more often than not that they delay their response or even forget to answer. If, otoh, you write an e-mail: "Is is okay if I ring you at 8 p.m tonight?" then they feel more pressure to answer you and maybe even agree with your date. Of course, they don't have to. It would be perfectly fine to answer: "No, tonight is not good and I am not sure when I am going to have time." But most people aren't that free. If you give them a range of choices, chances are they are going to pick one instead of offering a counter proposal. If you don't offer choices it is very likely that nothing is going to happen. A loose-loose situation (in this example: both of you want to talk but no date is being agreed upon and thus no call) is more likely to happen.